Kucharski’s book, which necessarily oversimplifies an extremely complex subject, is no cure for that ignorance, but gamblers...
A lucid yet sophisticated look at the mathematics of probability as it’s played out on gaming tables, arenas, and fields.
Scissors cut paper, rock smashes scissors, paper covers rock: we all know the game, and some of us have a sense of when to play which of the three choices. Game theory, writes Kucharski (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), would hold that the optimal strategy is simply to choose randomly, by which you would come out even in the long term. However, most of us are more predictable than that: if we win with rock over scissors, then we’ll choose rock next time. We may shift our strategies, but we’re not playing randomly—and in any event, Kucharski observes, “the irony is that even truly random sequences can contain seemingly nonrandom patterns.” Sure, card counting works to some extent, but most mathematical behavior is a kind of learned guesswork and a lot of hunch playing. The author doesn’t reveal secrets of winning so much as he looks at the myriad ways the math is working against us. “Finding a biased roulette wheel,” he notes by way of example, “isn’t the same as finding a profitable one,” but even so, finding a roulette wheel that “churns out numbers that are uniformly distributed” generally requires collecting a vast body of information about that wheel, something that computers are better at doing than people. The same is true at the parimutuel racetrack, the boxing ring, and every other venue for wagering: having sufficient information is key to making any sort of bet that isn’t a mere stab in the dark. Even the most seasoned of bettors is thus usually to be found somewhere along what mathematicians call Poincaré’s third level of ignorance.
Kucharski’s book, which necessarily oversimplifies an extremely complex subject, is no cure for that ignorance, but gamblers and math buffs alike will enjoy it for its smart approach to real-world problems.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-05595-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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