Geeky, geeky, geeky! And I love it.
I thought I would save my "oh so important 'cause I use 'em to type with" fingers some work. I didn't really want to cut up 44* squares of paper and write names on them in order to "draw a name out of the hat" for my Poetry Friday giveaway. Besides, I was sure there was a handy little computer thingy on the Internet that would do all the cutting and folding and writing and random selection parts for me.
Wrong. Did you know that as a "rational" machine, computers are incapable of "true randomness" without added hardware? The best one can do is generate "pseudo-random" numbers. See here for some almost-not-geeky further discussion. (UPDATE: Really, go read it if you have any interest---it's very well written, in a non-technical way, and includes a link to another interactive article called "Can you Behave Randomly?" And it discusses the Big Question: is everything in the universe pre-determined? Which I've now discovered the answer to is YES, because when I used the random number generator, it gave me the SAME number as when I drew one out of a paper bag below. Is that FREAKY, or what????)
So, here, chosen pseudo-randomly, from a pseudo-hat, by a pseudo-math geek is the winner of my Poetry Friday giveaway: #7 hipwritermama! (Please email me off-list so I can send it to you by absolutely real, and please! no randomness! U.S. mail.)
And for all of you: thank you so much for participating in Poetry Friday. You led me to stunning poems---modern, classic, original, complicated, simple, angry, sad, funny, wistful, joyful, blunt---and even a few posts that let me try writing a poem on the spot. Thank you all. It was a pleasure to be your hostess. For the roundup, see the post below.
*Two bloggers submitted two poetry posts each; I only put each name in once.
Wahoo! Thank you!
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