Quotes about randomization (341 quotes, page 4)

“Care about the beings you care about in gorgeous and surprising ways. Color outside the lines. Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. This is your last chance.”

Anne Herbert (writer) (1952) American journalist

"Handy tips on how to behave at the death of the world" in Whole Earth Review (Spring 1995), p. 88 http://archive.is/20120715140307/findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1510/is_n85/ai_16816244
Context: Eschew blandness. Eschew causing others pain. We are all the target so wear bright colors and dance with those you love. Falling in love has always been a bit too much to apply to one person. Falling in love is appropriate for now, to love all these things which are about to leave. The rocks are watching, and the squirrels and the stars and the mlklk tired people in the street. If you love them, let them know, with grace and non-invasive extravagance. Care about the beings you care about in gorgeous and surprising ways. Color outside the lines. Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. This is your last chance.

Beauty , Color , Way , Chance

“There were no longer words being spoken, but images being visualized. We achieved it above all by the dislocation of language. … Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.) Similarly, in my play The New Tenant, there is no speech, or rather, the speeches are given to the Janitor. The Tenant just suffocates beneath proliferating furniture and objects — which is a symbol of death. There were no longer words being spoken, but images being visualized. We achieved it above all by the dislocation of language. … Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words.

Silence

“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, memex will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)
Context: Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, memex will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

Books , Communication , Memory , Future

“This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing …”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 84

Life

“If I had never seen a watch and should see one for the first time, I should be sure its hands were moving according to some plan and not at random.”

Richard Evelyn Byrd (1888–1957) Medal of Honor recipient and United States Navy officer

Source: Alone (1938), Ch. 6
Context: If I had never seen a watch and should see one for the first time, I should be sure its hands were moving according to some plan and not at random. Nor does it seem any more reasonable for me to conceive that the precision and order of the universe is the product of blind chance. This whole concept is summed up in the word harmony. For those who seek it, there is inexhaustible evidence of an all-pervading intelligence.

Time

“Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.”

John Von Neumann (1903–1957) Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath

On mistaking pseudorandom number generators for being truly "random" — this quote is often erroneously interpreted to mean that von Neumann was against the use of pseudorandom numbers, when in reality he was cautioning about misunderstanding their true nature while advocating their use. From "Various techniques used in connection with random digits" by John von Neumann in Monte Carlo Method (1951) edited by A.S. Householder, G.E. Forsythe, and H.H. Germond 
Context: Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, there is no such thing as a random number — there are only methods to produce random numbers, and a strict arithmetic procedure of course is not such a method.

“In many ways life is less random than we think.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, One Fearful Yellow Eye (1966)
Context: In many ways life is less random than we think. In your past and mine, there have been times when we have, on some lonely trail, constructed a device aimed into our future. Perhaps nothing ever comes along to trigger it. We live through the safe years. But, for some people, something moves on the half-forgotten path, and something arches out of the past and explodes in the here and now. These are emotional intersections, when lives cross, diverge, then meet again.

Life , Way , Thinking

“Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty”

Richard Carlson (1961–2006) Author, psychotherapist and motivational speaker

Lesson 34, Practice Random Acts of Kindness
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and it’s all Small Stuff (1997)
Context: There is a bumper sticker that has been out for some time now. You see it on cars all across the nation. It says, "Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty." I have no idea who thought of this idea, but I've never seen a more important message on a car in front of me.
Practicing random kindness is an effective way to get in touch with the joy of giving without expecting anything in return. It's best practiced without letting anyone know what you are doing.

Beauty

“You are amazed that matter can form a man when matter is all mixed up at random and so many things go into making a person. But do you not realize that before matter forms someone it has also stopped along the way to make a stone, lead, coral, a flower, or a comet because there was too much or too little of it to make a human being?”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)
Context: You are amazed that matter can form a man when matter is all mixed up at random and so many things go into making a person. But do you not realize that before matter forms someone it has also stopped along the way to make a stone, lead, coral, a flower, or a comet because there was too much or too little of it to make a human being? No wonder, then, that an infinite amount of incessantly moving and changing matter makes up the few animals, vegetables and minerals that we see. No wonder, either, that if you throw dice a hundred times, they will all show the same numbers at some point.
This movement of matter, then, could not fail to produce something, and whatever it is will always be admired by the unthinking person who does not realize how close it came to not being made.

Way , Flowers , Personality

“The cross is not random suffering, but necessary suffering. The cross is not suffering that stems from natural existence; it is the suffering that comes from being Christian.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Discipleship (1937), Discipleship and the Cross, p. 86.
Context: The cross is not random suffering, but necessary suffering. The cross is not suffering that stems from natural existence; it is the suffering that comes from being Christian. … A Christianity that no longer took discipleship seriously remade the gospel into only the solace of cheap grace. Moreover, it drew no line between natural and Christian existence. Such a Christianity had to understand the cross as one's daily misfortune, as the predicament and anxiety of our daily life. Here it has been forgotten that the cross also means being rejected, that the cross includes the shame of suffering. Being shunned, despised, and deserted by people, as in the psalmists unending lament, is an essential feature of the suffering of the cross, which cannot be comprehended by a Christianity that is unable to differentiate between a citizen's ordinary existence and a Christian existence. The cross is suffering with Christ.

Nature , Suffering

“A given phenomenon, today considered random, may tomorrow be considered determined because its causes will have been unraveled by thorough and specific study.”

Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist

Grassé, Pierre Paul (1977); Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation. Academic Press, p. 279
Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)
Context: Exceptional, unforeseeable, or even inexplicable phenomena would hence be fortuitous. these very vague adjectives too often have a merely circumstancial meaning. A given phenomenon, today considered random, may tomorrow be considered determined because its causes will have been unraveled by thorough and specific study.
Biologists, whose task is not to seek moral causes or intentions, must first of all make sure that so-called random facts really are random facts; they must constantly keep in mind Poincare's (1912b, p. 65) famous phrase: "Chance is only the measure of our ignorance."

Study

“My past had disappeared. Not that I believed for a moment that this was an accident; in fact, I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system.”

Stanisław Lem book Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie (1961), translated as Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1973)
Context: My past had disappeared. Not that I believed for a moment that this was an accident; in fact, I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The assumption would be that every document, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one. A time-consuming procedure, perhaps, but one that would never fail. The Universe itself operated on the same principle. And for an institution as everlasting as the Universe — certainly our Building was such an institution — the speed at which these meanderings and perturbations took place was of no consequence.

Time , Past

“The theory of randomness is fundamentally a codification of common sense.”

Leonard Mlodinow book The Drunkard's Walk

Source: The Drunkard's Walk, Chapter 2, The Laws Of Truths And Half - Truths, p. 21 (See also: William Feller)

Sense

“What I Like about The Sims is that I don't have a normal life at all, so I play this game where these people have these really boring, mundane lives. It"s fun. My Sims family is called the Cholly family. I don't know why I picked that name; it's kind of random.”

Джерард Артур Уэй (1977)

Life , People , Family , Game

“Butterflies are random thoughts people have. They live, they die, they are pointless. ”

Джонатан Ватсон

People

“The last two years have seen the emergence of a beautiful new subject in mathematical physics. It manages to combine a most exotic range of disciplines: two-dimensional quantum field theory, intersection theory on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces, integrable hierarchies, matrix integrals, random surfaces, and many more. The common denominator of all these fields is two-dimensional quantum gravity or, more general, low-dimensional string theory.”

Robbert Dijkgraaf (1960) Dutch mathematical physicist and string theorist

[1992, Intersection Theory, Integrable Hierarchies and Topological Field Theory by Robbert Dijkgraaf, Fröhlich J., ’t Hooft G., Jaffe A., Mack G., Mitter P.K., Stora R. (eds.), New Symmetry Principles in Quantum Field Theory, NATO ASI Series (Series B: Physics), vol. 295, 95–158, Springer, Boston, MA, 10.1007/978-1-4615-3472-3_4]

Beauty , Mathematics

“You simply can’t throw strangers together at random and expect the fiery, quick romance to turn into love. Love has its own rules and enforces them rigidly.”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

Gray Flannel Armor (p. 9)
Short fiction, Notions: Unlimited (1960)

Love , Making love

“Randomness, chaos, uncertainty, and chance are all a part of our lives. They reside at the ill-defined boundaries between what we know, what we can know, and what is beyond our knowing. They make life interesting.”

Ivars Peterson (1948) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 10, “Lifetimes of Chance” (p. 202)

Life , Chance , Making love , Parting

“Ramsey theory implies that complete disorder is impossible. Somehow, no matter how complicated, chaotic, or random something appears, deep within that morass lurks a smaller entity that has a definite structure. Striking regularities are bound to arise even in a universe that has no rules.”

Ivars Peterson (1948) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 2, “Sea of Life” (p. 25)

Universe , Appearance

“Intriguingly, the mathematics of randomness, chaos, and order also furnishes what may be a vital escape from absolute certainty—an opportunity to exercise free will in a deterministic universe. Indeed, in the interplay of order and disorder that makes life interesting, we appear perpetually poised in a state of enticingly precarious perplexity. The universe is neither so crazy that we can’t understand it at all nor so predictable that there’s nothing left for us to discover.”

Ivars Peterson (1948) Canadian mathematician

Preface, “Infinite Possibility” (p. xiii)
The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997)

Understanding , Universe , Appearance , Mathematics

“Political events are always very confused and complicated. They can be compared with a chain. To hold the whole chain you must grasp the main link. Not a link chosen at random.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Communism and New Economic Policy",(April 1921)
1920s

“Note that in all this interaction between mutation and natural selection, no moth is making a conscious effort to adapt to a changed environment. The process is random and statistical.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 2, “Genes and Brains” (p. 28)

Effort , Change , Making love , Nature

“These are no random reminiscences. … The Negroid population of the West Indies is composed of a large percentage of actually black people. … Then there are the browns, intermediates, who cannot by any stretch of imagination pass as white, but who will not go one inch towards mixing with people darker than themselves.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 51

Imagination , People

“An honest fellow stripped of all his illusions is the ideal man. Though he may have little wit, his society is always pleasant. As nothing matters to him, he cannot be pedantic; yet is he tolerant, remembering that he too has had the illusions which still beguile his neighbor. He is trustworthy in his dealings, because of his indifference; he avoids all quarreling and scandal in his own person, and either forgets or passes over such gossip or bickering as may be directed against himself. He is more entertaining than other people because he is in a constant state of epigram against his neighbor. He dwells in truth, and smiles at the stumbling of others who grope in falsehood. He watches from a lighted place the ludicrous antics of those who walk in a dim room at random. Laughing, he breaks the false weight and measure of men and things.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

L'honnête homme, détrompé de toutes les illusions, est l'homme par excellence. Pour peu qu'il ait d'esprit, sa société est très aimable. Il ne saurait être pédant, ne mettant d'importance à rien. Il est indulgent, parce qu'il se souvient qu'il a eu des illusions, comme ceux qui en sont encore occupés. C'est un effet de son insouciance d'être sûr dans le commerce, de ne se permettre ni redites, ni tracasseries. Si on se les permet à son égard, il les oublie ou les dédaigne. Il doit être plus gai qu'un autre, parce qu'il est constamment en état d'épigramme contre son prochain. Il est dans le vrai et rit des faux pas de ceux qui marchent à tâtons dans le faux. C'est un homme qui, d'un endroit éclairé, voit dans une chambre obscure les gestes ridicules de ceux qui s'y promènent au hasard. Il brise, en riant, les faux poids et les fausses mesures qu'on applique aux hommes et aux choses.
Maximes et Pensées, #339
Maxims and Considerations, #339

Light , Personality , Forgetting , Smile

“As it happens, the Herk household did have a dog, named Roger. Roger was the random result of generations of hasty, unplanned dog sex: Among other characteristics, he had the low-slung body of a beagle, the pointy ears of a German shepherd, the enthusiasm of a Labrador retriever, the stubby tail of a boxer, and the intelligence of celery.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Source: Novels, Big Trouble (1999), Chapter 2

Sex , Dogs , Intelligence

“He leaves the reader with a realization. The line between those born with choices and those not so lucky is very thin. The side of the divide you’re born on is purely random.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

Savita Iyer, Ahrestani in: "Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil Dens and iniquity"

“No technique of random sample has, so far as I can ﬁnd, been developed in the United States or elsewhere, which can compare in accuracy or in economy with that described by Professor Mahalanobis.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

By Harold Hoteliing a well-known US mathematical statistician, in 1938 quoted in "Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in India."

“I don’t need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost’s observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person’s random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

And this person, in the poems, is not the “alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn’t, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so — a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.
“The Other Frost”, p. 29
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Personality , Feeling , Nature

“One could happily make a case that more random civilians, and fewer fucking lawyers, should be on the court. But the only other thing to say about Miers is that she is a fucking lawyer.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2005-10-10
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2005/10/miers_and_brimstone.html
Miers and Brimstone
Slate
1091-2339
2000s, 2005

Making love

“The cross is not random suffering, but necessary suffering. The cross is not suffering that stems from natural existence; it is the suffering that comes from being Christian. … A Christianity that no longer took discipleship seriously remade the gospel into only the solace of cheap grace. Moreover, it drew no line between natural and Christian existence. Such a Christianity had to understand the cross as one's daily misfortune, as the predicament and anxiety of our daily life. Here it has been forgotten that the cross also means being rejected, that the cross includes the shame of suffering. Being shunned, despised, and deserted by people, as in the psalmists unending lament, is an essential feature of the suffering of the cross, which cannot be comprehended by a Christianity that is unable to differentiate between a citizen's ordinary existence and a Christian existence. The cross is suffering with Christ.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Discipleship (1937), Discipleship and the Cross, p. 86

Understanding , People , Suffering , Nature

“For the record, natural selection is a highly nonrandom process that acts on the genetic variation produced by random mutation and genetic drift and results in those organisms with more adaptive traits differentially surviving and reproducing.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Part 1 “Four Classical Arguments”, Chapter 2 “The Argument from Design (and Some Creationist Calculations)” (p. 19)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)

Nature

“Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don't have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution.”

James D. Watson (1928) American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist.

"All for the Good: Why genetic engineering must soldier on" TIME magazine, Vol. 153, No. 1 (11 January 1999)
1990s

Courage , Heart , Science , Making love

“Hydroxychloroquine has been studied as a possible antiviral therapy for many decades. Despite showing evidence of activity against several viruses in the laboratory, it never showed success in randomized clinical trials.”

Luciana Borio American physician and public health administrator

In response to Donald Trump's statement on using the drug as treatment for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), quoted in Ignoring Expert Opinion, Trump Again Promotes Use of Hydroxychloroquine https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/us/politics/trump-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus.html (April 5, 2020) by Michael Crowley, Katie Thomas and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times.

Study , Success

“For those of us that are newcomers to politics, there aren't any real scandal that our opponents can use to attack us. This is why my opponent is just attacking (me) at random.”

Lai Pin-yu (1992) Taiwanese social activist

Lai Pin-yu (2020) cited in " DPP: Lai Pin-yu, From Sunflower Activist to Legislative Candidate https://international.thenewslens.com/feature/taiwan-women-politics-2020/129610" on The News Lens, 3 January 2020.