Abdul, the new clerk at the local convenience store, is from Saudi Arabia. We have had enough conversation for him to know that I am a bit different from his usual customers…

Today, I was buying lottery tickets, and he asked me if I knew the mechanism for determining winners in the multi-state lotteries; he had never seen a drawing. I described the machines, and we fell to a discussion of probability. He is a programmer, and knew a few things, though he said he was trying to figure a loophole in the lotteries; I wished him luck.

“There is no such thing as luck,” he said. “It is all algorithms.”

I shrugged. “You throw a thousand dice,” I said, “You expect 167 ones. That’s probability.” I made a gun of my left hand, pointed it at the ceiling. “You throw ONE die,” I continued, swiping my right hand across my left as if spinning a revolver cylinder, and then pointed my finger at him. “THAT is luck.”

His eyes got huge, and then his face lit up. His world view had just shifted. It was a small shift, but palpable nonetheless. I smiled and went on my way.