How do you do that?

A thermostat is a pretty simple device. There's a bimetallic strip inside. When it warms up, the one metal expands more, and the strip bends one way. When it cools down, that side contracts more, and the strip bends the other way. The bending strip opens or closes some contacts, and electricity flows or doesn't flow, turning the furnace or air conditioner on or off.

Fancy thermometers have computers built into them. Computers have flip-flop circuits in them. They, on an atomic scale, do the same thing as a bimetallic strip on a macro scale.

But it's all programmed in.

Making A Decision

A lot of the processes our bodies conduct are fairly simple as well. If we get cold, our skin tries to shrink up a little, allowing less perspiration to exit through pores, and we get goosebumps. If we get hot, our skin relaxes and more perspiration exits, and our skin is cooled through evaporative cooling.

But how do you decide whether to go to Biloxi for spring break, or Padre Island, or Maui? How do you decide which of the 31 flavors of ice cream to order?

I've been googling on this subject for about a month now, after reading a book called "Quantum Enigma" by Bruce Rosenblum. It's #2527 in popularity at Amazon right now, which qualifies it as a best-seller. It's #1 in quantum theory books, and #5 in consciousness, and if you'd asked me two months ago if one book could be popular in both categories, I'd have scoffed at the idea.

Look, I've taken a college course in quantum mechanics. If you're suffering from insomnia, that's the kind of book you should read. Except that I'd pick up Rosenblum's book at night, and instead of putting me to sleep, it would get my mind racing with all sorts of ideas, none of which have solutions, at least that I could see.

Nothing Wrong With My Vision

Those who have studied quantum mechanics are fond of saying, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't begin to understand quantum mechanics." Rosenblum says as much, himself, repeatedly, although he uses a slightly different phrasing (which escapes me at the moment).

Much of science in the last decade or two has been based on chaos theory. That's based on a mathematics using equations with fractional exponents. Now, if you take 2 to the power of 1.5, that's really 2 to the power of 3 (which is 8) to the power of 1/2 (which is the square root, which gives you 2 times the square root of 2, which is approximately 2.828).

A Mandelbrot equation, which is of the form z_n+1 = z_n²+z_c is used to illustrate chaos theory. Very slight variations in initial conditions cause massively different results. The Julia set of equations is part of the Mandelbrot set of equations - and most of the so-called "fractals" are graphings of Julia set equations, using fractional exponents.

The funny thing about fractals is that they seem to depict nature. You can find pictures of virtually any plant's leaves, or any plant, and they tell me that if you were to graph fractals in 3-D, you'd end up finding virtually everything in the animal kingdom as well, including next year's cinema sex kitten.

If You Believe That

Like I said, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't begin to understand quantum mechanics. And so far, I'm just talking about 3-D fractals, which is far more advanced than you'll find in most books on the subject. What happens when you add a time dimension as well, so that you don't have just solid objects, but solid objects that move and morph?

It's pretty apparent, if you understand quantum mechanics, that nobody has a friggin' idea what's going on. And I need to take us one step further. I need to introduce free will and conciousness.

Ada Countess Lovelace lived two centuries ago. She was the first computer programmer, although it took a century and a half to build machines to run computer programs. And computers don't do anything by free will. Nobody's yet figured out how to be the Ada Lovelace of free will, and that will need to come first, before we can invent hardware to handle the rest of the job.

More and more scientists are starting to take the notion of parallel universes seriously. It seems obvious that free will exists - but we have nothing, absolutely nothing, to explain how it works. If you prefer, you can decline to call it parallel universes, and call it God instead.

Random Numbers

But what about random number generators, you ask. Every time I turn on the handheld electronic Yahtzee, it rolls the dice differently, and I get a new game.

Sorry to disappoint you, but those aren't really random games. They depend on a random number generator, which is actually a pseudo-random number generator. If you ask for a random number, most computers will give you a series of numbers that start repeating themselves after 65,536 iterations. They use a "seed" to decide where in that series to start, usually drawing that number from the clock that's built into most electronic devices.

Pseudo-random is, for our purposes, plenty good enough. It's good enough, for instance, for the video poker machines in Las Vegas. The mob ain't gonna let you gamble against them if they know you can tell what's coming up. Some of the mob, though, doesn't think 65,536 is a long enough series to be adequately "random-looking". They have a special random-number subroutine that produces a string 65,536 times as long as that, which is to say, a series of numbers 4,294,967,296 numbers long. If you stand by the machine long enough to watch it go through the cycle, and you have a perfect memory, you know what's coming next.

Of course, if it takes one second to use a "random" number, it would take 136 years to go through the entire cycle. I hope you have a strong bladder, because if you don't, you'll probably lose track.

And The Lottery

Just in time to inspire this post, the Pennsylvania "Big Four" Lottery for Friday night had winning numbers of 4 - 3 - 2 - 1. If you bet that combination "straight" (those numbers, in order), you won $2,500 and if you bet that combination "boxed" (those numbers, in any order), you won $100.00

Was that a non-random result? No. If you eliminate that, then you'd have to eliminate 1 - 2 - 3 - 4, and 2 - 4 - 6 - 8, and 1 - 3 - 5 - 7, and all sorts of other non-random-looking combinations as well, which, as it turns out, would be about half of all potential draws, depending on how you define "non-random looking".

There were 3,486 winners, who collect a total of $708,600.00. If some of them won $100, and the rest won $2500, that means 150 of the people played the numbers straight, and the other 3376 played the numbers boxed. The odds slightly favor the "straight" player, because it's 24 times as difficult to pick the numbers in order, but it pays off 25 times as much.

Of course, the odds are 10,000 to 1 that you can pick the straight numbers, and since a 50c ticket pays $2500, that means that half the money of the "straight" players goes to the state.

I don't recommend

I don't recommend the Big 4 lottery to anyone. An extra $100 won't change your life for more than a couple of days. An extra $2500 isn't likely to change your life for more than a few months, especially after they take out income taxes.

If you play Quinto, where you name five digits in order, you win $50,000. That's enough to keep your house from being foreclosed, with possibly enough left over to buy a car and take your wife on a week's vacation at Ocean City.

Gambling is largely called a "tax on stupidity", but that's because nobody's looking at it the right way. For Bill Gates, it would be a tax on stupidity. On the other hand, for most of us, dropping 50c on a Quinto ticket isn't going to change our standard of living one iota, while $50,000 in pretax winnings will make a difference.

The key is to bet sufficiently small amounts that you will never notice the loss at high enough odds that you will notice the win.

Well, either that, or you rig the game. That's happened, too.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Ada Lovelace - chaos theory - fractals - fractional exponents - free will - julia set - mandelbrot - playing to win - random number generators - spring break - state lottery - thermostat