third time's a charm?

So today I was just thinking that perhaps I should start a blog. Then I remembered that I have one, which has lain derelict for a number of years. Though I would choose a different color scheme if I had it all to do over again, it's charming to leave it how it is as an ironic commentary on the melancholy of those days. I'll see if I can get it to play emo music in the background. Anyway, no guarantee I'll really post anything here, though I doubt it matters since I don't think anyone knows it exists. Frankly, this will mostly serve to relieve me of trying to journal, which is rendered unduly challenging and futile by the illegibility of my penmanship.
Anyhow, I've been reading a great deal in these past few days about randomness, which fascinates me beyond measure. I'm just finished The Drunkard's Walk by Leaonard Mlodinow, which solidified my view of the importance of taking into account the chaotic nature of almost all reality. As John Allen Paulos has remarked elsewhere, it is somehow refreshing for me to realize that often the most 'rational' decision is that which takes into account the chaotic and uncertain nature of the possible outcomes, and so in many cases the most 'rational' decision is actually indistinguishable from acting according to blind chance, and it is actually the attempt to control the outcomes precisely which is the least rational.
Additionally, it reminded me of many of Kahneman and Tversky's various "heuristics," which essentially describe the way we are terrible at processing randomness, find patterns when there are none, and attribute causality to cases when it is wholly lacking. This leads to a tendency to value those who succeed, attribute positive outcomes to good decisions, ignore evidence which contradicts our belief while remembering what affirms it, and find retrospective reasons that failure or success, even when determined randomly, were inevitable. I won't bother going into all the interesting details, but suffice it to say that study of some of the research, in addition to a bit of mathematics on random walks and brownian motion, should convince even the most skeptical that the only order we know today is the statistical order derived from an acknowledgment of chaos, and the best maxim we can draw from this knowledge is that in a world governed by chance, the only rational decision is... persistence. Mlodinow wisely concludes with a gem from Thomas Watson, the probabilistic justification of which will not be lost on the mathematically inclined: "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."