I Heart Randomness

I am a huge fan of randomness. I chalk this up to my self diagnosed mild case of ADHD. On any given day I think about thousands of different things which is probably not an oddity in and of itself. I can't say that i'm an authority on thoughts and how many different things people typically think about in a given time period. I'm sure someone, somewhere has done a study on it. But anyways, I remember the most random things about both people i know well and people that I hardly know at all. For some reason the most random things about people, places, and things stick in my mind. Now, I'm not talking about the usual things you begin to learn about people after knowing them for awhile, like their favorite color, food, book, or movie. Maybe this also has something to do with the fact that I am very observant and sort of a "people watcher." I've always been fascinated by anything and everything going on around me. Some people whose name i won't mention (**cough "Amy" cough**) would say that I'm just easily entertained. Ahh, she could be right.

So the other day when i was bored and sifting through the one million add - ons and extensions available for my favorite internet browser, Mozilla Firefox, i ran across the ultimate randomness tool for propagating my "hobby". It's called StumbleUpon. You put in a few preferences about the type of websites you like to browse, click the Stumble Button, and you are instantly taken to a random website within your noted preferences. My preferences included cars (fast ones!), online shopping (since i can't actually go to any stores these days), ebooks (because i love to read without all the clutter here in my little office), movies (i've watched a lot of those lately), etc. Basically, my point is, check it out if you're bored it's kinda cool.

Now, don't get me wrong randomness actually has a few more pertinent applications to people that aren't addicted to in the same manner I am. According to Wikipedia, which we all know is a very reputable source for information on just about anything:

The word random is used to express lack of order, purpose, cause, or predictability in non-scientific parlance. A random process is a repeating process whose outcomes follow no describable deterministic pattern, but follow a probability distribution.

The term randomness is often used in statistics to signify well defined statistical properties, such as lack of bias or correlation.

Randomness has an important place in science, philosophy, and religion.

Of all the more serious applications of randomness, the one that fascinates me the most is its role in science in relation to the chaos theory also known as the Butterfly Effect (awesome movie by the way). Chaos theory is quickly explained as a theory concerned with the order within randomness and its effect (confused yet?). I'll spare you all the nerdy details and let you look into yourself if you so wish.

Alright I think i've rambled on about randomness enough for now besides I gotta get back to work. Until next time...

So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.
~Sidney Poitier