>I would like to start a contest for the best analogy to explain why it's a bad idea to look for patterns in random events.
I have an example of why sometimes it's a good idea to look for patterns in supposedly random events. If nobody bothered to look for patterns in the American Coin scandal, the machines would still be operating today.
http://www.google.com/search?q="American+Coin+scandal"
I agree that if you specify a random variable that's 50% heads or 50% tails, there's no particular reason to run a Monte Carlo sim to figure out the possible results. But the real world is rarely that cut and dried, even coin flips are up to dispute:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1697475
Also check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator
