Word: randomization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...city of Berkeley, in the days before Messrs. Jarvis and Gann' and Professor Milton Friedman made the spending of money on urban sanitation an infringement of personal liberty, was sparkling clean and covered with geraniums....Especially in the filthy snows of winter, Cambridge was a dismal contrast. Harvard's random architecture, drifting incoherently into the city, did little for one's soul. Old Harvard men are known to love it. There is no accounting for taste...
...goes through his brief recovery, Tremont notes, within a few pages, "he's like a seventeen-year-old . . . he could have some feelings of being physically thirteen or fourteen years old . . . he has all the ego isolation and drive of a twenty-year-old." These sound like random thoughts, not the shaped statements of a narrator on top of his material. Tremont's treatment of his mother also provokes uneasiness. He seems blind to his bias against her, even though his own words reveal how eager he is to free his father by reining...
...organized gangs' operations probably involve no more than a few hundred criminals, including accomplices. But there is a rise of random crime as well. Once, before the state was founded, the late Zionist Poet Chaim Nahman Bialik used to say that he dreamed of the day when Jews could live like ordinary people, and "I will see a Jewish thief." In that sorry sense, a Zionist dream has been fulfilled. Armed robbery and burglaries are on the rise: an auto is stolen every ten minutes. Worse, there were 74 murders in the country last year, up from...
...world has adopted two different strategies toward luck. Much of the planet for most of its history has tried to woo and conjure and appease it, longingly courting the force to draw near, to descend from the void of the random for an instant and shower fortune on some lucky head. To ward off luck's malevolent side, the infection of a curse, the evil eye, populations have danced and chanted and worked with charms. To predict its whims, they have studied omens, birds' flights, goats' entrails; they have consulted gypsies and star charts...
Generally, luck is something that happens to individuals. If a society or a century is considered as a whole, the random individual events that are set down to luck or fortune form more coherent overall patterns; large historical forces become discernible. But entire societies should not mock luck either. The classic Mayan civilization disappeared so strangely, so precipitously, that some massive stroke of bad luck must have been at work-a sudden plague, say, a viral riot...