Shannon and Thorp Hack the Roulette Wheel
It was in this tinkerer’s laboratory that they set out to understand how roulette could be gamed, ordering “a regulation roulette wheel from Reno for $1,500,” a strobe light, and a clock whose hand revolved once per second. Thorp was given inside access to Shannon in all his tinkering glory:
Gadgets . . . were everywhere. He had a mechanical coin tosser which could be set to flip the coin through a set number of revolutions, producing a head or tail according to the setting. As a joke...
notes transcend sexual desire
It is a life-affirming and soul building accomplishment to overcome the pull of sex desire and transmute the saved energy into productive endeavors.The one thing that keeps us from becoming something more than animals is our sexual desire, the mindless urge to procreate. That is our basest instinct.if you could liberate yourself from that, completely, I think you would be well on your way to becoming something greater. Sexual desire is so deeply ingrained into our every thought and action, woven into our very being in every way. Almost everything we do, some way or another (wanting a good job, buying a nice car, getting a hair cut, anything) can be tied into it. It's the motivating factor for almost everything. It would be nice to free ones self and instead of looking through the world through the sex-influenced prism, one could look at it true objectively
Stable Orbits are Impossible in More Than Three Dimensions
If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit are necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. Circular orbits are possible in other dimensions, but those, as Newton feared, are unstable. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planet...
1 The force of gravity gets weaker the more dimensions you add to the Universe, making stable planetary orbits impossible.
