Gagner au Blackjack

         "Mystical explanations are regarded as profound;
         the truth is that they do not even go the length of being superficial."

                                                                   --Nietzsche, The Gay Science 3:126

I hate my Prius for the reasons it's hard to hate.  The gas mileage is impeccable.  When gas prices go up or down I barely notice it.  Everything in it is electronically guided.  The electronics are well made, and even better programmed.  When I turn the wheel, I feel the same resistance, get the same angle from the tires, and move through every curve identically every time.  Pressing the gas yields the same experience.  The vehicle does exactly what you expect it to do.  Easy driving?  You bet.  To say the transmission is automatic is an understatement.  The gearing is practically continuous: it shifts without you even feeling a thing.  

You can eat, talk on your cellphone, and paint the Mona Lisa while inebriated in your Prius, and do it in perfect safety.  Here's why:

• The car is so dang responsive that even if you notice an impending collision when there's only one second to impact, you've still got plenty of time to come to a complete stop.
• Even if you don't avoid the collision, the Prius doesn't weigh anything.  So whatever you hit will be barely scraped.
• The car might as well be a sled for what it weighs, but I still don't think you can die in it.  It's a moving series of arches--designed to bounce back while preserving survival space.  There are so many airbags, and aircurtains, and air teddy bears pervading the thing...the entire compartment is a cushion waiting to happen. 

 I'd like a car that's challenging to drive and easy to fix.  Controlling the vehicle should require effort and attention--the response should vary as the road varies.  The driver should have to feel the road, guide the machine.  Under the hood, all should be linear.  Electricity should flow through wire from battery to plug.  Fuel should be pumped from tank to injector and out to pressure regulator.  The Prius will have none of this.  All is electronic.  Every part is attached to a board.  Surely easy to repair if you can get the parts.  You can't get the parts.  Sigh...

Here is the trade--a little bit of unpredictability in the drive for predictability in the machine's operation.  In the world of an engineer or an economist, this is the sacred trade-off--instability where it is cheap for stability where it costs.  The Prius does the opposite.  It's the perfect first car for someone who has no interest in knowing anything about how the car works.  The difficulty of vehicle repair may be the greatest hoax ever played in the modern world.  A well-made vehicle is no more than an array of coupled linear systems.  Systems where input a leads to event b and follows inexorably to consequence c.  Easy to understand.  Easy to analyze.  Easy to fix.  A good car should require no more than a socket and screwdriver set.

 Non-linear and random systems defy human understanding.  At the scale of human sight and human life, linear movements are the stuff of survival.  A thrown rock moves roughly in a straight line until gravity overcomes it.  The sun moves around the earth at the same speed, day after day after day.  Seasons come and go, and it's not hard to predict a range of days when frost will set in or when the air will become hotter.  Common sense is suddenly good enough to live on.

Except when it's not.  Common sense has kept farmers alive for tens of thousands of years and hunter-gatherers for at least a few million years before that.  But when it comes to understanding the real workings of the very large or very small world, it is useless.  It's common sense, for example, that the sun circles the earth.  I see it circle the earth every day.  It is only through imagination, art, and mathematics that the real nature of the sun and earth can be understood.

The reason is because these systems are random and/or non-linear.  And while it's hard to fathom processes like mountain forming, and aging, the human mind has a tremendous advantage over other minds in a non-linear world.  The human brain is big for the same reason a dog's brain is big--so it can predict the emotions and behavior of other humans.  Seems like a terrible waste of  grey matter, but it is through unconscious emotions and intuitions that we begin to understand the unpredictable.

Randomness and non-linearity are mathematically described by probability curves, partial differential equations, chaos theory, and stochastic calculus.  In the realm of human knowledge this is just about as new as it gets.  Many of the mathematical operations can never be carried out on paper, and chaos theory itself was impractical until the advent of personal computing.

When we encounter non-linear systems we understand them by humanizing them.  We anthropomorphize--see a man where there is none.  A pilot, a driver, and a ship captain call their respective vehicles "her" and christen them with names.  They become the equivalent of the Cylon fighters in Battlestar Galactica--"more of an animal, maybe, than the human models... like a pet".  More powerful ones--the weather, the sea, the sun, the crops, the rivers--become the realms of divinity.  Notwithstanding Feuerbach, God is often seen in the non-linearity and randomness the conscious mind is insufficient to analyze.  That which is not human at all must become woman and man, as these are the non-linear, stochastic systems every human mind can posit and understand.  Like Ginger Guardiola mentions in her lectures, civilizations where weather patterns and crop yields are plentiful and predictable develop pantheons mimicking that experience.  And where the weather and crops are unreliable, the pantheons are vindictive and barely sane.

This is why intuitive thinking leads to faith.  This is why scientists and believers must struggle to reach agreement.  The analytical mind and the religious mind seek to understand the same systems, and encounter many of the same difficulties.   When Stephen Hawking stated his hope to "understand the mind of God", he was neither being profound nor faithful.  For Hawking, the mind of God is no more than the collection of constants that govern the physical universe.  He's not being anymore profound than feelgoodism and self help.  The beliefs that survive and thrive are often those which generate the easiest profit.  Barf!

Which all leads to Blackjack.  Blackjack is an excellent game for one who plays it astutely and attentively.  It destroys the timid and elevates the player from the shallow mysticism of luck.  The fastest way to lose at Blackjack is to play scared and rely on fortune.

Playing Blackjack is like hiking across a mountain range.  When one looks at the crags and peaks, it's easy to think they fall randomly, but they do not.  Instead they follow a pattern dictated by non-linear differential dynamics.  But each pebble on the mountain, it's size, and composition, is a result of random distribution.  A hiker moving at a relatively set pace will find mountain, mountain, mountain over time, and a predictable distribution of rocks and pebbles.  In Blackjack, each shuffle of the shoe can be thought of as a mountain, and each set of hands as the pebbles on it.

There is some argument as to whether the house has a built-in advantage in Blackjack.  I don't believe there is an inevitable advantage inherent to the cards and the game itself.  Rather, the advantage lies in the collected psychology of the players.  There will always be a supply of players who don't know how to play, drink while they play, or think their winning or losing depends on "luck".  Because of this, virtually anyone can find or learn a system that will allow him or her to come out even or close to it over a period of several hands.  Blackjack is like intercollegiate wrestling--even if your opponent is bigger, stronger, and smarter, there are still things you can do to avoid total disaster.

Beginning from a perfectly shuffled deck (or shoe of decks) from which no cards have been taken, the chances of winning or losing the first hand is about even.  The chance of the first card having a value of 10 is 4/13, of 1 or 11 is 1/13, and the same for each of 2 through 9.  If the dealer is showing 10, it is 53.4% likely that s/he is holding 18 or better.  Once the dealer checks, if you survive, the chance drops to 46.1%.  A simple system of playing each hand based on probability is the key to Blackjack survival.  

If perfect shuffling existed throughout the deck and players played rationally every hand, it would be impossible for either the house or the players to come out ahead over time.  In reality, though, perfect shuffling is a virtual impossibility, just as a perfectly smooth distribution of energy throughout the cosmos is virtually impossible.  The possibility of coming out ahead lies only in strategic betting before each hand is thrown.  There are many card-counting and betting systems out there, but each is flawed because they attempt to linearize a non-linear, stochastic system.  Instead, one must learn to play Blackjack as if the game is a brilliant and lovely Queen.

Each hand has a range of probable outcomes based on the cards remaining in the shoe.  The mean and the variance of the hands in a given deal follows a non-linear pattern as the shoe is dealt.  You must develop a true Gnosis, a true intuition, a true feel for the cards themselves.  You must foreknow the hands that will come, and predestine the hands for big wins or small losses.  I could give you a set of rules, I'm sure.  But that would be like following rules for dating, living, or getting rich.  It wouldn't be any fun, and probably wouldn't work out anyway.  Self-enslavement never does.  You might just as well go drive a Prius.

Cinquante Ans de Changement et Encore Non Fini

        "You who are on the road
        Must have a code that you can live by
        And so become yourself
        Because the past is just a good bye.

        Teach your children well,
        Their father's hell did slowly go by,
        And feed them on your dreams
        The one they picked, the one you'll know by."
 
                                               --Graham Nash
 
I don't normally do this, but Dr X has a great post discussing Governor George Wallace's inaugural speech in 1963:

It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

I don't agree at all with his statement at the end.  The reality is that most of the way politics is practiced in the US is about evoking feelings of anger and fear, unfortunately. But it's still amazing to think how much real progress has been made for civil rights and freedom in my country, and in only one generation.  What a blessing.

la Gnosie de Renee Descartes, The Tazo, et Rebecca Black

                  "Jesus said, "Come, that I may teach you about secrets no
                    person has ever seen.  For there exists a great and boundless
                    realm, whose extent no generation of angels has seen, in
                    which there is a great invisible Spirit

                         which no eye of an angel has ever seen,
                         no thought of the heart has ever comprehended,
                         and it was never called by any name."
                                                                               --The Gospel of Judas

During one of my periodic grocery store jaunts a couple weeks ago, I noticed the Tazo brand "Zen" green tea and picked it up for one of my friends. As I was handing it over to her the next day, I noticed that on the box top was this logo:
I realized that I was looking at the Gnostic cross.  The precious irony of all this is that the Zen tradition and the Gnostic tradition are just about as opposite as any other two I can think of.

As a practice, Zen is pretty unique.  While it falls under the general category of Buddhism, it only faintly resembles the Indian tradtions.  In fact, there has been a 1000+ year debate as to whether or not Japanese Buddhism is even Buddhism at all.  But I think the starkest line is drawn by the difference in their 3-D renderings of the Buddha himself.

Zen Buddhism has tremendous appeal, especially in the United States, mainly because one doesn't have to abstain from worldly possessions to pursue it.  On the contrary--one of the primary doctrines of Zen is that every morsel of life is sacred and numinous.  Even more basic to Zen is that the deepest and most universal meaning escapes intellectual pursuit.  It is found, rather, in emptiness.  According to Osho:

A haiku of Basho is The ancient pond....When you hear the haiku you have to visualize it.  It is so small that it is not a question of understanding, it is a question of entering into it....:

The ancient pond
A frog jumps in
Plop

...Basho has said so much: the ancient pond, the ancient trees, the ancient rocks....and there must be silence....and a frog jumps in.  For a moment the silence is disturbed, plop.  And again the silence is restored....What does he want to say in this haiku?  His saying, This ancient world...and your existence is just a plop, a little sound in the silence.  And then you are gone, and the silence deepens....That great silence is your very being.  Is is also the very being of the whole universe.

 The Zen practice reaches incessantly toward this understanding.  Gnosticism points in the opposite direction.  In Gnostic belief the material world is completely separate from the Ultimate.  The objective of the practitioner is to learn the sacred truths that will allow him or her to escape the material realm and enter the Heavenly domain.  Gnosticism is a treasure trove of ancient thought, in which the Phoencian-Jewish-Greco-Egyptian mythos is told and retold with interest.  In fact, the entire Christian and Islamic traditions, along with all their offshoots, cannot be really understood outside the Gnostic context.  The Gnostics recognized that their mythology was just that, a series of stories within which one could look for truth--truth more real than can be physically seen.  More importantly, they recognized that underneath all perception was a deeper, more meaningful reality that can never be seen, but must be felt and known.

It doesn't take much to realize this is the real basis of mathematical and scientific modeling and experimentation.  It's the basis of anthropology, archaeology, and most philosophy and art.  In a distillation column a gas rises to the top while a liquid falls to the bottom, and in ideal conditions there is virtually no temperature difference between the two.  In fact, you cannot measure the energy exchange between phases with a thermometer.  That which one can perceive is a mere thousandth of the activity, energy, and information exchange occurring in the column.

It's difficult to find a fusion of Zen and Gnosticism because the of their different approaches. But they are out there, sometimes as banal as the Tazo Tea logo.  For the ambitious and self-flagellant, there is the Meditations on First Philosophy.  But there's also Rebecca Black singing Friday.  The character in the video lives the life of an upper middle class American girl.  There are no special problems, no special learning, in fact, beyond the historical and global rarity of her lifestyle, there's nothing unique about her.

I had a conversation recently on Mark Thoma's blog.  The subject was higher education and it's use.  The discussion centered on the value of higher education and the quality of students.  A commenter mentioned that virtually all college students don't work, party non-stop, and generally learn nothing useful.  I can't speak to the last point.  But I had to tell the commenter that in my university experience (at the school ranked third on Playboy's party school list) virtually no one lived that way.  If I had to guess, I'd put the number of people who had the time and resources to live the Hollywood stereotype around 5% and maybe closer to 1% of the student population.  Most college students (at public universities, anyway) come from middle class homes and live a younger, more single version of their parents lifestyles.  In other words, most of their waking time is taken up by classes, studying, and working.  Most earn barely enough money to pay their bills and buy food.  "Partying" and social life are a side note to daily life, as they are for most Americans.  This is not anything to boo-hoo about.  It is just reality, and it is fine.

This leads back to Friday.  In the video, nothing is real.  The main character "wakes up" even though she was never asleep.  Her hair and makeup are already done.  She consumes breakfast without eating.  Her friends pull up without actually being in the car.  At the party scene later, a large number of people are there, and they are all the same.  There are no rejects.  Everything is fine.  The singer's voice isn't even real.  It's all image, all artifice.  How many people actually live that way?  None.  How common is the experience?  Rare, so rare there may not be anyone who has it.  What hidden knowledge is behind the work?  Nothing.  I think that's the whole point. 

les Enfants de Fritz et Carl

"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
                                                      --Genesis 1:28


The commandment to be fruitful and multiply was  was completely unrealistic and I have a feeling that everyone at the time knew it.  How could humanity compete with the vastness of nature and her vagaries?  Layered beneath that understanding was an even darker reality--those ancients were at least 40,000 years into the Quaternary Extinction begun by their unwritten ancestors.  They had no idea those ancestors had ever existed.  As far as they knew, the gods had formed the earth a few generations prior to their own.

Whether the words were taken literally by our ancestors or were merely re-interpreted (mis-interpreted) by their progeny, we can be certain that they never lived up to it.  The proof is in this chart (lifted from Kruse Kronicle):

As the chart shows, it took more than 5000 years for human population to rise from 50 million to 350 million.  Most of this growth was due to the spread of agriculture and farming technology.  For example, European population was stable from 800 AD to 1100 AD, prior to the invention of the wheelbarrow (already in use in China) and the horse collar.  These inventions spurred population growth, which in turn created ripe conditions for the Black Death.

Gods call from the starry sky:

Prophets and Pontiffs call for frequent and Holy War

While clerics and priestitutes admonish the wounded, bless their sores.

Often emanates from the barrack recitation of deific writ

But where from comes the bullet?

The sword, armory, the bomb, and radio?

When the wound is dressed, whence the gauze?

Regardless of commandment, magic, or animal sacrifice, the demand that human beings go forth, multiply, and subdue the earth was destined to never be achieved, until two researchers changed that destiny--Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch.  It had been known for nearly a century that adding nitrates to soil increased crop yields, and beginning in the 1830s, European farmers had been seeding their fields with sodium nitrate.  Even though global population had reached 1 billion by 1800 AD, it had risen by only 50% by 1913.

In 1909, Haber perfected a laboratory process that fixed atmospheric nitrogen in the form of liquid ammonia.  Four years later, an industrial process for producing economically significant amounts of ammonia was created by Carl Bosch.  Today, this process consumes approximately 2% of global energy production.  The graphical changes in global population following it are striking:

Click to view full size

In the 100+ years prior to it, the human population increased by 50%.  Here we sit 100 years later and global population has grown by another 400%.  More people have been born, survived to reproduction, struggled, built, destroyed, loved, hated, and died in the last 100 years than in all of human history before it.

What sort of lives have those people lived?  It's very difficult for me to say.  I would venture that I know a fair amount about the history and aspirations of first-world people.  But when it comes to developing and 3rd world cultures, I really don't, and I can't say I know anyone who does.  My guess is that they are less technological, deal with more disease, and less literate than most of us who read this.  I would also bet they tend to be more superstitious and less formally logical.  However, I would also bet that they are more like myself, my family, and my friends than either I or they would initially believe.

Thomas Malthus postulated that animals and plants reproduce much more than their habitats can ordinarily support.  He also guessed that human beings were the same way.  He reasoned that human population would always grow at exponential rates, while agricultural output would only grow at linear rates.  He was a brilliant ecologist for his time, but he was unfortunately born before the invention of barrier prophylaxis.  By the time the Haber-Bosch process came to dominate the human chunk of planet Earth, this kind of birth control was already in widespread use throughout Western Europe, Canada, and the United States.

I believe this is the reason population growth in the industrialized world proceeded at a linear rate (as the chart shows), while exploding geometrically in the undeveloped world.  Sending food to the starving is an obvious solution to an immediate and pressing need.  Sending them birth control was a bridge too far.  Malthus was partially right.  Partially right makes him better than most.

Human population exploded, but mainly in areas and among people who could least afford it.  We now live in a time of porous borders, becoming more porous every year throughout the entire world.  Global capital moves from one center of power to another within minutes....or seconds.  First Worlders of every profession are everyday locked in greater competition with a developing world population outnumbering them by three to one.

100 years ago, two German researchers discovered 90% of the solution to world hunger.  The next 100 years will tell the story of how the world solved the problems created by it.  100 years from now our counterparts will talk about how we stopped the population explosion, how we preserved and expanded human rights, how economic, academic, and personal opportunities and freedoms extended around the planet.  It will take more than two men playing with catalysts and condensers.  As is often the case, the problems of global competition must be addressed by the will to globally cooperate.

What Malthus did not realize, and could not have known, is that human beings have a natural tendency to limit their offspring to a number they can manage.  This is well-explained by r/K selection theory.  More importantly, recent history tells us that when societies have access to birth control, they tend to use it.  And the more types they can access, the more they use.  If barrier prophylaxis was effective prior to 1960, the birth control pill doubled that effectiveness:

Click to view full size

The conventional wisdom in the United States, at least as I've heard it, is that men care nothing about birth control, and only giving women access is effective.  I don't believe the historical data support this.  Birth rates in nations with easy access to barrier methods had half the birth rates of those without them in 1960, and access to birth control pills halved that rate again.  Interestingly, fertility rates seem to converge at two births per woman across all or most cultures.  Even the poorest nations have seen significant increases in standards of living in tandem with falling fertility rates. 

Back in March, Gary North mused on what he terms "The Most World's Important Unanswered Historical Question: 'What Changed in 1800?'"  Dr. North opens his article this way:

The economic historian Gregory Clark summarizes a remarkable fact.

". . . there is no sign of any improvement in material conditions for settled agrarian societies as we approach 1800. There was no gain between 1800 BC and AD 1800 -- a period of 3,600 years. Indeed the wages for east and south Asia and southern Europe for 1800 stand out by their low level compared to those for ancient Babylonia, ancient Greece, or Roman Egypt."

Then, around 1800, this all changed. Economic growth began about 2% per annum, compounded. That brought our world into existence. 

To me the answer is obvious.  James Hutton happened.  Often called "The Father of Modern Geology", Hutton discovered and proved the theory of geologic uniformitarianism.  Over the course of 25 years he showed that under varying environmental conditions sediments are laid down and/or eroded at constant rates.  From this basis, he and his contemporaries were able to determine the ages of continental strata around the globe.  Once formations could be aged, natural philosophers, miners, and entrepreneurs around the world were able to determine where (and how deeply) to dig for geologic resources.

Based on Hutton's work, coal beds were discovered throughout North America and much of Europe, along with vast quantities of iron ore, and even the saltpeter mines of Chile--the same saltpeter mines eventually put out of business by Haber and Bosch.  As Dr. North correctly points out, the legal and educational institutions needed for the industrial revolution had already existed for nearly 200 years.  What was lacking--reliable access to minerals and energy--Hutton found.

I shared my opinion with Dr North by email, but I don't think he was impressed.  He's a brilliant economist--one of the best IMHO--but he's also a very fundamental in his faith, as were many in Hutton's time.  It's his right to be and I don't fault him a bit.  God Bless him, even.  Every discovery Hutton made contradicted not only the two creation stories of Genesis, but also those of every culture that existed when he lived.  When faith and evidence collide, faith usually wins.  It's best to avoid the collision.

Of all the nuts to be cracked, this may be the most important.  Religious movements proved wonderful when they ended Communist domination of Eastern Europe and Jim Crow laws in the Southern United States.  However, as Christopher Hitchens points out, they also facilitated the rise of fascism in pre-WWII Europe and have stymied contraception and anti-poverty initiatives in the Third World.  I would also argue that in the last 40 years many religious institutions have sought to become gatekeepers and justifiers of privilege and indifference.  They've been darn successful, too, I'm sorry to say.

The point is not to defame religion; on the contrary, I love theology and religious practice.  My point is that the challenges to this world will require technical and scientific solutions that religion must embrace.  They will require social changes that popular religions can and must facilitate.  I hope they will.