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I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.
Gerhard RichterC being what it is lacks support for multiple return values, so the notion that it is meaningful to pass pointers to memory objects into which any random function may write random values without having a clue where they point, has not been debunked as the sheer idiocy it really is.
Erik NaggumYou say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
Mitch AlbomMy favourite road sign is 'Falling Rocks'. What exactly am I supposed to do with that information? They may as well have a sign saying "Random accidents ahead", "Life's a lottery, Be lucky."
Jimmy CarrYou can blow on the dice all you want, but whether they come up seven is still a function of random luck.
Barry RitholtzI have a giant baking book, so I close my eyes and pick a random page. Whatever it is, I try to bake it!
Nina DobrevIf you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.
Paul KrugmanEvery time I say thanks or thank you to a random person they blush and say you're welcome.
Charlie MorganI used to always throw in random questions. I'd have to ask about artist's single and their writing process, which I know is every artist's most-hated question, like, "Well what was ,your process?" And it's. like, "Well, I wrote this album." And then at the end I would throw in, like, "So, Seinfeld or Simpsons?" and they'd be so thrown, because everything else could be autopilot. All my greatest moments were from the most sporadic questions.
Ruby RoseBut the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.
Peter ThielFor me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions. . . .
Willard Van Orman QuineYou can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I've always thought--put together all those random pieces form everyone who's ever known you from your parents to the guy who once sat next to you on a bus, and you'd probably see a fuller version of your life than you even did while living it.
Deb CalettiImagine 1050 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik's cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have a chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.
Fred HoyleI read a random issue when I was a kid, but no, I wasn't super familiar with the characters [Captain Victory] until I started researching them. What I found once I started reading back issues however, was this crazy, sprawling, [Jack] Kirby space epic.
Sterling GatesDwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!
Terry PratchettI write a lot by sound. One sound leads me to another. These sounds aren't random; they have their own logic.
Kate BravermanChallenger was lost because NASA came to believe its own propaganda. The agency's deeply impacted cultural hubris had it that technology-engineering-would always triumph over random disaster if certain rules were followed. The engineers-turned-technocrats could not bring themselves to accept the psychology of machines with abandoning the core principle of their own faith: equations, geometry, and repetition-physical law, precision design, and testing-must defy chaos.
William E. BurrowsWhen I was in college, I was in the theater department, which for anyone who has been involved in any kind of theater program, you know that it's really wacky and tight-knit, a real family. Me and my good friends from college would do random shows and plays that were sometimes serious, but most of the time really goofy and funny.
Darren CrissI have no sense of being famous - you're just working. And then you'll have a random day in London when you'll do some press and it creeps into your awareness that this goes out - that what you do every day goes out to televisions right across the country.
Karen GillanThe Universe was a silly place at best...but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.
Robert A. HeinleinThe whole thing of singing on my own has been accidental and random. I sang a huge amount as a kid, and I was a boy soprano. I didn't do that much classical music; I did a little bit. I had a lovely voice. And then when my voice dropped, I didn't worry about it consciously because I wasn't that invested in my singing at the time.
Sam AmidonThe internet's perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain't one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional โlive audienceโ quickly conspire to create a โperfect stormโ of perpetual bickering.
Charlie BrookerStuff Happens.โ Thatโs the G-rated version. Thatโs a bumper sticker that only a straight white upper middle class male could have made. Because anyone who isnโt straight, anyone who isnโt male, anyone who isnโt white, anyone who isnโt upper middle class knows that stuff doesnโt just happen. Stuff gets done by people to people. Nothing is a coincidence. Nothing is random. This isnโt osmosis. And so we act as if itโs this passive thing, but yet thatโs not the case.
Tim WiseI know that a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania is about the most random place for a country singer to come from, but I had an awesome childhood.
Taylor SwiftI've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part.
David ByrneThe Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained - through prayer, study, and careful analysis - to manifest the divine event of God's saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of their time.
Henri NouwenI got a random tattoo the other day. It's a red triangle, which makes everyone think I'm arty, which I'm not. I used to draw red triangles all the time. It must mean something - maybe I don't know it yet. But I'll figure it out.
Ellie GouldingRagnor and Catarina both begged him to give the instrument up. Random strangers on the street begged him to give the instrument up. Even cats ran away from him.
Cassandra ClareThe rules took a while to sort out. Lena and Carmen wanted to focus on friendship-type rules, stuff about keeping in touch with one another over the summer, and making sure the Pants kept moving from one girl to the next. Tibby preferred to focus on random things you could and couldn't do in the Pants --- like picking your nose.
Ann BrasharesI sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary.
Deborah CopakenAre you fangalicious? -Jess, a random blogger I could never be as fangalicious as you'd want me to be.-Fang
James PattersonIn the year that I take off, I don't have any goals. I just surrender to experiences like traveling or learning yoga and meditation or just living in a completely random place like Mongolia or Portugal or Bhutan. Then when I come back, I am much more intuitive, creative, right-brained. That kind of system has been working very well for me.
Karan BajajAny random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.
P. J. O'RourkeThe first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.
Twyla TharpGiving Papa time to think, as Arty put it, was like pumping random rounds into a fireworks factory. The odds favored dramatic results.
Katherine DunnThere are two kinds of filmmaking: Hitchcock's (the film is complete in the director's mind) and Coppola's (which thrives on process). For Hitchcock, any variation from the complete internal idea is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. Coppola's approach is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in his mind when he began.
Walter MurchMy hobbies are random. One week I want to exercise, one week I just want to eat all day. One week I'm going out every night and the next week I'm totally locked in my house, not going anywhere. I'm a little bit all over the place, socially. I don't have another passion or hobby - it's really music. I'm in the studio constantly.
Macy GrayLiberals pretend to believe that when two random hoodlums kill a gay man in Oklahoma, it's evidence of a national trend, but when a million people buy a book, it proves absolutely nothing about the book-buying public.
Ann CoulterThe regime of control tightens inexorably in our schools, many of which now have video cameras, police patrols, chain-link fences, random unannounced locker searches, metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, networks of informants, undercover police posing as students, and a comprehensive system of passes so that there is a record of each student's authorized whereabouts at all times. What a perfect preparation for life in a prison or a totalitarian society!
Charles EisensteinThe positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance....Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism.
William A. Dembski