| Is there anything more random and yet more determinative than the geography of where you’re born? I was reminded anew of this on a recent trip to Cuba – where neurosurgeons, architects and journalists are all waiting tables because they can make more money in a restaurant. Imagine what they could be doing if they’d been born 100 miles north in Florida. “Much of who we are is entirely beyond our control and dependent upon chance," Mark Robert Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis, writes in his new book, “The Random Factor.” He’s talking about the “lottery of birth.” Rank’s book examines how often chance and randomness intervenes in our lives even though, as he notes, we are ”steeped in the notion of rugged individualism.” In other words, while we might allow for the occasional intervention of luck, we like to think that we are largely making our own destinies. Mystery character of the month: Uriah Heep created by Charles Dickens — Kerri Miller | MPR News | 