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WCityMike (2)

"We have little trouble recognizing that a chess grandmaster’s victory over a novice is skill, as well as assuming that Paul the octopus’s ability to predict World Cup games is due to chance. But what about everything else?" [Luck and Skill Untangled: The Science of Success]
posted by vidur on Nov 20, 2012 - 16 comments

Shuffle Literature and the Hand of Fate: an article about aleatory literature— including mention of Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1; B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates; Robert Grenier’s Sentences and Herta Müller’s Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm.
posted by misteraitch on Nov 15, 2012 - 6 comments

A short look at the role of chance, chaos and coincidence in three films: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Run Lola Run, and Three Colors: Red.
posted by Brandon Blatcher on Dec 29, 2011 - 20 comments

A little old, but chock full of enough wackadoodle quotes to be your morning cup of head-go-boom-iness. FOX News on Mr. Rogers and his effect on "the narcissistic society he gave birth to": "This evil, evil man has now ruined a generation of kids." "Do you think that Mr. Rogers [...] ruined a crop of our newest, youngest generation?" "Instead of telling them 'you're special, you're great', why didn't he say, 'there's a lot of room for improvement, keep working on yourself'?" [more inside]
posted by WCityMike on Apr 6, 2009 - 191 comments

Beyond the Reach of God. Thought experiments involving the God-universe and the Nature-universe, the Turing-complete Game of Life, and a lot of insightful back-and-forth in the comment section, to boot. One of the most interesting and thought-provoking essays I've read on the Internet in a very long time, by Eliezer Yudkowsky on his blog, Overcoming Bias (via).
posted by WCityMike on Oct 9, 2008 - 64 comments

20 Most Amazing Coincidences, "the noteworthy alignment of two or more events or circumstances without obvious causal connection" and other superlatives. [previously]
posted by nickyskye on May 2, 2007 - 47 comments

Please pick a random number between 1 and 100 (Explanation follows after filling out a short form.)
posted by kika on Aug 28, 2006 - 146 comments