Hacker News Reader

Cue TempleOS

TempleOS has a number of interesting Oracular things. The F7 button gives you a random Bible word, and Shift+F7 gives you a random Bible passage. The author claimed that God provided guidance through this functionality.

Lower down, TempleOS's "god" library was a 'random' number generator that was seeded/pre-populated with the entirety of the KJV. The "GodBits" function would get you "random" numbers from it.

I worked on a project once involving divination from texts and wrote Terry about this topic. Here's what he told me (2015):

"""The easiest way to pick a random passage is to read timer that is in the random 1-20Mhz. If you have a faster timer, then divide by a number. The Bible is 4Meg. You want a random number from 0 to 4 million. The Bible is 100,000 lines of text. If you have the Bible in memory being edited, broken down by line number, you can pick a random line number from 0 to 100,000. If you flip 17 coins, you get a random number from 0 to 120,000. I use that for picking a line number.

God can do pretty-much any technique. The simplest and best is probably just randomly opening the Bible by hand."""

RIP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com