Random

Random (pronounced ran-duhm)

(1) Proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern; lacking any definite plan or prearranged order; haphazard.

(2) In statistics, of or characterizing a process of selection in which each item of a set has an equal probability of being chosen (the random sample); having a value which cannot be determined but only described probabilistically.

(3) Of materials used in building and related constructions, lacking uniformity in size or shape.

(4) Of ashlar (stonework), laid without continuous courses and applied without regularity:

(5) In slang (also clipped to “rando” and some on-line sources insist “randy” is also used), something or someone unknown, unidentified, unexpected or out of place; anything odd or unpredictable (not necessarily a pejorative term and used as both noun & adjective).

(6) In slang, someone unimportant; a person of no consequence (always a pejorative).

(7) In printing, the sloping work surface at the top of a compositor's workbench on which type is composed (also called a bank and use now almost exclusive to the UK).

(8) In mining, the direction of a rake-vein.

(9) Speed, full speed; impetuosity, force (obsolete).

(10) In ballistics, the full range of a bullet or other projectile and thus the angle at which a weapon is tilted to gain maximum range (obsolete).

(11) In computing (as pseudorandom), mimicking the result of random selection.

1650s: From the earlier randon, from the Middle English randoun & raundon, from the Old French randon, a derivative of randir (to run; to gallop) of Germanic origin (related to the Old High German rinnan (to run) (from which Modern French gained randonnée (long walk, hike), from either the Frankish rant (a running) & randiju (a run, race) or the Old Norse rend (a run, race), both from the Proto-Germanic randijō, from rinnaną (run), from the primitive Indo-European r̥-nw- (to flow, move, run).  It was cognate with the Middle Low German uprinden (to jump up) and the Danish rende (to run).  The development of the adjective to mean “having no definite aim or purpose, haphazard, not sent in a special direction” evolved in the 1650s from the mid-sixteenth century phrase “at random” (at great speed) which picked up the fourteenth century sense from the Middle English noun randon & randoun (impetuosity; speed).  In English, the meaning closely mirrored that in the Old French randon (rush, disorder, force, impetuosity), gained from Frankish or other Germanic sources.  The spelling shift in Modern English from -n to –m was not unusual (seldom, ransom etc).  Random is a noun & adjective, randomness & randomosity are nouns, randomize is a verb and randomly is an adverb; the noun plural is randoms.

A “random person” is one variously unknown, unidentified, unexpected or out of place.

In general use, the meanings related to speed (full speed; force, trajectory of delivery etc) faded from use between the fourteenth & seventeenth centuries but persisted in the field of ballistics where “random” described the limit of the range of a bullet or other projectile (thus the angle at which a weapon was tilted to gain the maximum range.  Even that was largely obsolete by the early twentieth century but the idea of the angle being “a random” persists still in pockets in the UK to describe a sloping work surface on which printers compose pages (although few now use physical metal type).  The now familiar twenty-first century slang use can be either pejorative (someone unimportant; a person of no consequence) or neutral tending to the amused (something or someone unknown, unidentified, unexpected or out of place; anything odd or unpredictable).  The modern adoption appears to have its origin in 1980s US college student slang when “a person who does not belong on our dormitory floor” was so described; from this the hint of “inferior, undesirable” was perhaps inevitable.  “Rando” seems to be the standard abbreviation but some on-line sources also list “randy” which would seem to risk confusion or worse.

School lunch social engineering: Some sources recommend parents cut their children’s sandwiches in random ways.  The theory is it helps train their minds to accept change and helps them learn to adapt.

In computing, random access memory (RAM) had since the 1980s become familiar as one of a handful of the critical specifications of a computer (CPU, RAM, drive space) and the origin of the terms dates from IBM’s labs in the early 1950s when it was used to describe a new form of memory which could be read non-sequentially.  The modern RAM used by personal computers, servers, smart phones etc is an evolution from the original memory model; in the world of the early mainframes there was simply storage which could fulfil the functions now performed by both RAM and media like hard disks & solid state drives.  RAM is now a well-known commodity but the companion ROM (Read-Only Memory) is understood only by nerds and only an obsessional few of them give it much thought.  RAM volatile in that the contents are inherently temporary lost when the device is powered-down or re-started; it can thus be thought of as using static electricity for data storage.  That characteristic means it’s fast, affording the most rapid access by the CPU (Central Processing Unit) so is used to hold whatever data is at the time most in demand and that can be parts of the operating system, applications or documents.  ROM is non-volatile and whatever is written to ROM remains even if a device is switched-off; it’s thus used for essential, information like firmware and hardware information.

In mathematics and statistics, random does have precise definitions but in general use it’s used also as a vague synonym for “typical or average”.  To a statistician, the word implies “having unpredictable outcomes to the extent all outcomes are equally probable and if any statistical correlation is found to exist it will be wholly coincidental.  Thus, although all dictionaries list the comparative as more random and the superlative as most random, a statistician will insist these are as absurd as “very unique” although even among mathematicians phrases like “increasingly random” or “tending to randomness” are probably not unknown.  For others, the forms are useful and the colloquial use to mean “apropos of nothing; lacking context; unexpected; having apparent lack of plan, cause or reason” is widely applied to events, even those which to a specialist may not be at all random and may even be predictable.  For most of us, any sub-set of numbers which appears to have no pattern will appear random but mathematicians need to be more precise.  In the strict, technical sense, a true random number set exists only when two conditions are satisfied: (1) the values are uniformly distributed over a defined interval or set and (2) it is impossible to predict future values based on past or present ones.  In the pre-computer age, creating random number lists was challenging and subsequent analysis has found some of the sets created by manual or mechanical means were not truly random although those which were sufficiently large probably were functional for the purposes to which they were put.

“Random news” is something strange, unexpected and often amusing.    

Now, random number generators (RNG) are used and they can exist either in hardware or software and there are two types (1) pseudorandom number generators (PRNG) and true random number generators (TRNG).  A software algorithm, a PRNG emulates a TRNG by mimicking the selection of a value to approximate true randomness, the limitation being the algorithm being based on a distribution (the origin of the term pseudorandom) which can only produce something ultimately deterministic and predictable (although to determine the pattern can demand much computational power).  Relying on a seed number, if that can be isolated, other numbers can be predicted although, if the subset is large, for many purposes, what PRNGs generate is functional.  TRNGs don’t use an algorithm (although their processes can be represented by one) but are instead based on an unpredictable physical variable such as radioactive decay of isotopes, airwave static, or the behaviour of subatomic particles, the latter now favoured for their utterly unpredictable movements, now called “pure randomness”.  So random is the behaviour of subatomic particles that their observation appears to be immune to measurement biases which can (at least in theory) afflict other methods.

Random numbers are important in a number of fields including (1) statistical sampling and experimentation where it’s essential to select a random sample to ensure that the results are representative of the entire population, (2) cryptography where random numbers are used to generate the encryption keys which ensure the security of data and communications, (3) simulation and modelling where there’s a need to replicate real-world scenarios, (4) gaming & gambling where the need exists to create unpredictable outcomes and (5) randomized controlled trials (RCT), notably in medical and scientific research where true randomness is needed to assist in the assessment of the effectiveness of treatments, interventions, or policies.

Lava

Lava (pronounced lah-vuh or lav-uh)

(1) The molten, fluid rock that issues from a volcano or volcanic vent (sometimes accumulating, occasionally permanently) in a volcano’s “lava lake”.

(2) The rock formed when this solidifies, occurring in many varieties differing greatly in structure and constitution.

(3) In fashion, as “lava dress” (sometimes volcano dress), a long, flowing gown, classically in orange and black fabric, styled to recall a vertiginous lava flow.

(4) A shade of red which tends to orange, recalling the color of red-hot, molten lava.

(5) As Lava Lamp, the trademarked name of a electric decorative lamp made of a transparent, (usually tapered) cylinder containing a liquid in which a colored wax (or wax-like substance) is stimulated by the heat of the light bulb to change into randomly separating, seemingly luminous shapes which constantly rise and descend.

1740–1750: From the Italian lava (molten rock issuing from a volcano), from the Neapolitan or Calabrian dialectal lava (avalanche, torrent or stream; downpour overflowing the streets).  The original use in Italian was to describe flash flood rivulets after downpours and only later to the streams of molten rock from Mount Vesuvius.  The once commonly supposed link with the Latin lavāre (to wash) (from the primitive Indo-European root leue- (to wash) was based on the idea of “a liquid flowing” but is now thought one of those creations of the medieval imagination and it’s just as unlikely there’s was any relationship with the Arabic لابة‎ (lāba) (black volcanic rock).  Lava is also wholly unrelated to larva (an early stage of growth for some insects and amphibians) which was from the Latin larva (ghost-like, masked) which may have been from the Etruscan Lār (Etruscan praenomen; titulary god) which appeared usually as Lares (guardian deities).  The alternative etymology is from the Latin labes (sliding down, falling), which influenced lābī (to slide, fall or slip) (a labina an “avalanche or landslide”).  The only adjective in modern use is lavalike (or lava-like).  The old adjectives lavatic (1805), lavic (1822) & laval (1883) all fell into disuse by the twentieth century (although their occasional revival in the technical literature would not be unsurprising) and lavaesque seems never to have been coined.  The palindromic Laval did endure in France as both a locality name and surname and is remembered because of Pierre Laval (1883–1945), prime minister of France 1931-1932, 1935-1936 & de facto prime minister in the Vichy Government 1942-1944, executed by a French firing squad in 1945.  Lava is a noun and the obsolete lavatic, lavic & lavalike were adjectives; the noun plural is lavas.

Lindsay Lohan in Pucci triangle lava-print bikini, The Bahamas, May 2007.  Pucci are noted for the shapes and colors printed on their fabric but their minimalist website is worth visiting as a reminder of how good Italian design can be.

What Pucci did for their "Lava" range was take the shapes and curves assumed by a lava flow and render it with colors sometimes never seen in volcanology.  The terms lava and magma (from the Ancient Greek μάγμα (mágma) (paste)) are sometimes used interchangeably but to geologists and volcanologists the distinction is that Magma is molten rock which exists beneath a planet’s surface and become lava only when it flows from a volcano or volcanic vent.  Magma thus does not always become lava, sometimes cooling and solidifying as rock beneath the surface and sometimes collecting in a magma chamber.  A magma chamber differs from a lava lake in that the pleasingly alliterative latter describes the (usually large) large pool of molten lava that forms in a volcanic crater (although volcanologists do use the term also of lava which “sticks” to a volcano’s surface and doesn’t flow further.  They also in some cases call the extrusive igneous rock formed when it hardens and cools “lava” although this is not in general use, laypeople associating both “magma” and “lava” with the material in its molten state.

1976 Lincoln Continental Mark IV, Pucci Edition (left) and the opera windows of the designer series Mark IVs (right), into which was etched the house's name.  The other designers were Bill Blass, Cartier & Givenchy and presumably something of an owner's character could be determined by their choice.  The ownership of the Mark IVs was overwhelmingly male and if a young lady heard one suggest she "come and see my etching", on the basis of what she saw on the opera window, she could elect to proceed or decline, fashion choices as good a criterion as any in such decisions. 

Although there was little else in the cars which suggested much influence from Italy, Pucci was one of four fashion houses chosen by the Ford Motor Company (FoMoCo) to provide “touches” for “designer” editions of the 1976 Lincoln Continental Mark IV and the Pucci package (in “vintage burgendy with a loose pillow velvety burgendy velour interior”) added US$2000 to the MRP (manufacturer’s recommended price) of US$11,060.  The creation of the designer editions was an attempt to stimulate demand because the sales numbers in 1974-1975 had proved disappointing, something attributed both the downturn in the economy and the Mark IV having been on the market since late 1971, the only changes since the addition of (1) emission controls which reduced power & impaired drivability and (2) huge, heavy, impact resistant bumpers, neither of which much engaged potential buyers.  The economy improved somewhat in 1976 but the “touches” of the fashion houses must have helped because after sinking to 47,145 in 1975, sales the next year for the Mark IV’s final season rebounded to 56,110.  The designer editions accounted for almost a third of that volume, FoMoCo so pleased the contracts were renewed and those who want a classic Pucci Lincoln can choose a Mark IV (1976), Mark V (1977-1979) or Mark VI (1980-1983), the detailing changing with each version although the Pucci name was always etched into the opera windows on the C-pillar.  Now part of the LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) multinational conglomerate, in their corporate history there seems to be no mention of Pucci’s involvement with Lincoln’s “land yachts” but it must at the time have seemed a good idea.

Lava flowing over snow and ice, demonstrating the “Leidenfrost effect”.  The Leidenfrost effect (known also as “film boiling”) describes the phenomenon in which a liquid, close to a solid surface of another body that is significantly hotter than the liquid's boiling point, produces an insulating vapor layer that prevents liquid rapidly from boiling.  This happens because of “repulsive force”; droplets hovering over the surface, rather than making physical contact.  In a charming linguistic coincidence, the “frost” element in the word is not a reference to frozen water but from the name of German physician Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost (1715—1794), who first documented the phenomenon in De aquae communes nonnullis qualitatibus tractatus (Tract about some qualities of common water, 1756).  The son of a preacher, Dr Leidenfrost began his academic career studying theology before switching to medicine.  Until modernity overtook the twentieth century, the church was a source of many scientists, not all of whom abandoned their faith.  The German Leiden can be both a noun and verb; as a verb (leiden) it means “to endure” or “to suffer” but in idiomatic use it’s used in that sense also to mean “to tolerate” although most often in the negative (such as “Ich kann ihn nicht leiden” (I can't stand him.))  As a noun (das Leiden), it means “pain”, “suffering” or “affliction”.  The German Frost means “frost or freezing temperatures”.  Thus the surface analysis of the surname “Leidenfrost” is “enduring frost” or “suffering from frost” and onomasticians (or onomatologists, those who study surnames, a sub-branch of anthroponymy (the study of proper names) suspect the origin was something to do with those who live in cold or icy places although it may also be toponymic, referring to individuals from specific locations in Germany Leidenfrost in Thuringia or Leidenfrosten in Saxony-Anhalt.

Lava lake, Mount Erebus, Antarctica.  Some 60 m (200 feet) in diameter, it sits within a small pit crater within the post-caldera summit and is phonolite in composition.  It may or may not remain a permanent feature.

The rock formations created by cooled magma at Mount Erebus proved especially interesting to those researching the history of the Earth’s magnetic field.  Geophysicist Dr Catherine Constable (b 1958) was studying the data used to refine a model explaining the mechanism of the earth’s occasional magnetic field reverses (from the familiar north & south polarity to the reverse where they swap) and found lava to be a substance keeping a perfect recorder of the field.  All magmas contain enough iron-rich minerals to detect the field and these align themselves toward the field as the lava freezes. As a result, the magnetic field at that moment is recorded: set in time and set in stone.  Over geological time, quite what the frequency (or the rapidity) of the shift isn’t clear and while studies suggest historically there’s be a swap every few hundred thousand years, it’s been almost a million years since the last so while one “might” be (over)due, Dr Constable says there’s no available evidence one is in progress or even imminent.

Catriona Gray (b 1994; Miss Universe 2018) in lava dress by Filipino designer Mak Tumang (b 1986) which used a image of lava flowing down Mayon Volcano, rendered in Swarovski crystals, Bangkok’s Impact Arena, Thailand, December 2018 (left) and lava flow on Tungurahua volcano, Huambalo, Ecuador (right).

Catriona Gray on the catwalk, lava flowing.

Lava cup-cakes

Lava cakes can pay tributes to volcanologists in different ways.  They can feature a magna chamber which, upon slicing can feed a lava flow or they can formed with an exposed crater in which sits a lava lake.  Professional chefs can produce the effects with room-temperature “lava” but usually these are for display and the cakes work best with hot, melted chocolate and obsessives use a variety of ingredients (peanut butter, raspberries, orange colored icing etc) to attempt to emulate the variegated colors of the real stuff.  They work best with dark chocolate but sweeter types can be used (or a blend).  Lava cakes can be made at larger scales but the laws of physics (both thermal and structural) mean full-sized constructions can be challenging (and messy) so most produce lava cup-cakes.  Because, in a sense, lava cakes are a kind of civil engineering, some very complex recipes have been created but the following will make 6-8 cup-cakes (depending on the size of the muffin tins) and it has the virtue of simplicity:

Ingredients

4 tablespoons of unsalted butter at room temperature (plus some with which to grease the muffin tray).

A third of a cup of granulated sugar (plus some to sprinkle in the muffin tray).

3 large eggs.

A third of a cup of all-purpose flour.

A quarter teaspoon of salt.

8 ounces of dark chocolate, melted (for best results, delay the melt process until ready to blend (step (8) below).

6-8 squares (from the standard blocks) of dark chocolate.

Icing (confectioners') sugar, for dusting.

Whipped cream or ice cream, for serving (optional).

Fruit for serving (optional and most choose a red or orange variety).

Instructions

(1) Preheat oven to 400°F (205°C).

(2) Grease the cups of muffin tray with butter, ensuring the coasting is light and consistent.

(3) Sprinkle some granulated sugar over the muffin tray and ensure each has buttered cup has a consistent coating.  Shake off any excess grains.

(4) Spoon some granulated sugar into each cup, swirling to make sure the cup is completely lined.

(5) Blend the butter and granulated sugar until the mix is creamy.

(6) To this mix, as the eggs, one at a time, blending them in after each addition.

(7) To this mix, beat in flour and salt (on a low speed) until combined.

(8) To this mix, add the molten chocolate, and beat until combined.  Don’t be off-put if the mix seems either more or less viscous that you might expect.

(9) Pour mix into the greased cups. Fill only to half-way.

(10) In the centre of each cup, place one of the chocolate squares.

(11) Add the remaining mix to each cup but, because the mix will expand, don’t fill higher than three-quarters.

(12) Put tray into the heated oven, baking until the middle of the cakes no longer jiggle (should be no more than 8-12 minutes and if left too long, they’ll cease to be lava cup-cakes and become chocolate cup-cakes).  Because there’s some risk of spillage, place baking paper underneath the tray.

(13) Remove tray from oven and allow it to sit for 7-8 minutes.

(14) Up turn tray on a plate or other suitable flat surface and remove cup-cakes so the conical aspect resembles volcano.

(15) Dust with the icing (confectioner's) sugar and serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream, adding some sort of fruit if desired.  Upon being sliced, the magma should ooze out, lava-like.

The Lava Lamp

The decorative lava lamp was invented in 1963 by Edward Craven Walker (1918-2000), a Word War II (1939-1945) RAF (Royal Air Force) pilot who was inspired by a rigged-up egg-timer he saw in a pub, the device made with oil and water in a bottle.  Oil and water being two immiscible (unable to mix) fluids, the timer worked by shaking the bottle, the egg deemed to be ready when the resulting blobs of oil had re-coagulated.  Knowing the world was well-supplied with cheap, reliable egg-timers, Craven saw little point in “making a better mousetrap” but he found the behavior of the blobs a pleasing piece of art and in his garage experimented with different fluids until he found a pleasing combination which produced just the effect he’d envisaged.  The characteristic shape of the lamp came about because the one seen in the pub used a standard cocktail shaker and the container in which Craven undertook his early research was an orange-squash bottle which was made in a similar shape; it proved ideal.  They work by the heat-soak from the incandescent light-bulb raising the temperature of the blobs, lowering both their density and the liquid's surface tension.  As the warmed blobs rise, they cool, lose buoyancy thus descend to the base where a wire with an active current breaks their surface tension, inducing re-coagulation.

Although associated with psychedelia, as well as lurid colors (the range expanded since the introduction of LEDs), lava lamps with plain black blobs in clear fluid are available.

The first lava lamp patent (Lava Lamp is a registered trademark in some jurisdictions) was applied for in 1963 and they were first displayed in 1965.  Very popular in the early-mid 1970s, by the 1980s the fad had passed, not because of the popular association of them with stoners imagined sitting staring at one for hours while the Grateful Dead played on the turntable (endlessly on repeat) but because they’d come to be thought of as plastic kitsch.  However, they never quite went away and while there are spikes in demand (associated usually with some appearance in some prominent piece of popular culture), there is clearly a constant demand for those who just like the look while others furnish according to retro schemes or like the odd ironic piece among their conspicuous good taste.

Lava Lamps and Random Number Generation

US-based Cloudflare is a “nuts & bolts” internet company which provides various services including content delivery, DNS (Domain Name Service), domain registration and cybersecurity.  In some aspects of the internet, Cloudflare’s services underpin as many as one in five websites.  For many reasons, the generation of truly random numbers is essential for encryption and other purposes but to create them continuously and at scale is a challenge.  It’s a challenge even for home decorators who want a random pattern for their tiles, their difficulty being that however a large number of tiles in two or more colors are arranged, more often than not, at least one pattern will be perceived.  That doesn’t mean the tiles are not in a random arrangement, just that people’s expectation of “randomness” is a shape with no discernible pattern whereas in something like a floor laid with tiles, in a random distribution of colors, it would be normal to see patterns; they too are a product of randomness in the same way there’s no reason why if tossing a coin ten times, it cannot all ten times fall as a head.  What interior decorators want is not necessarily randomness but a depiction of randomness as it exists in the popular imagination.

Wall of Entropy, Cloudflare, San Francisco.  Had this been in an installation in a New York gallery in 1985, it would have been called art.  

For most purposes, computers can be good enough at generating random numbers but in the field of cryptography, they’re used to create encryption keys and the concern is that what one computer can construct, another computer might be able to deconstruct because both digital devices are working in ways which are in some ways identical.  For this reason, using a machine alone has come to be regarded as a Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) simply because they are deterministic.  A True Random Number Generator (TRNG) uses something genuinely random and unpredictable and this can be as simple as the tiny movements of the mouse in a user’s hand or elaborate as a system of lasers interacting with particles.

One of Cloudflare’s devices encapsulating unpredictability (and thus randomness) is an installation of 100 lava lamps, prominently displayed on a wall in their San Francisco office.  Dubbed Cloudflare’s “Wall of Entropy”, it uses an idea proposed as long ago as 1996 which exploited the fluid movements in an array of lava lamps being truly random; as far as is known, it remains impossible to model (and thus predict) the flow.  What Cloudflare does is every few milliseconds take a photograph of the lamps, the shifts in movement converted into numeric values.  As well as the familiar electrical mechanism, the movement of the blobs is influenced by external random events such as temperature, vibration and light, the minute variations in each creating a multiplier effect which is translated into random numbers, 16,384 bits of entropy each time.

Wall of Entropy, Cloudflare, San Francisco.  Note the arrangement of colors which avoids any two being together, in the horizontal or vertical, something which probably was a deliberate choice rather than randomness although, there's no reason why, had the selection truly been random, this wouldn't have been the result.  Were there an infinite number of Walls of Entropy, every combination would exist including ones which avoid color paring and ones in which the colors are clustered.  What Cloudflare have done in San Francisco is make the lamps conform to the popular perception of randomness and that's fine because the colors have no effect on the function.

Kitsch

Kitsch (pronounced kich)

(1) Something though tawdry in design or appearance; an object created to appeal to popular sentiment or undiscriminating tastes, especially if cheap (and thus thought a vulgarity).

(2) Art, decorative objects and other forms of representation of dubious artistic or aesthetic value (many consider this definition too wide).

1926: From the German kitsch (literally “gaudy, trash”), from the dialectal kitschen (to coat; to smear) which in the nineteenth century was used (as a German word) in English in art criticism describe a work as “something thrown together”.  Among “progressive” critics, there was a revival in the 1930s to contrast anything thought conservative or derivative with the avant garde.  The adjective kitchy was first noted in 1965 though it may earlier have been in oral use; the noun kitchiness soon followed. Camp is sometimes used as a synonym and the two can be interchangeable but the core point of camp is that it attributes seriousness to the trivial and trivializes the serious.  Technically, the comparative is kitscher and the superlative kitschest but the more general kitschy is much more common.  The alternative spelling kitch is simply a mistake and was originally 1920s slang for “kitchen” the colloquial shortening dating from 1919.  Kitsch & kitchiness are nouns, kitschify, kitschifying & kitschified are verbs and kitschy is an adjective; the noun plural is kitsch (especially collectively) or kitsches.  Kitschesque is non-standard.

Kitsch can become ironic.  Lava lamps were in the 1970s briefly fashionable as symbols of the modern but were soon re-classified kitsch.  In the twenty-first century, such was the demand that re-creations of the originals became available, bought because they were so kitsch.

For something that lacks and exact definition, kitsch is probably surprisingly well-understood as a concept although not all would agree on what objects are kitsch and what are not.  Nor does is there always a sense about it of a self-imposed exclusionary rule; there are many who cherish objects they happily acknowledge are kitsch.  As a general principle, kitsch is used to describe art, objects or designs thought to be in poor taste or overly sentimental.  Objects condemned as kitsch are often mass-produced, clichéd, gaudy (the term “bling” might have been invented for the kitsch) or cheap imitations of something.  It can take some skill to adopt the approach but other items which can compliments such a thing include rotary dial phones and three ceramic ducks flying up the wall (although when lava lamps were in vogue, lava lamp buyers probably already thought them kitsch.

Lindsay Lohan: Prom Queen scene in Mean Girls (2004).  If rendered in precious metal and studded with diamonds a tiara is not kitsch but something which is the same design but made with anodized plastic and acrylic Rhinestones certainly is.

Führerkitsch: A painting attributed to Adolf Hitler.

The Nazi regime devoted much attention to spectacle and representational architecture and art was a particular interest of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945).  Hitler in his early adulthood had been a working artist, earning a modest living from his brush while living in Vienna in the years before World War I (1914-1918) and his landscapes and buildings were, if lifeless and uninspired, competent enough to attract buyers.  He was rejected by the academy because he could never master a depiction of the human form, his faces especially lacking, something which has always intrigued psychoanalysts, professional and amateur.  Still, while his mind was completely closed to any art of which he didn’t approve, he was genuinely knowledgeable about many schools of art and better than many he knew what was kitsch.  However, the nature of the “Führer state” meant he had to see much of it because the personality cult built around him encouraged a deluge of Hitler themed pictures, statuettes, lampshades, bedspreads, cigarette lighters and dozens of other items.  A non-smoker, he ordered a crackdown on things like ashtrays but generally the flow of kitsch continued unabated until the demands of the wartime economy prevailed.

To the Berghof, his alpine headquarters on the Bavarian Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, Barvaria, there were constant deliveries of things likes cushions embroidered with swastikas in which would now be called designer colors and more than one of his contemporaries in their memoirs recorded that the gifts sometimes would be accompanied by suggestive photographs and offers of marriage.  Truly that was “working towards the Führer”.  At the aesthetic level he of course didn't approve but appreciated the gesture although they seem never to have appeared in photographs of the house’s principle rooms, banished to places like the many surrounding buildings including the conservatory of Hans Wichenfeld (the chalet on which the Berghof was based).

Hitler's study in the Berghof with only matched cushions (left) and the conservatory (centre & right) with some pillowshams (embroidered with swastikas and the initials A.H.).

In the US, Life magazine in October 1939 (a few weeks after the Nazis had invaded Poland) published a lush color feature focused on Hitler’s paintings and the Berghof, the piece a curious mix of what even then were called “human-interest stories”, political commentary and artistic & architectural criticism.  One heading :“Paintings by Adolf Hitler: The Statesman Longs to Be an Artist and Helps Design His Mountain Home” illustrates the flavor but this was a time before the most awful aspects of Nazi rule were understood and Life’s editors were well-aware a significant proportion of its readership were well disposed towards Hitler’s regime.  Still, there was some wry humor in the text, assessing the Berghof as possessing the qualities of a “…combination of modern and Bavarian chalet” styles, something “awkward but interesting” while the interiors, “…designed and decorated with Hitler’s active collaboration, are the comfortable kind of rooms a man likes, furnished in simple, semi-modern, sometimes dramatic style. The furnishings are in very good taste, fashioned of rich materials and fine woods by the best craftsmen in the Reich.”  Life seemed to be most taken with the main stairway leading up from the ground floor which was judged “a striking bit of modern architecture.”  Whether or not the editors were aware Hitler thought “modern architecture” suitable only for factories, warehouses and such isn’t clear.  They also had fun with what hung on the walls, noting: “Like other Nazi leaders, Hitler likes pictures of nudes and ruins” but anyway concluded that “in a more settled Germany, Adolf Hitler might have done quite well as an interior decorator.”  There was no comment on the Führer’s pillows and cushions.

Lindsay Lohan themed pillowshams are available.

Whatever Life’s views on him as interior decorator, decades later, his architect was prepared to note the dictator’s “beginner’s mistakes” as designer.  In Erinnerungen (Memories or Reminiscences), published in English as Inside the Third Reich (1969)), Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) recalled:

“A huge picture window in the living room, famous for its size and the fact that it could be lowered, was Hitler s pride.  It offered a view of the Untersberg, Berchtesgaden, and Salzburg. However, Hitler had been inspired to situate his garage underneath this window; when the wind was unfavorable, a strong smell of gasoline penetrated into the living room.  All in all, this was a ground plan that would have been graded D by any professor at an institute of technology. On the other hand, these very clumsinesses gave the Berghof a strongly personal note. The place was still geared to the simple activities of a former weekend cottage, merely expanded to vast proportions.”

He commented also on the pillowshams: “The furniture was bogus old- German peasant style and gave the house a comfortable petit-bourgeois look.  A brass canary cage, a cactus, and a rubber plant intensified this impression.  There were swastikas on knickknacks and pillows embroidered by admiring women, combined with, say, a rising sun or a vow of "eternal loyalty."  Hitler commented to me with some embarrassment: "I know these are not beautiful things, but many of them are presents.  I shouldn't like to part with them."

The gush was also trans-Atlantic.  William George Fitz-Gerald (circa 1970-1942) was a prolific Irish journalist who wrote under the pseudonym Ignatius Phayre and the English periodical Country Life published his account of a visit to the Berchtesgaden retreat on the invitation of his “personal friend” Adolf Hitler.  That claim was plausible because although when younger Fitz-Gerald’s writings had shown some liberal instincts, by the “difficult decade” of the 1930s, experience seems to have persuaded him the world's problems were caused by democracy and the solution was an authoritarian system, headed by what he called “the long looked for leader.”  Clearly taken by his contributor’s stance, in introducing the story, Country Life’s editor called Hitler “one of the most extraordinary geniuses of the century” and noted “the Führer is fond of painting in water-colours and is a devotee of Mozart.”

Country Life, March 1936 (both Hermann Göring (1893–1946) and Werner von Blomberg (1878–1946) were then generals and not field marshals).  Hermann Göring wearing the traditional southern German Lederhosen (leather breeches) must have been a sight worth seeing.

Substantially, the piece in Country Life also appeared in the journal Current History with the title: Holiday with Hitler: A Personal Friend Tells of a Personal Visit with Der Führer — with a Minimum of Personal Bias”.  In hindsight it may seem a challenge for a journalist, two years on from the regime’s well-publicized murders of a least dozens of political opponents (and some unfortunate bystanders who would now be classed as “collateral damage”) in the pre-emptive strike against the so-called “Röhm putsch”, to keep bias about the Nazis to a minimum although many in his profession did exactly that, some notoriously.  It’s doubtful Fitz-Gerald visited the Obersalzberg when he claimed or that he ever met Hitler because his story is littered with minor technical errors and absurdities such as Der Führer personally welcoming him upon touching down at Berchtesgaden’s (non-existent) aerodrome or the loveliness of the cherry orchid (not a species to survive in alpine regions).  Historians have concluded the piece was assembled with a mix of plagiarism and imagination, a combination increasingly familiar since the internet encouraged its proliferation.  Still, with the author assuring his readers Hitler was really more like the English country gentlemen with which they were familiar than the frightening and ranting “messianic” figure he was so often portrayed, it’s doubtful the Germans ever considered complaining about the odd deviation from the facts and just welcomed the favourable publicity.

As a working journalist used to editing details so he could sell essentially the same piece to several different publications, he inserted and deleted as required, Current History’s subscribers spared the lengthy descriptions of the Berghof’s carpets, curtains and furniture enjoyed by Country Life’s readers who were also able to learn of the food severed at der Tabellenführer, the Truite saumonée à la Monseigneur Selle (salmon trout Monseigneur style) and caneton à la presse (pressed duck) both praised although in all the many accounts of life of the court circle’s life on the Obersalzberg, there no mention of the vegetarian Hitler ever having such things on the menu.

Djuna Barnes (1892–1982).  Briefly, Putzi Hanfstaengl was engaged to the US author Djuna Barnes who, although she denied being predominantly lesbionic, was regarded by some contemporary critics as having written the most definitive expressions of lesbian culture since Sappho.  It was one of Hanfstaengl's wives who spoke the most succinct thumbnail sketch of Hitler's sexuality: “I am telling you Putzi, he is a neuter.”

Fitz-Gerald was though skilled at his craft and interpolated enough that was known to be true or at least plausible to paint a veneer of authenticity over the whole.  Of the guests he reported: (1) Hitler’s long-time German-American acquaintance & benefactor (when speaking of Hitler, both better words than "friend") Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl (1887–1975 and a one-time friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR, 1882–1945, US president 1933-1945) was a fine piano player (which nobody ever denied), (2) that Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946; Nazi foreign minister 1938-1945) was a wine connoisseur (he entered the wine business after marrying into the Henkell family’s Wiesbaden business although his mother-in-law remained mystified, remarking of his career in government it was: “curious my most stupid son-in-law should have turned out to be the most successful” and (3) that Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897-1975; Nazi propaganda minister 1933-1945) was an engaging dinner companion and a “droll raconteur” (it is true Goebbels’ cynicism and cruel wit could be amusing even to those appalled by his views, something like the way one didn’t have to agree with the press baron Lord Beaverbrook (Maxwell Aitken, 1879-1964) to enjoy his tart cleverness).  Much of the credibility was however sustained by it being so difficult for most to “check the facts” and few would have been able to find out that in the spring of 1936 when Fitz-Gerald claimed to be enjoying the Führer’s hospitality, the quaint old Haus Wachenfeld was part of a vast building site, the place being transformed into the sprawling Berghof, the whole area unliveable and far from the idyllic scene portrayed.

Führerkitsch: A painting attributed to Adolf Hitler.

Dutifully, Hitler acknowledged the many paintings which which were little more than regime propaganda although the only works for which he showed any real enthusiasm were those which truly he found beautiful.  However, he knew there was a place for the kitsch… for others.  In July 1939, while being shown around an exhibition staged in Munich called the “Day of German Art”, he complained to the curator that some German artists were not on display and after being told they were “in the cellar”, demanded to know why.  The only one with sufficient strength of character to answer was Frau Gerhardine "Gerdy" Troost (1904–2003), the widow of the Nazi’s first court architect Paul Troost (1878–1934) and one of a handful of women with whom Hitler was prepared to discuss anything substantive.  “Because it’s kitsch” she answered.  Hitler sacked the curatorial committee and appointed his court photographer (Heinrich Hoffmann (1885–1957)) to supervise the exhibition and the depictions of happy, healthy peasants and heroic nude warriors returned.  Hitler must have been satisfied with Herr Hoffman's selections because in November that year he conferred on him the honorific "professor", a title he would award as freely as he would later create field marshals.  

Kitsch: One knows it when one sees it.

What is kitsch will be obvious to some while others will remain oblivious and the disagreements will happen not only at the margins.  Although there will be sensitive souls appalled at the notion, it really is something wholly subjective and the only useful guide is probably to borrow and adapt the threshold test for obscenity coined by Justice Potter Stewart (1915–1985; associate justice of the US Supreme Court 1958-1981) in Jacobellis v Ohio (1964):

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…

Kitsch also has a history also of becoming something else.  As recently as the 1970s, tea-towels, placemats, oven mitts, serving trays and plenty else was available in the West adorned with depictions of indigenous peoples, often as racist tropes or featuring the appropriation of culturally sensitive symbols.  These are now regarded as kitsch only historically and have been re-classified as examples variously (depending on the content) of cultural insensitivity or blatant racism.

Kitsch at work: Lava Lamps and Random Number Generation

Some may have dismissed the Lava Lamp as "kitsch" but the movement of the blobs possesses properties which have proved useful in a way their inventor could never have anticipated.  The US-based Cloudflare is a “nuts & bolts” internet company which provides various services including content delivery, DNS (Domain Name Service), domain registration and cybersecurity.  In some aspects of the internet, Cloudflare’s services underpin as many as one in five websites.  For many reasons, the generation of truly random numbers is essential for encryption and other purposes but to create them continuously and at scale is a challenge.  It’s a challenge even for home decorators who want a random pattern for their tiles, their difficulty being that however a large number of tiles in two or more colors are arranged, more often than not, at least one pattern will be perceived.  That doesn’t mean the tiles are not in a random arrangement, just that people’s expectation of “randomness” is a shape with no discernible pattern whereas in something like a floor laid with tiles, in a random distribution of colors, it would be normal to see patterns; they too are a product of randomness in the same way there’s no reason why if tossing a coin ten times, it cannot all ten times fall as a head.  What interior decorators want is not necessarily randomness but a depiction of randomness as it exists in the popular imagination.

Useful kitsch: Wall of Entropy, Cloudflare, San Francisco.  Had this been in an installation in a New York gallery in 1985, it would have been called art.  

For most purposes, computers can be good enough at generating random numbers but in the field of cryptography, they’re used to create encryption keys and the concern is that what one computer can construct, another computer might be able to deconstruct because both digital devices are working in ways which are in some ways identical.  For this reason, using a machine alone has come to be regarded as a Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) simply because they are deterministic.  A True Random Number Generator (TRNG) uses something genuinely random and unpredictable and this can be as simple as the tiny movements of the mouse in a user’s hand or elaborate as a system of lasers interacting with particles.

One of Cloudflare’s devices encapsulating unpredictability (and thus randomness) is an installation of 100 lava lamps, prominently displayed on a wall in their San Francisco office.  Dubbed Cloudflare’s “Wall of Entropy”, it uses an idea proposed as long ago as 1996 which exploited the fluid movements in an array of lava lamps being truly random; as far as is known, it remains impossible to model (and thus predict) the flow.  What Cloudflare does is every few milliseconds take a photograph of the lamps, the shifts in movement converted into numeric values.  As well as the familiar electrical mechanism, the movement of the blobs is influenced by external random events such as temperature, vibration and light, the minute variations in each creating a multiplier effect which is translated into random numbers, 16,384 bits of entropy each time.

Wall of Entropy, Cloudflare, San Francisco.  Note the arrangement of colors which avoids any two being together, in the horizontal or vertical, something which probably was a deliberate choice rather than randomness although, there's no reason why, had the selection truly been random, this wouldn't have been the result.  Were there an infinite number of Walls of Entropy, every combination would exist including ones which avoid color paring and ones in which the colors are clustered.  What Cloudflare have done in San Francisco is make the lamps conform to the popular perception of randomness and that's fine because the colors have no effect on the function