Roll the Dice: randomizing Delicious

[Laura Gibbs]

I love the power of random (because is it REALLY random... or not??? hmmm...) - anyway, by poking around today I discovered that there is a random parameter you can add to a Delicious URL to get a random webpage displayed from the list of tagged items - WOW. That is what led to the "Roll the Dice" which you can now find in the right-hand column of this Ning.

It's SO SIMPLE. Here's a Delicious URL for stuff tagged as "firesidelearning" and "member" (member blogs, wikis, websites, Nings, student projects) -
http://delicious.com/tag/firesidelearning+member
See how it works... there is delicious.com, then a search by tag, for "firesidelearning" AND "member" - and the result is a page listing all the items tagged in that way.

Well, look at this:
http://delicious.com/tag/firesidelearning+member?random=1
All I did was add the parameter "random=1" to the end, and the resulting link has the awesome power to go get a page from that list and display it! (Click on the link and you'll see what I mean!)

I hope that will encourage everybody to get a Delicious account (so easy to do: here's more info!) and then start tagging what you publish online with "firesidelearning" and "member"... that will automatically add it to the list and when the dice are rolled, you may be the winner!

But here's the thing: we are all winners! As I was going through the links that Connie and Skip had collected (I think that is who created the list of links I started with...?), I was DAZZLED by the variety of blogs and wikis and websites and Nings that Fireside members have created. Really: it is enough to inspire hope even in the most hardened cynic (a title for which I could surely compete!).

SOOOOOOOO, roll the dice! You will be delighted by the results.

And start tagging: you can tag anything of interest to the Fireside community with the tag "firesidelearning" and if it is something YOU have created, please add the tag "member" ... and if it is something your students have created, add the tags "member" and "student" - the more people can do this, the better the rolls of the dice will be!

I have to admit, this may be the neatest online trick I have ever discovered. It is the best use of controlled randomness I have yet to find online. I give Delicious an A+ for this one. :-)

[Skip Zilla]

Thanks for the explanation of how you've achieved a randomized output in Delicious. Prior to the introduction into software APIs (application programming interfaces) of a built-in random function, an application developer had to create one from scratch based on a computer(chip)-logical algorithm. I hope that many more of our youngsters will engage themselves in learning the science of algorithmic computation and underlying mathematical logic which make digital life and its "coolness" possible. (I still dislike the take-for-granted-as-is superficiality of "coolness." I love, on the other hand, the fundamental personal originality and integrity of learning attentiveness displayed by the creators of what is remarkable "cool!")

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi again, Skip! Someday I have to write about something about random because I am kind of obsessed about this. I can appreciate randomness from two very opposite angles, and maybe that is why it thrills me so much. On the one hand, I used to work in a statistics lab, and I understand the mathematics of random which powers the whole modern science of statistics: randomness is real, and it really is "random"...

But at the same time, one of my other great interests is randomness in divination - things like the Sortes Virgilianae where you would randomly open you copy of Vergil and use it in a way something like the I Ching, and all kinds of other similar, fascinating examples of how the human mind is really prepared to interpret randomness as not random at all, but as a SIGN. I mean come on, you throw 500 COINS AND THEY ALL COME UP HEADS... yeah, the odds are against it, and that's exactly why it seems like a divine sign, right???

So, I love random. The first random thing I ever wrote, incredibly primitive, is a little script to help my students choose which unit they will read each week in the Myth-Folklore class, and it's hilarious, in their starting assumptions post they will say something like, "I had to read Egyptian folklore because the Fates told me so four times in a row!" HA!
Let The Fates Decide randomizer (each week the students choose between two options like this, and the Fates can help!)

:-)

[Skip Zilla]

Laura, you've been (fatefully) immersed in the mindfulness of ancient and traditional peoples which is expressed in their oral and written cultures. They sought to hear and see signs which commanded/compelled personal action in a cosmos full of the complexities/uncertainties of fate at every turn. But the greatest insight you've gained in your work, perhaps, is that they are really more like us than we would concede in our modern conceitedness. And so too do our deepest thinking physical scientists find the fatefulness, the luck of circumstances, the good or ill fortune in phenomena and in their happening in historical time as the other (right-brained?) side of randomness in its logically mathematical conception. I'm moved, for example, when modern-day, empirically-oriented cosmologists state as part of their "science" that we humans of Earth may exist in a fatefully fortunate universe among a number which haven't been/aren't so fortunate from our point of view.

On the matter you raised of where one begins (divining? deciphering? devising?) making sense of the whole meaning of a work like the I Ching, it seems you begin wherever you've opened the book and opened your mind. Where is the designated entrance to the network of interrelated fateful connections? In an analogous way, although neuroscientists are opening the physical brain in various locations and evolutionary developmentalists are opening the genomes of humans and other life forms, there remains a mysterious fatefulness about the complexities of minds and living beings and the fortunate/unfortunate dispositions of their actual histories.

What makes us celebrators of mysteries (of fate) beyond our ken and control in no way diminishes our dream to better understand who we are and to do what we can to better our odds of success in living personally meaningful and amiably useful lives.