Randomness is a very, very subtle concept with its study properly belo — Randomness

"One of us recalls producing a random plot with only 11 planes, and being told by his computer centers programming consultant that he had misused the random number generator: We guarantee that each number is random individually, but we don’t guarantee that more than one of them is random. Figure that out."

"Fretting about a dearth of randomness seems like worrying that humanity might use up its last reserves of ignorance."

"Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they cant be seen."

"Events may appear to us to be random, but this could be attributed to human ignorance about the details of the processes involved."

"The definition of random in terms of a physical operation is notoriously without effect on the mathematical operations of statistical theory because so far as these mathematical operations are concerned random is purely and simply an undefined term."

"Quand une regle est fort composée, ce qui luy est conforme, passe pour irrégulier."

"The absolute requisites for the study of this work... are a knowledge of algebra to the binomial at least, plane and solid geometry, plane trigonometry, and the most simple part of the usual applications of algebra to geometry. ...A. De Morgan. London July 1, 1836"

"A free people will always refuse to put up with preventable poverty. If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution. The problem of how to prevent these three forces from coming into head-on collision is the principal study of the more politically conscious Conservative leaders. How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century."

"A clear prediction in an area undergoing vigorous study permits doctrines to be subject to disproof. The last posture a bureaucratic religion wishes to find itself in is vulnerability to disproof, where an experiment can be performed on which the religion stands or falls."

"Spencer argued in a very articulate way for the communality of these processes of self-organization, and used his ideas to make a theory of sociology. However, he was not able to put these ideas into mathematical form or argue them from first principles. And no one else has, either — doing so is perhaps the central problem in the study of complex systems."

"The commercial exploitation of the web has become a growing facet of the world economy, particularly in the last several years. In June 1999 NUA Internet Surveys estimated that 179 million people are connected to the Internet worldwide. A recent study by the sponsored by estimated that the "Internet Economy" generated $300 billion in revenue in the United States alone."

"In biology the Cartesian view of living organisms as machines, constructed from separate parts, still provides the dominant conceptual framework. Although Descartes simple mechanistic biology could not be carried very far and had to be modified considerably during the subsequent three hundred years, the belief that all aspects of living organisms can be understood by reducing them to their smallest constituents, and by studying the mechanisms through which these interact, lies at the very basis of most contemporary biological thinking. This passage from a current textbook on modern biology is a clear expression of the reductionist credo: One of the acid tests of understanding an object is the ability to put it together from its component parts. Ultimately, molecular biologists will attempt to subject their understanding of cell structure and function to this sort of test by trying to synthesize a cell."