Americium-241 as a hardware random number generator (external)
Hopefully we all know by now that computers are not good at coming up with random numbers. They can do a bunch of tricky math and come up with numbers that are random enough for dealing your hand of solitaire, but some outside random force is necessary for tasks where patterns, repetition simply cannot occur. One such method involves counting radioactive decay events, and it occurred to me that Americium-241 is readily and affordably accessible – it’s in any good smoke detector. Now, I don’t have a need for this, nor do I intend to go dismantling smoke detectors, but I was curious if anyone else had proof-of-concepted such a thing before, and lo – here we have one such example. Neat.