Talk:A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

message: Damnit, I accidently blanked the page. Does anyone have a backup copy?
Edit: thanks Malo -SB
I thought this article was longer. It used to mention the copyright arguemnet, didn't it? TaylorSAllen 02:44, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: --Shirt58 (talk) 12:52, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: old comments

message: I once heard that the IRS has an algorithm that catches tax cheats that just make up numbers off the top of their head when filling out tax forms. People tend to use the same numbers or combination of numbers apparently. I wonder if any one has ever used a random number generator or this book and just moved the decimal point to a suitable order of magnitude! I wonder if they can detect uncommon randomness too... whats the average entropy of the average Americans economic life? 75.170.64.238 (talk) 19:20, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually doing this would likely alert the IRS. There have been studies which show that incomes follow Pareto distribution, basically a power rule xa, a<0. The consequence of this is that its more likely for an income to start with the digit 1 than any other. If you were to take values straight out of the book you would end up too many values start with 9 which would be suspicious. Too much randomness is actually as likely as not enough.--Salix (talk): 23:35, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: More likely to be something similar to Benford's law --Rumping (talk) 23:59, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Fooling the IRS

message: I just came here randomly while on a WikiWalk (hard to be quite serious about this subject – I initially titled this section "Random comment"). I just thought it's a cute coincidence that this book was published by an institution called RAND, despite that acronym having no connection to the word "random". The caption of the sample in the article is cute, too – one might wonder how the sample was chosen. :-)
On a more serious note, is there a copyright on the contents of the book? Or is the content inherently uncopyrightable? The description at rand.org does suggest it is copyrighted. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:57, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: At least here in Sweden it would be covered by a different intellectual protection, the database right.--Henke37 (talk) 23:42, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyright? 

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*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20081130084855/http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/deviates.txt.zip to https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/deviates.txt.zip
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Just letting anyone here who doesn't read XKCD know that this book is mentioned in a recent strip, so this page is going to get a lot of new traffic and possibly vandalism because of that. Tolstoyan at Heart (talk) 17:11, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: The particular strip, for anyone interested, is 1751: Movie Folder --StarChaser Tyger (talk) 08:20, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Book is mentioned in a recent XKCD comic 

message: What is a normal deviate, and why does the book include them, rather than another 200 pages of 'plain' random numbers? --StarChaser Tyger (talk) 08:20, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: In fact these are not just normal deviates, these are standard normal deviates, i.e. random numbers drawn from a normal distribution with expected value 0 and variance 1. The book includes them because generating values from normal distribution given random numbers drawn from a uniform distribution is not straightforward. Qwfp (talk) 19:43, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  So what the heck is a normal deviate?