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So there's this book, "A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" published by the Rand Corporation in 1955, a large mathematical table, rigorously proven, perversely or hilariously, to contain absolutely no information -- an anti-table. Instructions for its use read like a card trick. It contains random digits from an anti-oracle machine, sourced from an electronic device that produced noise. Rand's machine was a difficult technical challenge for the time, but the "high quality" random numbers were sorely needed for theoretical work on nuclear bombs, amongst other things.
You should at least glance at the Million Digits book page for background on the machine(s) described here.
In 2009-2010 I made this machine, the Atomic Number Generator, that does not use Rand's noise source, but a more obvious and more easily implemented method, using the decay of radioactive uranion (ore). It was and still is puzzling that Rand did not use this. In 2011 I did build a machine that used the actual device that Rand used: the Gas Tube Noise Generator.
My Atomic Number Generator, and the Rocks and Code installation it was designed for, directly reference that original Rand project; what was done, why, and what it means today. It's a starting point for me to look at some fundamental limits of knowledge, amongst other things that will unfold later.
The horrible machine voice is the Model 31 Vocalizer (1999), borroed from the Story Teller installation.
Construction of the ANG; stuffing the assembly in the box, layout and fabrication of the front panel.
First pass at a front panel layout. Rectangularity is OK to work out space issues, but it's boring, and not the easiest to use.
Much better use of space. Just lined up by eye.
Detail documentation.
Detail documentation.
Fitting the guts into the box. Clockwise from upper right corner: Arduini Diecimela, power supply, audio and lamp driver, mail board; black object is the HV supply.
Rear panel; Arduino USB access, WPS serial buss, AC power.
Detector tube connector detail. It's a BNC chassis female. I didn't have high-voltage cable (the detector tube runs at 1400V nominal), just ordinary PVC 300V wire; so I stuck it in some flexible sheathing. Now it's mostly air insulated.
Junk in the box, with front panel controls dangling, awaiting front panel fab.
The front panel drawing is taped to the panel for centerpunching.
I worked up a detailed front panel design in Inkscape; it has hole location info in red and the silkscreen artwork in black. However, the printer was out of red ink so that didn't print.
It was easier to use a compass to put interval marks in pencil on the spiral loudspeaker porting than it was to figure out how to do this in Inkscape.
After centerpunching.
Front panel holes drilled and panel sanded with 320 grit paper.
This is the detector tube, likely a minor variant of a Geiger-Mueller tube. This was made in 1946 almost certainly by Fermi's techs in the University of Chicago's euphemistic "Metallurgical Laboratory", which was the site of the first "atomic pile", so-called because it was assembled as a huge, filthy, stack of unranium metal and graphite bricks. It still works! I've got a stack of these but the rest have hand-inked 1948 "Argonne Lab" stickers.
