What Does Randomness Look Like?

Excellent article exploring (and explaining) something that is counter-intuitive to almost everyone: truly random data doesn't look random (well, at least not to most people).

Something the article doesn't touch on, but is closely related: people are very good at visually identifying certain kinds of non-random data, by picking graphical patterns out of images similar to the ones shown in the article...

Randomness via Metastability...

Ordinarily metastability is something digital hardware designers go out of their way to avoid.  Intel has come up with a way to harness metastability for, of all things, generating random numbers.  If you're a digital geek, then you already know that generating high quality (in the cryptographic sense) random numbers is surprisingly difficult.  Intel's system, to my knowledge, hasn't yet been vetted by the cryptographic professionals – but knowing what its basis is, the notion looks pretty solid to me. 

High quality random numbers in every CPU.  Cool...