Suppose you want, for some reason, to find the length of a randomly chosen river or the population of a randomly chosen city.
In the old days, we all had things called “reference books”, with long lists of river lengths, city populations, etc. You could open to a random page, close your eyes, put down your finger, and there you’d have it.
But now many of us no longer own reference books. We own smartphones instead. This raises two issues:
1) I’m not sure there are online lists of river lengths or city populations that are as extensive as what you used to find in reference books. Why should there be? Nowadays, if you want to know the population of Des Moines, you just Google for Des Moines; you don’t need a site that lists the populations of thousands or tens of thousands of cities.
2) Even if there were such lists, what would be the modern equivalent of opening to a random page, closing your eyes and pointing? Scrolling for a random amount of time seems less random somehow.
So what do you do?
I would go to wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_length
and make a single list out of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_cities_with_100,000_or_more_inhabitants/cityname:_B
Then find an online random generator to make a random choice from the lists.
Someone at Wikipedia should add a button to every list longer than 20 for selecting a random element using the code here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17867814/selecting-a-random-li-element-jquery
Randomly clicking through the CIA World Factbook website is a pretty good equivalent.
Is this a question for the modern world? Landsburg is describing how Dr. Doolittle planned his itineraries as described in the 1920s about evens in the early 1800s. Doolittle specifically used an atlas. (He planned his lunar voyage after he happened to open the atlas to the back cover and place his finger on an illustration of the moon.)
I’d say it depends on the “for some reason.” If I just want a random number, I’d just use (or write) a random number generator.
If I were writing a story that involved a river or a town and I wanted a plausible value for the length or population, then I think I’d research that more thoroughly – maybe select some plausible candidates (non-randomly) and then roll some dice or whatever to randomly select from my candidates.
Another option is to use some sort of proxy to define a list, and then randomly select from the list. For example – find the store locator page for a retailer with a lot of locations across the US. Generate a list of all locations. Randomly pick one, and then either use that town, or find the river closest to that town with Google Maps.
If you need a whole bunch of towns or rivers, you could extend that concept – e.g., go to ancestry.com or something to generate a unique ordered list of last names. Select one last name randomly. Then use that last name to search online white pages or the equivalent to generate the list of towns in which people with that last name live. Finally, randomly select a town from that list.
Yet another approach – write a “random word generator” that strings together, say, 1 – 15 randomly chosen letters and then uses Google determine if that word is in fact the name of a river or town (or whatever you’re looking for). If so – there you go. If not, try again.
Wikipedia has a random page generator…fun for flipping, but without a list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
1) This issue seems to have a contradiction in it. Are you essentially saying: “Lists are not as extensive as they used to be, they don’t have facts X, Y or Z. Why would they need to? Nowadays if you want to know X, Y or Z you just Google for it.”
2) Click that “Random article” button on the left on Wikipedia?
@Daniel R. Grayson
You don’t even need to wait for somebody at Wikipedia to do it. With the TamperMonkey extension you could just inject the jquery code directly into the Wikipedia pages yourself. Coding that up once and for all should take about an hour. After that, everybody with TamperMonkey would have it for a button press.
If you are not concerned with actual *facts* then could you just apply Benford’s law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
River length, population etc. all have pretty wide error bands in anycase.
Paul Ralley: Alas, the reason for my query is that I’d like a good way to *demonstrate* Benford’s Law, so invoking it would be circular.
If you get the fact from Wikipedia, it will be pretty much random to start with. J
“I’m not sure there are online lists of river lengths or city populations that are as extensive as what you used to find in reference books. Why should there be? ”
I’d bet the opposite: that there are online sources for these data that are far more accurate, extensive and up-to-date than any reference book you owned in the past.