That's not to say you should start picking random stocks.
Now here I am at the doorstep to my 80th birthday and I receive a random phone call on an idle Wednesday afternoon.
Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them.
For example, upon looking at the face and considering four possible names — Jacob, Dan, Josef or Nathaniel — observers correctly chose "Dan" 38 percent of the time, significantly above the 25 percent chance level of a random guess.
We look for and find general patterns in the noise, but the complexity of reality is such that most of what happens is essentially random and out of anyone's control.
In the study, 884 people from 21 countries were asked to listen to random recordings of laughter.
Journalist Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall set out to investigate why and the result is Hung Over: The Morning After and One Man's Quest for a Cure (out now from Penguin Random House).
Far from being afraid of them, I take Laffy on doggie playdates and to a muddy city park where a random group of owners show up to throw balls.
The sales figures were announced by Penguin Random House last Friday.
The rest of the week, the retired teacher and coach never leaves the house without a few in his pocket, and he hands them out to random people he meets.
24 volunteers were shown 40 pictures of strangers, paired with random names.
Dutton Books for Young Readers, which is part of Penguin Random House, began releasing the first dwarsliggers in the US, with four novels by the best-selling young-adult novelist John Green, including "The Fault in Our Stars".
Just random people shooting threes with perfect form.
Feeling a pit in my stomach, I followed the group into a store they decided to enter at random, and walked idly around the interior as I gazed at the golden lights, the shiny surfaces, the hard edges, and the beautiful clothes.
"It sounds quite random but you can really get an idea of the person they are," said Stott, who recommends asking this question early on.
Instead of going home with me at the end of the trip, he stayed and got drunk with some of his friends who conveniently showed up, and slept with random girls.
"I can tell the blog is well read because I heard from all sorts of random people.
In order to reach their conclusions, a team of statisticians analysed a random sample of over 500 of the most successful individuals from 11 different career groups to identify statistically significant patterns.
Trump went even farther by blackmailing, intimidating or containing others through the random use of "extreme pressure", "extreme sanctions", "zero tolerance", "breach of bottom lines," and "withdrawals" from organizations or deals in international relations.
The UK Visas and Immigration said it reserved the right to request evidence of finances or language ability, and would do so for a random sample of applications.
