Larry Hnetka Goes HMmmm

Have you ever wondered about the concept of randomness? Of not confusing randomness with unpredictability? Or that ubiquitous event named the chaos theory?

In philosophy, some argue “everything has a purpose or a cause.” My take on that statement is simply, “there are no accidents.”

But what do you make of my need to find patterns for my experiences? Is there cause and effect guiding me daily?

Are random events in my life caused by chance? Or all the events to occur in my life already set out in some master plan?

Am I like Agnes in the cartoon? Have I somehow tampered with the “divine plan” by just thinking about randomness?

All these random thoughts came to the fore when I chanced upon this site.

Here I randomly learned “catagelophia” is the fear of being ridiculed.

To satiate my need for visual stimulation, random photographs popped up here.

But I wonder whether the random facts area is researched very well.

One random fact I generated was that “Canada is an Indian word meaning Big Village.“

A simplistic view of the origin of the word and even a bit misleading. I checked the government’s Canadian Heritage site.

It seems explorer Jacques Cartier may have been a tad lazy.

In 1535, two Indian youths told him about the route to “kanata.” They were giving him directions to the village of Stadacona. “Kanata” is simply the Huron-Iroquois word for “village or settlement.”

Cartier used “Canada” to refer not only to the village of Stadacona to which he was directed but also to the entire are subject to its chief, Donnacona. By 1546, the word was applied to the much larger area and by 1546 the word designated everything north of the St. Lawrence River as “Canada”.

HMmmm, now am I being nit-picky about some random fact about my country’s name? That I am wondering about whether I am being nit-picky is this just a random thought or was it already planned that I would think about it?

That you are reading this entry about me questioning the meaning of randomness, is this a random event in your life as well as mine?

See what I mean? It’s enough to give me catagelophia.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2006 at 9:48:49 PM and is filed under JOURNAL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.