Sunday, July 08, 2007

Is this cheating?


As some of you may have noticed, I started a Reading Queue on my sidebar as a follow-up to this post based on C Max Magee's article on The Millions.

The unread books on my shelves were getting out of hand and I needed a better method of choosing the next book to read. I stumbled onto Magee's method and decided to give it a go. I've had mixed results.

I listed all the unread books on my shelves; I alphabetized them by title; I put them all on a spreadsheet and numbered them; I fed the data into the Random Number Generator (actually, it's called the Integer Generator, but who except mathematicians would call it that); et voila, out spits the number of the next book I'll read.

One little problem. There's a try "Again!" button. When I'm not in the mood for the book that comes up, I tend to hit "Again", again and again. Is that cheating? Methinks it is.



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