random thoughts

my sister made a comment a while back that there was no such thing as random. with my cs background, this almost sent me into apoplexy. but i think i knew what she meant: any event follows from it's context, so it can't be called random. i posit that an event's randomness requires recognition by an observer, who may or may not be aware of it's context. she says (i'm paraphrasing) an event's randomness is independent of observation, and so is it's context. thus it can't be random.

the argument looks to me like the question of the difference between fact and truth. however, in this case the point in contention is whether an event may be classified as random in the absence of observation. i suspect this parallels any kind of classification of events.