Stranded in Italy with no family, little money and an exceedingly delicate temperament (she finds the crunching required to eat an apple unendurably violent), Isabel proceeds to make a series of mysterious and haphazard choices.
The reference to "peaking" is not a haphazard word choice -- "peaking" is a term used in oil geology to define the critical point at which reservoirs can no longer produce increasing amounts of oil.
Haphazard selection should randomize error variance.
But developers don't want to hinge the growth of their apps on haphazard editorial choices by platform owners.
Tooth decay is a combo platter of genes, poor dietary choices with haphazard oral hygiene habits.
But the idea remains an idea; the realization of it is thin and haphazard, the effects undistinguished, the choice of icons scattershot, the tone wonderless, the camera eye undiscerning.
The question that occurred to me as I read Malloy's opinion piece was this: as artificial intelligence gets smarter and smarter, what will happen to the haphazard, lazy, short-sighted, stupid choices?
Such thoroughgoing musical achievements were rare, as they are bound to be when the choice of pieces is so haphazard and the performances are correspondingly undermotivated.
This, of course, is a variation on familiar Lively themes, reminding us of her preoccupation with the ways the past molds or fails to mold the present; the role that chance (from a wartime bomb to a fortuitous meeting on an airplane) plays in people's lives; the haphazard might-have-beens that follow an impulsive choice made long ago.
Other than luck and haphazard circumstance, our ability to envision ourselves making good choices, teamed with a willingness to 'pretend' we're committed to reaching useful goals, until the pretense becomes familiar enough to evolve into enthusiastic habit, is a pretty solid recipe for becoming that person we've spent such time and effort convincing ourselves was not a possibility.
