Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator

Something just warms the cockles of my blackened geeky heart to see that. Its... tactile? Like the Japanese commuter trains, which run on a accurate-to-15-seconds schedule that drives one of the world's biggest economies and has catastrophic consequences for failure.

So are the trains kept in sync with the schedule by their onboard computers or radio signals from an atomic clock or NTP servers over wireless? No. They are actually kept in sync by windable gold clockwork watches, which each conductor keeps with him and places in a special gold clockwork watchholder on the dashboard of his modern technological marvel.

Its partially for historical reasons and partially for aesthetic sensibilities, although I know at least one Japanese railroad engineer who says it is a safety feature. I think that is largely a justification so that he doesn't have to say "We sync the trains with gold clockwork watches because we wanted to sync the trains with gold clockwork watches, as trains were meant to be synced!"

That is just ridiculous -- and by that I mean ridiculously impressive. Of course, it may be a step in the wrong direction w/r/t true randomness, both logically and in the psyches of whining gamers. If someone doesn't trust random.org (and I have to say, I would have stopped right there), I doubt that basic image processing where "pips sometimes blur" is going to help calm the whiners. Kudos for whimsy and throughput, though!

Favorite part: "As I promised earlier, if you donate to the site and are unhappy about the rolls, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine, melt it flat and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice. Tangible revenge. "

Wow, just wow. The visual effect of so many dice tumbling down the spiral is totally worth the Rube Goldberg-esque design; that's something a random number generator based on thermal noise or cosmic background radiation just couldn't possibly match! :)

I want to see a probability distribution graph for this behemoth! It would be very cool (well, in a geeky-cool sort of way) to compare it with various 'strong' crypto RNGs...