GR, Poisson distributions, alleged "randomness"

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Depends on the size of the paper. I mean, viewing the pattern from, say, geosynchronous orbit, with a medium power telescope- quite non-random.
But trying to predict the next strike from within a room at 10 Downing St.- maddeningly unpredictable.

That's a problem with concepts like random, determined, predictable, causation, etc.- highly scale dependent, including time scales.



-----Original Message-----
From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, Mar 3, 2013 7:11 am
Subject: Re GR, Poisson distributions, alleged "randomness"



Via Boing Boing: http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/12/21/what-does-randomness-look-like/
 
“Imagine, for a moment, that you are working for the British intelligence, and you’re tasked with solving this problem. Someone hands you a piece of paper with a cloud of points on it, and your job is to figure out if the pattern is random.”

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130303/8c26e647/attachment.html>