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"Lava lamp randomness," by Ivars Peterson. Science News, 9 August 1997, page 92.
The "lava lamp" has become a kitsch icon of the 1970s. Now, researchers have turned to the meandering, unpredictable movements of a lava lamp's colored blobs in order to improve random number generators. Such generators produce random numbers by carrying out a set of procedures on a "seed number"; if fed the same seed number a second time, the generator will produce the same string of digits. Varying the seed numbers is therefore important. The movements of the blobs in the lava lamp were an inspiration for researchers to come up with a new way of randomly varying the seed numbers.
--- Allyn Jackson
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