In the lobby of Cloudflare's San Francisco office, about a hundred lava lamps undulate in front of a camera. The unpredictable movements of the wax, mixed with passing visitors, are turned into random numbers that serve as an extra source of randomness for encryption. Computers, being perfectly predictable, struggle to produce true randomness. Silicon Graphics came up with the idea back in 1996.
How many different structures can you build with six classic 2-by-4 Lego bricks of the same colour? The company used to quote just over 102 million. In 2005, Danish mathematician Søren Eilers recounted everything by computer: 915,103,765 combinations. The official estimate had been too low by a factor of about nine.
Fold an A4 sheet in half and you get an A5 with the same proportions. That only works for one ratio between length and width: about 1.414, the square root of 2. The A0 format measures exactly one square metre, and A4 is a sixteenth of it. With standard 80-gram-per-square-metre paper, an A4 sheet therefore weighs exactly 5 grams.