A few weeks ago, jeremy posted about the intricacies of randomness:

People have asked and, yes, the graphic is an actual scatterplot generated using Stata, although the data are random (and uniformly distributed on both the abscissa and ordinate.) Note the relatively large spaces of white adjacent to places where the points are densely bunched on top of one another. That’s what true randomness really looks like, and the reason people are bad when they try to fake random numbers (or coin flips, or financial transactions, or scatterplot points) is that they think randomness should be more evenly spread.

Unfortunately, this is particularly poignant today. My neighbor, who I only knew as she passed by and would wave, lost her life while riding as a passenger in a small plane with her husband. Although I know my other neighbors quite well, these two kept to themselves. This was expected, as they were grieving. For it was just last year, right before we moved into the neighborhood, that her daughter lost her life while piloting another small plane.

The intricacies of randomness, and the randomness of tragedy. Heartbreaking.