Word: random
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Birth: Your existence is determined by random causes on three level: 1) the decision of your parents to conceive a child at that particular time in their lives is less the product of their philosophical ideas than of the security which your father felt because the lawnmovers were selling well in the hardware store he worked in and which your mother felt because she was sitting around young and complacent with little else to do; 2) the act of conception was something they had to try several nights before they were sure they had something--why on one of those...
...world, etc.") Actually you could fall in love with half the girls at Radcliffe. It's just a matter of the right time and place and of whether the girl happens to be needing someone like you to have around at the time you need someone. The random factors here are infinite in their inter-relations. The converse view is that love is entirely determined by your past. Probably you will fall in love with someone unconsciously reminiscent of your mother. Also whenever you and a girl mutually fall in love, that event directly determines the life of the other...
...There are approximately 136,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of air in the given room you're sitting in. They are constantly zapping back and forth all over the place. Their distribution throughout the room is entirely random. One of the possibilities of this random distribution is that they would all huddle together over in the corner. In such a case the room would implode to fill the vacuum; you would be killed by the tremendous force of the reaction. The probability of this happening is about one in ten to the 73rd power. It's one of those...
Death: Death needs little introduction. It rivals birth in its number of different levels of random causes. It can happen to you at any time, and stop the whole thing; there's nothing you can do about...
...corpses would be preferable to the straightfaced but inwardly leering remarks of the police officers who discover the bodies. After an hour, one is thoroughly tired of the discovery scenes, the interviews with terrified old ladies, and the slapstick arrests of suspects seemingly chosen at random from the sexual underground by Boston police...