Randomness is a pattern in itself

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.

"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough." 

                    - Alice and the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland.

In short, if you don't know where you want to go, all roads will take you there. You would think I read the book, but you would be wrong :-)

I wonder what Lewis Carroll's blog would have looked like if he lived in our times. Maybe minimal or no design but great content. (Him having a blog is almost axiomatic to me)

Wikipedia defines randomness as lack of pattern or predictability in events. 

But a way to think of randomness, in any field or manner of thought is not being able to predict what lies in front of you.

At the most basic level, there are only two choices or possible outcomes: either there will be some thing, event etc. that we expect, or something else. The something else part can be anything. Maybe the opposite of what we expected, or (a bit recursively) something else.

So, what does this mean?

First a Punjab Police joke:

How do you catch a tiger without a gun or any other trap for that matter? 

 - Newton's Method: Run faster than the tiger in the direction it is running, and you will eventually get close to it and catch it. 

 - Einstein's Method: Run in the direction opposite to the tiger, at the speed of light. Due to some obviously obvious relativity physics thing, you will end up in front of the tiger. Cool! 

 - Punjab Police's Method (refer to their service rules for further details): Catch a kitten, and beat it up until it says, "Yes, I am a tiger!"

And yes, I have no idea about relativity, but since it is "said" that only 12 people understood Einstein at that time, I am in the majority! Consensus can.... lets just keep it at that.

What I am trying to say here is that true randomness is something that eludes and will continue to elude us, just like the speed of light or something.

What the hell does it really mean?

It means that whenever we try to predict things without a good enough knowledge of what will happen, we will fail. What is good enough knowledge? To be sure about something, I think we need to be sure of what that thing will be. Cent percent surety would mean being witness to that situation beforehand, and assuming such a thing is possible, we wouldn't need predicting then, no?

Some might think on the lines of when do we predict.. A better question would be on the lines of when do we not predict?

As people, we think if we could pass a test, or if it would rain today, or what that person from the opposite desired sex thinks about us. Where should we invest our money, when should we get out from an argument, or why read blog posts from people who do not even know what they are writing about. If you are thinking about the last part of the last line right now, you are probably right :-)

Organisations/governments need to predict the weather, know about the economy 6 months into the future, and whether or not they are going to be victims of silly bomb blasts targeting normal folks rather than the leadership or the military.

Even if we had proper or sufficient information/knowledge/data, could we guarantee about using it properly?

What now?

As Russel Peters says in a made-up Indian accent, nothing!

As I already wrote before, randomness is a pattern in itself. If we don't know what might happen, it does not matter what the outcome is. The problem is choice. And it will take a few years of medicine research to fight the mental problem called "what if".

As far as I am concerned, I am gonna take all my predictions with a grain of salt from now on. At least the ones I make consciously.

Randomness, predictability, disorder, entropy, probability et. al. can ... again, lets just keep it at that.