Random rules

Guards working for a foreign contractor fired randomly and killed two civilian Iraqi women – a mother and her daughter – in Baghdad yesterday. Another Blackwater shooting fiasco? Not this time: instead it was the Australian Unity Resources Group that took responsibility.

Random means having no particular pattern or order. Mathematicians and scientists use random numbers to test hypotheses; some artists and musicians even use them to create art as Franz Liszt probably did in 1885 with his musical composition Bagatelle sans tonalite.

Using a formula, computers generate pseudo-random numbers that are pretty good for most applications. Many think the digits of Pi are random but that has yet to be proven.

Humans have come a long way, now being random even when it comes to shooting bullets at other humans. While it won’t help the two Iraqi women, it’s at least a comfort to know that we’re also capable of random acts of kindness.

Uniformly different

Uniformity is antithetical to American culture. But uniforms, whose purpose is to minimize individual differences to maximize cohesion of a group, are ubiquitous.

Tom Cruise puts on a Nazi uniform for a new movie. President Musharraf will take his off only after his election. And fans pay hundreds of dollars to wear the uniforms of their favorite teams and sports stars.

The military seems to likes uniforms - and uniformity. But until the House of Representatives bill is signed into law, Blackwater will not be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice or US law.

In probability theory, a uniform distribution describes a set where all values are equally probable. For example, tossing a coin has two equi-probable events, a die six.

Up to now Blackwater has been able to operate outside the law of Iraq and the US, but the chances are pretty good it won’t be able to evade the laws of probability.