I've been running a 1970s-era lava lamp for some time, and found that it can enter a stable attractor where you get a non-circulating blob o' wax at the bottom. While Walker et al.'s (?) LL video entropy source is cute/clever, the general lesson we can take from this is to be careful that physical sources do not fail. Cooling the lamp and restarting it seems to have put it back into a quasi-random physical trajectory. I suppose my visual observation counts as an online entropic monitor that any physical source apparently should have. This was driven by a 40 watt bulb and the ambient temperature dropped when it stabilized. Shaking did not restart it; only cooling and then reheating did. Now back to your regularly scheduled war crimes.
-- On 17 Dec 2004 at 22:51, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
I've been running a 1970s-era lava lamp for some time, and found that it can enter a stable attractor where you get a non-circulating blob o' wax at the bottom. While Walker et al.'s (?) LL video entropy source is cute/clever, the general lesson we can take from this is to be careful that physical sources do not fail.
These days the video entropy source is not a lava lamp, but a lens cap - in the dark, the ccds generate significant thermal noise, which (unlike chaotic noise) cannot fail, unless someone immerses the camera in liquid helium. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG YIh62RYRs2hLkj/bbMuhph73iWN9Kmjo6IJ27mBf 4RyyRBC0ayoxtSug4pB9k+d7sjGlnt3gsa6yVYFy5
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Major Variola (ret)