According to statistics, it is very likely that you have uploaded pictures to your Facebook account from various events–or, if not you, then one or many of your friends–and had a hard time categorizing some of these photos. It is also very likely that you put the photos that cannot be categorized as “Italy 2004″ and “Summer 2008″ and so forth into a photo album entitled “Random” (or some variant). Really?
When you have a collection of things that have nothing to do with each other, they are not random; they are simply unrelated. Your album is a catchall; it is a disparate grouping of similar items (photos!) that have no other logical home. But I have an idea: use a random word generator to come up with the name of your photo album. I set it to “uncommon” and it gave me “Neurotransmitter.” If nothing else, please change your “Random” album to “Neurotransmitter.”
But honestly. The term is “non-sequitur.” This is not an uncommon term in the English language.
And here’s another thing! Jokes are not random!
As someone who has made jokes before and who has relied on the non-sequitur as a comedic device, let me tell you this: every “random” joke you hear was agonized over by self-loathing writers who desperately just want you to think they’re funny. Specifically, I’d like to address the late Mitch Hedburg and The Family Guy. These are two comedic vehicles who/that do not follow traditional story-telling techniques. They use (to varying–BUT NOT RANDOM–levels of success) jokes that are not tied to a plot.
Mitch Hedberg used a comedic style known as the one-liner; he would say one funny sentence and move on to the next. The Family Guy uses straight-up non-sequiturs,* cutting away from the plot to drag us through what is generously called a joke.
Furthermore, when a person, minding his own damn business on the street and then is blown up by a bomb, he is not random; he is simply unfortunate. An explosion cannot have a random victim; for that to happen, the explosion would have to happen and then INSTANTLY every person in the world (the universe, actually) would have to be assigned a number. Then the explosion would have to consult a random number generator to discover who its victim would be. If it it were to be truly random, the explosion would have to determine the number of victims also using the random number generator.
No, the person on the street was not random. As I said, he was unfortunate. The person who placed the bomb intended to kill (or maim, or startle) the people in the immediate area around the bomb. That was intentional. There was a measurable amount of thought that went into its placement (and its construction, and whether or not to use it). Maybe it was not understood and it was very likely not predictable, but it was on purpose.
And you know what? When you say your Facebook photos are random, I pay the number generator people to make your number come up for explosion duty each time.
*The Family Guy leans on non-sequiturs so much, in fact, that South Park suggested dimwitted manatees nosed balls into slots to compose all of The Family Guy’s the jokes. This suggestion has yet to be unproven.
well I think you need to be a little bit careful yourself! I think you might be conflating “random” and “improbable”.
consider the following case. 26 men are in cells; one of the cells contains a trap door that leads to a pit of zerglings. however, the probability function describing the likelihood of any man’s cell containing a trapdoor is not even! specifically, the first cell contains the trapdoor with p = 0.75, and the remaining cells each contain the trapdoor with p = 0.01.
men are put in their cells and we draw from the distribution. suppose the second man’s cell contains the trapdoor, and he falls into the zergling pit. was this a random result? certainly, and improbable to boot! was he unfortunate? definitely. however, the same could be said in the case of the man in the first cell, if his cell had contained the pit. yes, that outcome is not improbable, but it is still random.
going back to your example, let’s take the placement of the bomb as given. it’s very easy to define probabilities for each person: pr(in blast radius && time of explosion | bomb). these values will not be equal for every person (maybe) but the draws from a distribution will be random, even if the placement of the bomb was not.
all of this said your point stands that people use “random” when they mean “unrelated” or “desultory” or “non-sequitur” or “miscellaneous” all the time and it’s irritating like crazy
Sam,
Yes, but nobody draws from a random distribution when they walk past an exploding building. They are just trying to buy some peas. I still maintain that, because there was thought put into the placement of the bomb and thought put into going to the pea store that, while improbable and unfortunate, it is not random.
In essence, my argument is that purpose negates randomness.
let us say that the placement of the bomb was not random (mostly) but that the set individuals affected by the explosion was random (mostly)?
Suppose I intend to flip a coin, does that make the results less random?
But still, the person’s walking path was not random. He was walking into the store, stopping to look at the local notices for guitar lessons, then straight to the pea aisle, then to the cashier, then to the door. Before he could get to the door, the bomb exploded in the entrance. He meant to go into that entrance, and the bomber meant to put the bomb there. He was unfortunate but his death was intentional.
Sure, but it was random with respect to the bomb.
Can you imagine any event affecting a human being called random under your definition of the word?
I would say probably not much, if anything. People always do something for a reason. Are you saying coincidence is randomness?
Suppose a man is taking an evening walk when he is struck by an asteroid and killed. Random?
I agree with you, but I also err on the side of the sentiment behind the word. An event such as the bombing you describe, even as it occurs to a very purposely targeted group, takes its victim by chance on the individual level. To the family of the person killed by a bomb, it is a random death because it happened by chance—not chance in a mathematical sense, sure, but still by chance.
A death was intentional, but not necessarily his. The reason he was there at the moment the bomb went off was by mere chance. To call that coincidental is stretching that word a little thin.
I also don’t think you could call a photo album on Facebook acting as a catch-all a non-sequitor. Unless you’re crafting a series of humorous or absurd photo story, it might just be better to call it 2010 or Photos I Just Found Laying Around.
Ack. Lying Around