Chapter 2

Randomness and Cholesterol

“Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.”

—Eric Hoffer

We live in an unfathomably complex world. It is tough to appreciate in modern times how humanity lacked the understanding of basic natural phenomena when their entire livelihoods may have been determined by those same phenomena. If crops failed, an entire village could starve. To avoid that, there needed to be a cause-and-effect relationship between a farmer’s behavior and the odds of a successful harvest. Without understanding of the mechanics of weather, chemistry, and botany, human societies improvised.

A Short History of Randomness

Modern humans have developed greater and greater tools over the centuries to help ...

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