Imagine that you have to write about something going on in Washtenaw County every single day. (It's easy if you try.) Then imagine that you have, at times, a hard time figuring out what to write about. If you are like me, you want to turn to some element of useful randomness to help guide your search.

Here are a couple of ways to predictably create a random portion of a map of an area to focus on, and some musings on using randomness to create focus.

A random number generator, Random.org

To work randomly, you need a source of randomness.

A traditional technique from the days of my misspent youth playing Dungeons & Dragons is to roll dice to generate numbers. Hobby shops like Rider's carry dice with a variety of sides (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20).

A more flexible random source for our purposes is from Random.org, a random number service run by Mads Haahr of the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, in Ireland. It allows you to create sets of random information in the form of jazz scales, random times of the day, playing cards, and more. We'll be using it for its simple approach to picking numbers from a range.

Equal area randomness

A straightforward way to look at picking a random location is to select a spot that is equally distributed over the area of the county.

There are 20 townships in Washtenaw County, arranged in a 5x4 grid. Roll 1d20 to pick one, then identify it on the Map Washtenaw map run by the county. Townships are divided into 36 sections, so roll 2d6 to pick one of them, and then use "Search by Section" (in the search menu on the top right) to pick the one you want. All in all, you will have a random selection of one of 720 township sections, approximately 720 square miles.

The benefit of this approach is that you get equal representation by area; you are as likely to pick a rural square mile in Lyndon Township as you are to pick a densely settled campus neighborhood. The randomness is not quite perfect, though. The curvature of the earth, and small errors in the original survey, make sections like Salem Township Section 4 not perfectly square.

A random voting precinct

Voting precincts have roughly the same population, though not precisely; the map has some areas where 800 voters are registered, and others have 2600. It works as a first approximation, as long as you are not too concerned about precision.

Use the county's voting precinct list to pick from one of the precincts. There are 142 of them; generate a number in that range, and count down the list until you find the random one you want. You will have about a 34 percent chance of landing in Ann Arbor, a 7 percent chance of finding yourself in the City of Ypsilanti, and an 0.7 percent chance of winding up by random in rural Freedom Township. By comparison, your random area pick would give you a 5 percent chance of being in Freedom Township.

A random page on Arborwiki

Arborwiki is an encyclopedia of the Ann Arbor area which anyone can edit. It currently has about 6,800 pages in it, ranging from the ever-popular list of deals you can get on your birthday to obscure but earnest attempts at a biography of Ann Arbor mayor Royal S. Copeland (1901-1903).

A random page on Arborwiki is likely to pull up something either in Washtenaw County or somehow linked and relevant to the area. Article quality varies wildly, with some pages simply a link to a home page of the company mentioned, and others carefully and lovingly tended every time someone has a birthday.

Just like Wikipedia, Arborwiki can be edited by anyone. If the random sample turns up something that you know more about than what is written down, add a few words of your own.

Edward Vielmetti flips a coin before crossing the street on his way to AnnArbor.com. He's looking for a random number tool that generates a random restaurant within walking distance. Send suggestions or code to edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.