You may have had one of these as a child. In the distant past, my sister and I did. It lacked the sheer sizzle of an ouija board. But those were not allowed in our house. One Christmas, an uncle, gifted us with one, and hours spent asking silly questions resulted. I was small enough then to creep under the fragrant boughs of the tree to spy on the answers my sister was getting. My laughter gave away my hiding spot.
A few years ago, I bought a number for joke presents and had a spare sitting in its box for a year or two. While writing up a few posts, I recalled how some people used them to randomly generate answers to reports ( see my post on Gundecking). I pulled out the Magic Eightball to refresh my memory. It was surprising how many people I knew had used one or still had one kicking around – not that they ever admitted using it – of course!
We all know that Magic Eightball answers are specious, right? Fess up. How many of you have one. Now I’m not accusing you of using it, but how many have one?
3 Replies to “Magic Eightball”
Comments are closed.
I once wrote a program to generate 6 lottery numbers at random, because I do not believe lettery machines churn out truly random numbers. I guess that’s the same kinda thing, though I never heard of what you’re on about. Must be a transatlantic thing.
Your comment recalled a conversation I had with a friend who was a programmer about the un-randomness of many random numbers generators. You have no Magic Eightballs? How Have you survived
Yeah it is incredibly difficult to generate truly random numbers. The best machines rely on radioactive decay – you have a macroscopic level of something having a half-life but at a microscopic level, decay rate is random