It feels like something is making it happen. Indeed, de Moivre himself might have felt this way. By many accounts, he viewed the regularities in the behavior of repeated coin flips (or any other experiment subject to chance) as the work of God’s hand itself, which turned the short-term irregularities of coins, dice, and human life into predictable long-term behavior, governed by immutable laws and decipherable formulae. It’s dangerous to feel this way. Because if you think somebody’s transcendental hand—God, Lady Luck, Lakshmi, doesn’t matter—is pushing the coins to come up half heads, you
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