This may seem to be the most frivolous of all my rants, but I'm actually quite serious, though not optimistic about likelihood of success. I am conducting a one-man campaign

Retire "dice" as the icon for randomness!

Because Of course I have no ambition to influence "popular culture" references to chance, but I am addressing academic and "serious popular" writers.

To expand on the second bullet point, frequently encountering the same image surely gives people the impression that probability concerns little more than the kind of "pure randomness" exemplified by dice, whereas in reality such pure randomness is better viewed as just one of 100 contexts where we perceive chance in the real world.

Re the first point, one can very quickly find many visual images such as those below. Of course lists of examples prove nothing, but (this is an undergraduate project) I am very confident that any more systematic way to sample visual images of chance would find dice to be by far the most common. This strikes me as very unimaginative. By analogy, for deterministic systems one might visualize a pendulum or a thrown ball or the elliptical orbit of a planet -- there is no single prevalent image.

"And replace with what?" you may ask. Well, I'm open to suggestions. I use dart throws, as a mixture of skill and chance.

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