The Shape of the World

Kyrie Irving, the star guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers who hit the winning shot in Game 7 of last year’s NBA Finals, believes the earth is flat. No, really.

When I first heard the story a few days ago, I thought perhaps it was a prank of some sort being pulled by Irving, meant to illustrate how outrageously easy it is to manipulate social media, which in turn makes it trivially simple to make any sort of absurdity go “viral.” After all, if you had thought about it a week ago, the idea that Kyrie Irving believes the earth is flat probably would have seemed almost as unlikely as the earth actually being flat.

But, no. He wasn’t joking. Given that Irving spent part of a year at Duke University before going pro provides this UNC fan a ready opening, of course. But I’m more interested in a larger issue connected to this story.

Irving made his position known on an episode of a podcast hosted by two of his Cleveland teammates, Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye. Amid talk of conspiracy theories, Irving mentioned his view about the planet’s shape, defending it as not a conspiracy but a fact (in his estimation). “If you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel,” Irving explained, “the way we move... can you really think of us rotating around the sun, and all planets align, rotating in specific dates...?”

There’s more, but it’s hardly worth transcribing. The gist of his position is to insist that “there’s a falseness in stories and things that people want you to believe and ultimately what they throw in front of us.” Or, to put it another way, “I think people should do their own research, man.”

Some, like NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, shared my initial, skeptical response to the story of Irving’s skepticism and tried to contextualize Irving’s comment in a way that made it seem less patently ignorant. “He was trying to be provocative and it was effective,” Silver said, reflecting on Irving’s own later comments about the furor he’d created.

“I think it was a larger comment on the sort of fake news debate that’s going on right now... and it led to a larger discussion,” added Silver, who didn’t omit appending the sanity-affirming disclaimer “I personally believe the world is round.”

The denial of objective truth is difficult to combat. It’s quite challenging to convince a superstitious poker player who refuses to accept that the cards dealt on one hand are wholly independent of the cards next on the next one that the “pattern” he perceives is in truth wholly subjective and not at all meaningful. You have to find some sort of common ground even to communicate with someone refusing to accept something as fundamentally obvious as the planet’s shape, rotation, and orbital path.

Existentialism encourages us to make our meaning, emphasizing subjective experience over the blind acceptance of received ideas about “reality” -- that is, not to receive “what they throw in front of us” without applying a little of our own rational analysis as a test. That doesn’t preclude, however, accepting certain (nominally) objective truths, even tentatively. Like, say, the laws of physics.

If Irving really understood the science, he’d understand how gravity works, which explains why when he launches a basketball skyward it comes back down toward the spherical planet’s center and doesn’t careen toward the center of his imagined “flat” earth, wherever that might be (one of dozens of easy-to-observe phenomena proving the earth’s roundness). Irving apparently hasn’t considered this or if he has he doesn’t find convincing the evidence he necessarily witnesses every waking moment of his life.

Silver -- who probably doesn’t care too much about one of the league’s stars espousing what might be called “fake science” -- grabs that “fake news” thread, trying to suggest that Irving was himself making some sort of point about the need to be skeptical amid what can certainly be a confusing climate of reporting and news-sharing.

But that kind of twists what Irving was saying. Rather, he was only referring to his incredulity that people would care so damn much about his position that the earth is flat.

“There are so many real things going on, actual, like, things that are going on that’s changing the shape, the way of our lives,” Irving told ESPN a couple of days after the initial blast. In other words, he doesn’t view the news of his belief as being “real” or “actual” (as in “significant”) compared to other, more important issues.

Irving even unwittingly puns on the word “shape,” saying (to paraphrase) that we should concern ourselves much more with the things certain people are currently doing to shape our world in a figurative sense than with the literal shape he imagines the world to be.

I agree with Irving on that point. In other words, I’m glad to know that our perspectives regarding the world in which we both live overlap at least in this way. I’m also more worried about the “things going on that’s changing the shape” of our world -- particularly about the people who are doing those “things” -- than about Irving’s flat-earth folly.

I’m additionally concerned, though, when the people shaping our world seem influenced by ideas about it that are easily discovered to be false.

Need examples? People can do their own research, man.

Image: “Fragile Planet,” Dave Ginsberg. CC BY 2.0.

Flight Time

Am back home safe and sound on the farm after two weeks in Monaco at the EPT Grand Final. Have already gotten busy mowing some of that grass that relentlessly has been growing on all sides of us for the last six weeks or so.

Wrote about the grass last spring, right about this same time, in fact. Sometimes I find myself looking out and imagining I’m actually seeing it growing. Think sometimes of that Stephen King short story “Weeds,” made into an episode in George Romero’s Creepshow anthology titled “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” (in which King starred).

Speaking of movies, I didn’t watch any on the way out and almost didn’t on the way back. Searching through the selections of mostly new titles, I had little desire to see anything, particularly on a small screen and in a cut version (as is the case with some of them).

It was a nine-hour flight home, and traveling back through six time zones I almost felt like I was getting some time back. But after frittering away the first half of it doing nothing much, I realized I could use some way to make the rest of it go by more quickly. I finally decided to dial up the almost three-hour (and not edited) Interstellar, the sci-fi one starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway.

Was a little skeptical at first, although I was drawn in by the rural farm setting where the film begins. I’d been gone nearly two weeks and was feeling some serious longing to get back not just to Vera, our horses, and cats, but to the pastures, the sky, the barn, the fences, and yes, even that grass growing up all around.

I’ve written here before about being the son of a physicist who nurtured within me curiosity about various physical phenomena, as well as about space. Not enough to have made it an academic pursuit (beyond just a few classes), but enough to make me interested in some of the questions raised by some “hard SF.” Or by movies like Interstellar that take on some tough concepts and ideas and try to fit them into a plot most of us can follow with characters to whom we can relate.

I won’t get into the story too much other than to say after getting over those initial doubts it drew me in quite well. At one point characters having to negotiate passage near a supermassive black hole introduces the idea of gravitational time dilation -- i.e., some characters age just a few minutes while others age many years -- something that subsequently creates some very affecting pathos when a father realizes he’s suddenly missed 23 years of a daughter’s life.

I couldn’t help but think of being away from home for those two weeks and missing everything happening during that time I was gone. From there it isn’t hard to think as well of even longer gaps between meetings with friends and family.

Later on in the film comes a scene with an elderly woman in a hospital near the end of her life, and that, too, brought on some personal memories reminding me of how even though life seems so edge along so gradually, so slowly, it only seems that way because of our lack of attention to what’s happening.

In reality, it’s flying. Faster than we can imagine. Blink and two weeks are gone. Or two months or two years. Or a lifetime. I can’t really see the grass growing. But if I look away for long enough and then look back, it seems like it has.

I’m a complete sucker for time-lapse photography, partially because of the way it foregrounds that theme of time -- our lives -- slipping away from us. I become oddly moved by it, even emotional. I think how we haven’t got long. I think, worriedly... slow down!

Here’s an example of what I mean, an inspired video matched with a track from an album I’ve been listening to a lot lately, Robert Fripp’s A Blessing of Tears (a record expressly intended as a memorial for the artist’s late mother). The music isn’t unlike some of Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for Interstellar, actually, at least in terms of the mood it evokes:

Slow down clouds, sky, grass. Slow down Earth.

Tournament Poker for Advanced Anglers

Over the weekend I had two different instances of people alerting me to references online to poker-related pieces I’d written, both of which had popped up in non-poker contexts.

That in and of itself was interesting -- both for vanity’s sake (who doesn’t find references to themselves noteworthy?) and because I’m always intrigued by talk of poker outside of our relatively cloistered community. But there was one other reason why the references intrigued me even further.

On Saturday Eric Ramsey let me know over Twitter that I’d been referenced on a fishing site, of all places, something called Advanced Angler. A short post discussing the rise of competitive fishing over recent years brings up poker as a parallel example, and the unnamed author makes reference to a Betfair poker post I’d written sharing what for us is common knowledge regarding the invention of the hole card camera.

Then yesterday Vera and I went out to dinner with another couple and the fellow told me he’d run across a reference to me appearing on what I believe is a somewhat popular physics blog called Preposterous Universe written by Sean Carroll, a physicist at Caltech.

The post -- “Poker is a Game of Skill” -- was written last fall and swiftly makes the case for the game’s skill component while referencing a sketchy academic study appearing in the Journal of Gambling Studies the year before. I’d written about the study here (pointing out its poor methodology), and Carroll had linked me up as he discussed it.

Like I say, who among us isn’t intrigued by others talking about us? And as I mention above, there’s always something to learn about poker when people who aren’t immersed in our subculture discuss it.

Sure, the non-poker people will make mistakes sometimes when discussing our favorite game, but in some cases they see things more clearly than we do, I think. For example, the Advanced Angler piece reiterates the importance of hole card cameras to those casually acquainted with poker (something we take for granted sometimes), and Carroll’s utter rejection of the idea that poker does not involve skill is refreshing in its clear-headedness.

But there’s another reason why I found these two references in particular interesting. I’ve mentioned before how my Dad is a physics professor, now retired. He also happens to be a lifelong fisherman, something else I remember writing about here once when discussing my friend Carlos Monti, the photographer on the LAPT.

I had to share both of these references with him, of course, suggesting that perhaps they proved some latent influence he’d had over me, as evidenced by fishermen and physicists being readers.

Or perhaps poker, fishing, and physics have some natural affinities I hadn’t previously appreciated? I guess all three groups do include people interested in angling.

Questioning the Poker Gods

Have been kind of vaguely following this whole creationism “debate” a little bit over the last couple of days, reading a few articles and noticing all of the references whirring past to the big online event on Tuesday featuring Bill Nye ("The Science Guy") and Ken Ham, president of something called the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky where the event took place.

Apparently around 3 million people tuned in to watch the pair square off over evolution and creationism, thus explaining all of the response. Here’s a link to the full program over on YouTube, if you’re curious. Sounds like many appreciated Nye’s defense of the scientific method, including several of those writing the articles I read.

I’ve mentioned before here how my Dad is a physicist, which probably explains my own appreciation of science and reason as means to explain the world as well as to explore it further. But I also respect those who find that faith helps give their lives meaning, especially when that faith helps encourage them to treat others well.

As I say, I didn’t watch the program and so am not going to try to comment on it. But I did want to share one item from a response I noticed today, something by Phil Plait, an astronomer who writes for Slate.

He had written an initial response yesterday titled “The Creation of Debate” that raised some questions about the whole idea of “debating” evolution and creationism. Then today Plait followed that up with another article in which he took some time to answer 22 questions creationists have of Nye and those who share his views regarding how the world originated and evolved, questions that were posted over on Buzzfeed.

One of the questions was “How can you look at the world and not believe someone created/thought of it? It’s amazing!!!”

Plait agrees that the world is amazingly complex, but “that complexity can arise naturally through the laws of physics.” Again, I’ve been influenced by my Dad here, I know, to agree with that point of view. He then interestingly evokes poker to illustrate how “it doesn’t take very complex rules to create huge diversity.”

“Look at poker,” writes Plait, “a simple set of rules creates a game that has so many combinations it’s essentially infinite to human experience.”

It’s a point that to me seems more directly to prove human limitations than anything else, but the analogy is easy enough to follow. Just because something strikes us as overwhelmingly complicated or beautiful or awesome doesn’t necessarily mean it cannot be explained by science.

I mean, poker is complicated, sure. But the fact that its complexity can exceed our capacity to comprehend it utterly doesn’t mean the game was created by some deity, does it?

Of course, someone hitting a two-outer against you to win a pot after all the chips go in is another matter entirely.

The Boeree Principle

Amid the poker-related news of the past week, you might have heard something about a short video by the Institute of Physics featuring poker pro Liv Boeree that appeared last week. I wanted to mention (and share) it here, as it includes what I find to be several worthwhile messages.

The Institute of Physics is a U.K.-based organization that functions as a charity, a lobbying group, and a professional association for educators and scholars. First formed way back in 1874, the IOP currently boasts about 40,000 members from all over the world. The IOP’s mission involves promoting and advancing physics education and research, working with policy makers to help increase understanding of physics, as well as publishing and producing materials related to physics education.

The video featuring Boeree is an example of the latter, made to promote physics education and in particular to encourage girls to consider physics as a possible area of study. Before winning the 2010 EPT San Remo Main Event in April 2010 and becoming a Team PokerStars Pro a few months later, Boeree studied physics and astrophysics at the University of Manchester where she earned a 1st Class Honours Degree.

In the video Boeree persuasively explains how her background in physics has proven useful to her at the poker tables, among other topics. Take a look:

I particularly like what Boeree says when she insists that being a professional poker player hardly means she is “wasting” her physics degree.

“The beauty of doing physics as a degree is that it doesn’t mean you have to become a physicist... you don’t have to become a research scientist” explains Boeree. “The training that I got from physics -- the way it’s trained my mind to think -- has enabled me to go into such an analytical game as poker.”

I often find myself making an analagous point when talking to undergraduates who are uncertain about the usefulness of, say, a degree in English or some other major for which future job prospects aren’t necessarily obvious.

Many students are under the false impression that getting a degree in English necessarily means one is destined to become a teacher (and probably destined to earn a less-than-desirable salary, too). In fact, there are a lot of students who are under the false impression that any non-business degree is somehow going to be a waste of time for them, which to me largely misses the entire point of going to college -- i.e., to learn how to think and thus prepare yourself for later life, with the obtaining of a credential mostly incidental to that training.

Boeree goes on to talk about how playing poker and studying physics both involve making complex decisions with many variables and bits of information that you have to sort through when analyzing a problem. Her argument is similar to that posed by Jennifer Ouelette in an article titled “Big Game Theory” that appeared in Discover magazine a couple of years ago.

Ouelette draws many of the same connections Boeree does, in fact, when she talks about the way “poker appeals to physicists because it is an intricate, complex puzzle... steeped in statistical probabilities and the tenets of game theory.” Ouelette also brings up how poker and physics both present problems in “partial information” that players/researchers are challenged to solve. I wrote more about Ouelette’s article -- and about connections between physics and poker -- in a post titled “Physicists & Poker.”

Like I say, I appreciate the messages Boeree is helping the IOP deliver with this video, among which we might list defenses of both higher education and poker. The encouragement to young women not to shy away from male-dominated fields like physics or poker (or heavy metal!) is commendable, too.

But most of all I like the larger argument that whatever you happen to study -- I mean really study with earnestness and a genuine desire to learn -- that work of interpretation and analysis and “training your mind” will necessarily prove of use to you when encountering subsequent problems and challenges.

Call it a principle of education, sometimes unheeded, but ultimately inviolable.

Mega Madness

My dad is a retired physics professor. I’ve mentioned him before here, including once in a post titled “Physicists & Poker” in which I pointed out how when I was a kid watching Road Runner cartoons, he couldn’t resist stepping in whenever Wile E. Coyote ran off of a cliff and hung for a moment in mid-air before plummeting downward.

Dad could never allow such a blatant disregard of the law of gravity to go by without making sure his kid understood the folly of what he was seeing. I was exaggerating just a little with that story, but it is nonetheless indicative of how matter-of-fact Dad is. I mean really, he’s a very grounded guy. (Rimshot.)

As such, Dad has little patience for the lottery. Our state (North Carolina) was pretty much the last one on this side of the country to give in and allow its citizens to play the lottery, like around 2006 or so. If asked, Dad will proudly point out he’s never once bought a lottery ticket. Actually he’ll occasionally point that out even if not asked, if something inspires him to do so.

“A tax on the dumb,” he calls it, knowing that it’s never a +EV game to play. And while he’s not really a poker player he appreciates the huge difference between a game like poker in which one really does stand a chance of winning -- especially if one is skilled -- and the guessing game that is the lottery.

Was thinking about Dad this week as I read about the Mega Millions, the big multi-state lottery, having grown to its largest jackpot ever. Actually, we’re now talking about the largest lottery in the history of the U.S., with the Mega Millions having rolled 18 times since it was last won back in January.

The next drawing is tomorrow (Friday) at 11 p.m. Eastern time. Right now the estimated prize is about $540 million, crushing the previous all-time high of $390 million split by two players back in March 2007. It sounds like the winner could either take a single payment of $360 million or so or get $19-20 million a year for the next 26 years. (Those figures will probably go up over the next 36 hours, I imagine.)

I read with interest an article tweeted by my buddy F-Train yesterday in which a computer science researcher broke down the relative expected value of a Mega Millions ticket, showing how it changes as the jackpot grows. The article was penned back in January 2011 at a time when the Mega Millions had also ballooned large enough to get the attention of lots of folks.

According to the author, Jeremy Elson, the expected value of a $1 ticket actually peaks right around the point that the jackpot hits the $420 million mark, then slides back down again from that point forward. He’s taking all sorts of factors into consideration, including the possibility of multiple winners, non-jackpot prizes, taxes, and so forth. In other words, we’re already on the downslope of that graph now that the jackpot has pushed up over $540 million.

However, even at its peak the expected value of a $1 ticket only reaches 69.3 cents according to Elson. “Thus,” he concludes, “Mega Millions tickets are never a rational investment, no matter how big the jackpot grows.”

He adds a disclaimer concerning professional poker player friend of his who plays the lottery and then declares the cost of tickets as tax-deductible. For him, the peak point of the graph actually sneaks up over $1 for a time, but Elson kind of dismisses that as not too terribly significant to the larger point that the lottery is no way to invest your cabbage.

In fact, he ends on an anecdote that sounds a heckuva lot like one my Dad likes to tell, the one suggesting your chances of getting killed driving to the store to buy a lottery ticket are much, much greater than your chances of buying a winner.

“That’s why I plan to walk,” jokes Elson as a final punch line.

I’m kind of thinking I might just walk up to the corner and get one myself. However, I’ll be looking up as I go, you know, to make sure there aren’t any genius coyotes falling from the sky.

Wish me luck. Also, please don’t anyone tell Dad what I’m doing.

Physicists & Poker

You might have heard something last week about an article in the November issue of Discover magazine about physicists and poker. The article is titled “Big Game Theory” and is by Jennifer Ouelette. You can read it online by clicking here. There was also an NPR segment on the article over the weekend, which you can access by clicking here.

I happen to have a particular interest in this subject. While I never studied physics too intensely -- only had a couple of classes that didn’t really take me beyond an introduction to the subject -- my father is in fact a physicist, and as a result I’ve always been somewhat curious about some of the many areas of inquiry physicists pursue.

What was it like being raised by a physicist? Well, I used to joke about how Dad didn’t mind me watching the Wile E. Coyote-Road Runner cartoons as a kid, but simply could not let me see the coyote run off the side of a cliff, hang in mid-air for a few seconds and perhaps hold up a sign, then drop from the sky leaving a puff of smoke behind without delivering an explanation of the impossibility of such applesauce.

The joke (only partially embellished from the truth, I maintain) perhaps suggests something about how physicists see the world around them -- namely, as a place where explanations really do exist for most physical phenomena. Some of these explanations, such as why a coyote can’t hang in the air like that, are not difficult to discover. Others are less obvious, but even there the physicist will pursue acceptable methods of inquiry in the effort to discover such explanations.

That’s the idea -- of the physicist being a puzzle-solving, rational interpreter of the world -- Ouelette advances in her article, her main point being to suggest that such a mindset appears to be especially well-suited to poker.

“Perhaps poker appeals to physicists because it is an intricate, complex puzzle,” writes Ouelette, noting how poker is “steeped in statistical probabilities and the tenets of game theory.” Since it often turns out that “the best players evince a rare combination of skills in math, strategy, and psychology,” it isn’t that surprising to find a number of physicists doing well at the tables.

Ouelette refers to Michael Binger, perhaps the best-known and most successful poker-playing physicist, whom you’ll recall finished third at the 2006 WSOP Main Event behind Jamie Gold and Paul Wasicka. She also makes reference to a few others, including Michael Piper and Liv Boeree, while also mentioning Chris Ferguson who has a Ph.D. in computer science.

She additionally spoke with the Dutch player Marcel Vonk, another physicist who won a WSOP bracelet in an event I happened to cover this summer, Event No. 54, the last of the $1,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em events. As the tournament reached the final stages, we became aware of his background in physics and his website. I wrote a little about Vonk’s background in a post here back in July.

Vonk certainly played well in that event, although experienced some good fortune, too -- including during heads-up play versus the strong David Peters -- on his way to conquering the 3,844-player field.

Vonk confirms Ouelette’s suggestion that those who become physicists may in fact be especially well-suited for poker.

“The skills required are similar,” says Vonk, noting that they include “mathematical abilities,” being able to “spot patterns and predict things from them,” and “patience” to keep working at difficult problems that may take multiple attempts to solve.

The article goes on to make a few more points that most poker players will find familiar. It’s good to know probabilities, but one shouldn’t get too carried away with emphasizing the “math” of the game. Poker is a game of “incomplete information,” so we can’t perfectly calculate everything, anyway. And bad beats or “statistical anomalies” will happen, something any physicist worth his credentials well understands.

All in all, an interesting piece that makes some decent observations. The only deficit I can see -- beyond the fact that Ouelette is really only scratching the surface of this subject -- is her suggestion that poker tourneys began to “flourish” in the 1970s when “thousands of how-to books” appeared. (About three decades off there, I’d say.)

I say she’s only scratching the surface -- indeed, the article only represents a small portion of the writing and research she did. Over on the “Cocktail Party Physics” website, Ouelette has additionally published a lengthy blog post, titled “Physicists Put on Their Poker Face,” in which she shares a great deal more from her piece that didn’t make the final cut -- more discussion of probability and game theory, more quotes from her interviewees, etc.

I will have to send these links along to my Dad the physicist and see what he thinks about them. Maybe reading these pieces will get him wanting to play poker with me.

However, for my sake I might be better off avoiding getting involved in a game with him. Might well end up like this: