I received an interesting phone call from my friend Phil last week. I hadn’t heard much from Phil, but he called me in the middle of a ferry ride to San Francisco to tell me that he was reading a book called Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and that he was sure that I’d enjoy it. I’m a hundred or so pages into it now, and I must agree, I do like it. (more…)
This weeks whim book purchase was Amazon.com: Books: Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. Apparently MIT has a long history of blackjack players, and this book details a particular team which aggressively used card counting, team play, shuffle tracking and other aggressive techniques to win over three million dollars from Las Vegas casinos.
In the late 80s to early 90s I went through a brief love affair with blackjack, egged on by books such as
Thorp’s Beat the Dealer (still an excellent read) and Griffin’s Theory of Blackjack. I never really graduated to a real card counter, being content to slowly give my money to the casinos by using Basic Strategy.
What’s really amazing about this tale isn’t the techniques they used (only really sketched at a high level in the book, refer to Thorp or Griffin for the mathematically inclined) but just how aggressively they used these techniques, and how long it took the casinos to catch on. Ultimately team play requires a number of spotters who play at tables and bet constantly, perhaps even playing basic strategy while keeping track of
counts. When the counts go positive, the spotters signal
"Gorillas" and "Big Players" who come
in and bet large until the count goes cold.
To me it seems rather obvious that if you reviewed tapes of big winners employing this strategy, you’d begin to see familiar faces around the table. If the casinos employed
their own card counters, they’d also be particularly wary
of anyone entering mid-deck during positive counts.
And yet this isn’t how the casinos finally figured it out. I won’t
spoil the book by telling you about how the team eventually became "dinosaurs" (banned from casino play),
but the book has just as much to say about the interactions of people as it does cards.
A fun read. I burned through it in an evening.
When I was probably eight or ten years old, I remember going to the Book Vault, our local bookstore and seeing Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World.
I remember asking my mom to buy it for me, but somehow I forgot about it, even though I thought it was a really cool book. Well, some thirty years later, I now own a copy. It’s a terrific little book on how to doodle interesting little stick figures. I find the bright colors, playful images and subject matter to be oddly intriguing as I near the end of my fourth decade on the planet. If you are caught in a dull meeting, this book will inspire you to doodle in new ways.
I stopped by Barnes & Noble on the way home the other day, and was bemused by a couple of books, including this one on the construction of robots to play sumo. Since I am considering a small robotics project, I thought this book might be good, and after a brief reading, it appears to be better than most, striking a nice chord between entirely theoretical and entirely practical. It has a
good section on the use of remote control gear to control robots, something which several other robotics books that I have sort of ignore, and as I am not
an RC enthusiast, something which I need to learn a bit more about. Included are some nice projects using the Basic Stamp, good coverage on IR and ultrasonic proximity sensors, and plans for a mini-Sumo robot. It also has nice pictures and a darn cute cover. I’m sure if you are a genius robot engineer,
you’ll learn nothing, but as I haven’t built one myself, I give it two thumbs up.
I just picked up a copy of a new book on Cascading Style sheets by Eric Meyer. He’s a wizard of all things having to do with style sheets, and rather than just describe the syntax and options (which are easy to get from htmlhelp.org) he presents style sheet wizardry in the form of thirteen projects that he works through a step at a time. While I just got the book yesterday, it seems quite good, and I’m undoubtably going to spend some time this weekend putting some of it to use redoing the templates for this site. Don’t be surprised if this looks worse before it gets better!
Recently I’ve become rather interested in the topic of the design and printing of books. It seems that many modern books are incredibly poorly designed and typeset, despite the existence of excellent tools that should make book production simpler. The problem is that while software has been created to reduce the tedium, it has not created tools that replace inspiration and skill. In trying to understand the process of book design and typography, I bought an inexpensive and excellent book by Eric Gill called An Essay on Typography
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As part of my experiments with telescope making, I’ve been exposed through the efforts of some of my friends to the world of metalworking. i did some minimal metalwork (fabrication of some aluminum bearings and C channel using Paul Zurakowski’s lathe and mill) for my “Australia scope”, and that gave me the bug to learn more about metalworking. A bit of research ensued, where I found Lindsay’s Books, a small publisher that specializes in publishing books of interest to metal workers and other technical pursuits. One of their best selling series is
the collection Build Your Own Metalworking Shop from Scratch by Dave Gingery.
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One of the most important and interesting question that science can ask is whether or not life exists elsewhere in the universe. The recent book Rare Earth by Brownlee and Ward hypothesizes that multicellular life is quite rare in the universe, so rare in fact that it is likely that we are the only intelligent civilization in the galaxy. Other’s of course have alternative views.
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