GR: that pattern again

[Monte Davis]

>From Daniel Kahneman's _Thinking Fast and Slow_, pp. 115-116 (paperback):

"...statistician William Feller... illustrated the ease with which people
see patterns where none exists. During the intensive rocket bombing of
London on World War II, it was generally believed that the pattern could not
be random because a map of the hits revealed conspicuous gaps. Some
suspected that German spies were located in the unharmed areas. A careful
statistical analysis revealed that the distribution of hits was typical of a
random process -- and typical as well in evoking a strong impression that it
was not random. 'To the untrained eye,' Feller remarks, 'randomness appears
as regularity or tendency to cluster.' "

The endnotes cite Feller's _Introduction to Probability Theory and its
Applications_ (New York: Wiley 1950), a classic and very widely used text
that TRP might well have encountered.