[contingencies]

I feel compelled to share this quote from the author of cfengine with whom I have had some emails of late, because it neatly summarizes a more holistic, physics-inspired approach to the computational world's obsession with invariance, which could be seen as present in the quest for 'randomness'.

The simplest idea of stability is constancy, or invariance. A thing that has no possibility to change is, by definition, immune to external pertubations. [...] Invariance is an important concept, but also one that has been shattered by modern ideas of physics. What was once considered invariant, is usually only apparently invariant on a certain scale. When one looks in more detail, we find that we may only have invariance of an average. - Mark Burgess, In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure (2013)

This accords well with the opening quotation Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view. - John Gay, English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club (1727) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gay