Word: random
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...computer printout, each containing 5,000 digits, has some practical value. The square root of 2 is what mathematicians call an irrational number, one that runs maddeningly on without any repetitive patterns or predictable sequence no matter how far it is carried out. Such numbers are also apparently completely random,* an important quality to mathematicians, who have contrived lengthy random numbers for use in computer studies of such chance phenomena as incidence of telephone usage, highway traffic patterns and even the lineup of shoppers in a supermarket. Dutka claims, however, that a naturally occurring random number, like the square root...
Another riot followed in May. Dick was very unhappy, wondering how the continuation of such random violence could do any more than make a lot of people angry. He hurried nervously about shaking his head. "This is not a good idea," he said. "I thought we had decided not to have any more of these...
...satire factory. He raged at Western civilization and every last one of its works. He decorticated the Third Reich, cheese fanciers, gossip columnists and the Hollywood star system with equal and total frenzy. Since the foaming manias of The Oldest Confession and The Manchurian Candidate, Condon's fine, random wrath has aged until it is nothing more than irritability. Once he could have picked up the Republican and Democratic parties by their tails and swung them around his head like a couple of dead cats, as he tries to do in the present novel...
...Pill and other means of birth control, so many unwanted pregnancies happen, even among the most educated and sophisticated. Subconsciously, many may want to become pregnant, according to Dr. Lawrence Downs, a Manhattan psychiatrist, who, in collaboration with Psychologist David Clayson, has been studying women selected at random at New York Hospital's therapeutic-abortion ward. Downs found that at least one-quarter of the first 108 women studied had suffered psychiatric problems in the previous two years; more than half had lost a parent or close relative during the past year. A slim majority said that members...
Antony Jay, a British management consultant and former BBC producer, thinks that the distance between the tribal councils of Kalahari bushmen and the inner circles of IBM is not all that great. In a book to be published next month, Corporation Man (Random House; $7.95), Jay argues that modern business firms are organized on the same basis as aboriginal tribes. Furthermore, the behavior of corporate executives springs not so much from reason as from animallike, prehistoric instincts. As in Management and Machiavelli, a 1968 book in which Jay compared the corporation to a nation-state, he has done little scientific...