Pick a Card, Any Card

• DECEMBER 10, 2011 The Wall Street Journal

By ALEX STONE

The standard way to mix a deck of playing cards—the one used everywhere from casinos to rec rooms—is what is known as a riffle (or "dovetail") shuffle. You begin by splitting the deck into two roughly equal stacks. Then you flick the cards with your thumbs off the bottoms of the piles in alternating fashion, interleaving the two stacks.

For games like blackjack or poker to be truly fair, the order of the cards must be completely random when the game begins. Otherwise a skilled cheat can exploit the lack of randomness to gain an advantage over other players.

How many riffle shuffles does it take to adequately mix a deck of 52 playing cards?

Francesco Abrignani/Alamy

As it turns out, you have to shuffle seven times before a deck becomes truly scrambled. Not only that, the cards become mixed in a highly unusual way: The amount of randomness in the deck does not increase smoothly. The first few shuffles do little to disturb the original order, and even after six shuffles, you can still pick out distinctly non-random patches.

But right around the seventh shuffle something remarkable happens. Shuffling hits its tipping point, and the cards rapidly decay into chaos.

Magical Mathematics

By Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham
Princeton, 244 pages, $29.95

The seven-shuffles finding applies to messy, imperfect riffle shuffles. The deck might not be divided exactly in half, for instance, or the cards might be riffled together in a haphazard way. Far from undesirable, a little sloppiness is actually the key to a random shuffle.

A perfect (or "faro") shuffle, meanwhile, wherein the deck is split precisely in half and the two halves are zippered together in perfect alternation, isn't random at all. In fact, it's completely predictable. Eight perfect shuffles will return a 52-card deck to its original order, with every card cycling back to its starting position.
And this doesn't just work for 52 cards. A deck of any size will eventually return to its starting order after a finite sequence of faro shuffles, although the number of faros required isn't always eight—and doesn't increase linearly. If you have 104 cards, for instance, it takes 51 faros to restore the deck. For a thousand cards, it takes 36.

These findings are among the many fascinating results explored in "Magical Mathematics," a dazzling tour of math-based magic tricks. The authors, Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham, are distinguished mathematicians with high-powered academic pedigrees. Both are also accomplished magicians who have taught courses on mathematical magic at Harvard and Stanford.

Mr. Diaconis has an especially unusual résumé for a mathematician. In 1959, at age 14, he ran away from home to study with the great 20th-century sleight-of-hand master Dai Vernon—a man who once fooled Harry Houdini with a card trick. After spending 10 years under Vernon's tutelage, Mr. Diaconis returned home to New York and enrolled in night school, eventually earning a full ride to a Ph.D. program in mathematics at Harvard.

The book's title may strike some people as odd in its pairing of magic and math, but the two subjects share a common lineage that goes back centuries. In fact, some of the earliest recorded magic tricks were based in math. Fibonacci's 1202 manuscript "Liber Abaci," the foundation of modern arithmetic, contains a number of magic tricks, including several versions of the famous three-object divination, wherein a spectator mentally selects one of three objects and the magician correctly identifies the spectator's choice.

The earliest recorded card tricks, meanwhile, appear in a math text written around 1500 by a Tuscan friar who was close friends with Leonardo da Vinci. And one of the first magic manuals was compiled in the 17th century by Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac, an early number theorist.

Player/Alamy

But mathematical magic truly came of age in the 20th century, with the growth of magic as a mainstream hobby. "In the past hundred years, a revolution has taken place," the authors write, citing the thousands of math-based magic tricks now in circulation.

In their breezy yet authoritative book, Messrs. Diaconis and Graham showcase some of the genre's best creations as well as many new ones of their own devising. Included are tricks with coins and cards (the reader will want to have a deck handy), a divination routine that employs the I Ching—the 5,000-year-old Chinese fortune-telling book—and, my personal favorite, a gambling demonstration in which the spectator shuffles a deck of cards but somehow still manages to deal himself a royal flush in spades.

This last effect exploits something known as the Gilbreath Principle, a beautiful property discovered in the 1950s by a mathematician who worked for many years at the Rand Corp. Take a deck of cards and arrange it in alternating red-black order. Now deal half of the deck facedown into a pile—thus reversing its order—and riffle shuffle the two piles together. Finally, deal the cards face up in pairs.

Each pair will contain one red and one black card (though not necessarily in alternating order). This is the Gilbreath Principle. This same idea applies to any repeating pattern of cards. If, for instance, the deck is arranged so that the cards cycle through the four suits—clubs, hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs, hearts, spades, diamonds, and so on throughout the deck—and the same procedure is executed, then every four cards dealt off the top will contain a complete set of suits. This result, combined with a few clever subtleties, is the basis of the royal-flush effect.

All the tricks in "Magical Mathematics" are of the "self-working" variety—meaning they require little or no physical skill—and while a grasp of the underlying mathematics is helpful, it is by no means a necessity. Even math-phobes will be able to astound audiences by simply following the directions and consulting the many full-color illustrations provided throughout the text.

The mixing of magic and math is more than just a means to new tricks. It has also spawned a host of major mathematical breakthroughs. "Some magic tricks use 'real mathematics' and lead to questions beyond the limits of modern mathematics," the authors write. "Sometimes, we have been able to solve the math problems."

The seven-shuffles result is one such solution. Mr. Diaconis became interested in the math of shuffling after he encountered a card trick published in the early part of the 20th century by Charles Jordan, a chicken farmer and champion puzzle solver who invented several groundbreaking card tricks. In this particular effect—called "Long Distance Mind Reading," because it could be performed through the mail—the spectator shuffles before and after picking a card, but the magician still finds his selection.

Mr. Diaconis realized that for the trick to work shuffling had to be less effective than people generally assumed. While at Harvard, he teamed up with a mathematician named David Bayer and the two undertook a theoretical analysis, building on work done at Bell Labs in the 1950s. Their landmark 1992 paper—"Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to its Lair"—rigorously proved that anything less than seven shuffles is inadequate. Not only that, their results had implications for a wide class of "mixing" phenomena—from stirring cake batter to compounding chemicals.

Similarly, the remarkable "looping" property of perfect shuffles is a facet of group theory—a branch of abstract mathematics that deals with, among other things, symmetric structures. Group theory has applications to chemistry, biology and, most notably, physics, where it provides the mathematical framework for the Standard Model—the overarching theory of subatomic particles and forces.

There's also a deep link between the perfect shuffle and the binary number system—the universal language of modern computing. To appreciate the connection, you first have to understand that there are two ways to do a faro. You can either weave the cards together so that the top and bottom cards stay in place—this is called an "out-faro"—or you can do what is known as an in-faro, in which the top and bottom cards each move inward by one card.

Now let's say that the ace of spades is on top, and you want to move 25 cards above it, so that the ace will be 26th from the top. The sequence of faros required to bring about this arrangement can be found by writing the number 25 in binary notation, like this: 11001. For each 1, you do an in-faro, and for each 0 you perform an out-faro. In this case, you would do two in-faros (11), followed by two outs (00) and, lastly, one more in (1).

Shuffling is one example of something seemingly ordinary that subtends an elegant mathematical structure. Juggling is another. "Mathematics is often described as the science of patterns," Messrs. Diaconis and Graham (a former president of the International Jugglers' Association) write. "Juggling can be thought of as the art of controlling patterns in time and space. Both activities offer unbounded challenges."

The central challenge in the mathematical study of juggling is to figure out which sequences of throws are possible and to categorize them according to the number of balls they require and their length—or period. Toward that end, mathematicians have developed a notation, called "siteswap," that uniquely describes all possible throwing sequences.

A siteswap pattern consists of a string of numbers, each of which specifies how much time one ball—or club, or chainsaw, or banana—spends in the air. The classic three-ball cascade, for instance, is denoted 333, because each ball is aloft for the same amount of time (three beats), and the sequence repeats after every third throw.

The remarkable thing about siteswap is that it allows jugglers to devise new patterns on paper and determine whether they're juggleable with a few simple calculations, all without tossing a single ball. What's more, the average of the digits in a pattern tells you the number of objects needed to juggle it—3 in the case of 441, for example, since the average of 4, 4 and 1 is 3.

Siteswap has led to the discovery of hundreds of unknown throwing sequences, many with just three or four balls. "Once the connection has been made between juggling (sequences) and mathematics, all kinds of doors, both mathematical as well as juggling, are thrown wide open," the authors note. "Many jugglers have been working hard to master the almost unlimited number of new patterns suggested by siteswaps."

Throughout the book, Messrs. Diaconis and Graham shuttle back and forth between magic and math, probing each trick for hidden mathematical insights and developing new magic based on what they find. In the process, they encounter a number of unsolved problems, some of which have prize money attached to them. It's a fun ride, even if you don't follow the nuances of every theorem and proof, and a refreshing change from the bombastic sort of magic one typically encounters on television.

Lovers of recreational mathematics, and especially fans of the late Martin Gardner, who contributed the foreword, will find many pleasures in "Magical Mathematics." And while exposing magic secrets in a book intended for the general public may raise hackles among some old-guard magicians, exploring the math behind these tricks will, in truth, only deepen the mystery. For, as the authors remind us, sometimes the methods are as magical as the tricks themselves.
 

—Mr. Stone is the author of the forthcoming "Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind."

Bankers are the dictators of the West

Robert Fisk in The Independent

Saturday, 10 December 2011

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American "peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".

The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can't touch them.

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?

The true costs of Keynes

By Martin Hutchinson

Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong each killed tens of millions of people, and John Maynard Keynes was a pacifist who never fired a shot in anger. However, economically, when the billions come to be totted up, it may well be the case that Keynes was the most destructive of the four.

He cannot entirely be blamed for mistakes in monetary policy, which he never understood, and even his "stimulus" ideas owed much to those who came before him - for example Arthur Pigou - and after him - for example Joan Robinson. Yet the other value destroyers had their henchmen too, in Heinrich Himmler, Lavrenti Beria and Jiang Qing. Overall, when henchmen are added in, Keynes runs the other value destroyers close, and may in the future surpass them as his value-destructions continue. Truly, persuasive but misguided economic theories can be much more damaging than they appear.

This is not to claim that big government per se is value-destructive (it is, but that's a separate issue.) The right size of government is a matter for legitimate debate, and successful societies such as Sweden and Singapore can be built with very different sizes of government. Personally, I would rather live in Singapore than Sweden, and I would expect Singapore to exhibit markedly faster long-term economic growth than Sweden, but both societies run their finances in a responsible manner and are models of governmental integrity.

Since both Sweden and Singapore currently have modest budget surpluses and have kept control of their currencies and avoided excessive monetary stimulus, they are in the modern debased sense of the term non-Keynesian, even if the managers of Sweden's economy might well describe themselves as Keynesians for the sake of harmony at international gatherings.

The Keynesian fallacy is in essence one of getting something for nothing. By Keynesian fiscal stimulus, normally involving spending more money though occasionally through tax cuts, providing they avoid the annoyingly savings-prone rich, we are supposed to produce additional economic output whenever there is an "output gap" from full employment, that is, in all conditions save those of a raging boom, when resources are scarce.

Keynes himself recommended such stimulus only at the bottom of deep recessions, and suggested that it should be balanced by running budget surpluses in times of boom. Needless to say, his disciples have neglected the disciplines he recommended.

Similarly, the analogous monetary policy (which Keynes personally did not advocate, since he believed that interest rates had no effect on output) pushes down interest rates and indulges in ever-more lavish bouts of monetary "stimulus" in the belief that by doing so the economy can be persuaded to expand more rapidly.

It's fair to claim that monetary stimulus does not derive directly from Keynes (though it is not new - it was a policy advocated by Keynesians in the 1960s Lyndon B Johnson administration, for example.) However fiscal stimulus is a direct product of Keynes' 1936 General Theory and both forms of stimulus derive from Keynes' overall approach of flouting economic orthodoxy and using ingenious paradox to propound unorthodox policies.

Keynes was the origin of the "stimulus" approach; its central idea that by manipulating monetary or fiscal policy we can get a bigger government than we pay for is his. It is thus fair to blame the costs of that approach on him.

Those costs are considerable. In the 1930s, US president Herbert Hoover's reckless expansion of government spending, including loans to cronies through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, caused further slowdown in the economy, which was exacerbated by his dreadful early 1932 increase in the top marginal rate of tax from 25% to 63%.

Then, as I discussed a few weeks ago, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal deficit spending, combined with his reckless "set the gold price in my pyjamas" monetary policy prolonged the Great Depression far longer than would naturally have occurred, delaying full recovery from 1934-35 to 1939-40.

In the recent unpleasantness, fiscal stimulus worldwide initially appeared merely ineffective. By diverting resources from the productive private sector to unproductive public sector boondoggles it reduced long-term output. In the US case, the Barack Obama stimulus converted a vigorous recovery into an anemic one; only in the third quarter of 2011, after the effects of stimulus had begun to wear off, did output begin to accelerate and unemployment trend down (in this case we should celebrate public sector job losses and declines in public sector output, since they free up resources for healthy private sector growth!).

However, with the euro crisis it has become clear that fiscal stimulus, if excessive, has an exponentially adverse effect. By increasing deficits to unsustainable levels, it precipitates bond market fears about the state's credit risk. Naturally, that strangles credit availability to almost all entities domiciled in the country concerned.

Thus while a mild fiscal stimulus in a country that before recession was running a surplus might be mildly beneficial (because the differential between private sector savings rates and the 100% stimulus spending rate outweighed the inefficiency effect of diverting resources to the public sector), a large fiscal stimulus, or one incurred in a country like Greece or the 2009 US that was already dangerously in deficit, will cause economic damage rising to many times the value of the stimulus itself, persisting for years or even decades to come.

Monetary stimulus is similarly damaging. As Walter Bagehot remarked over a century ago, the correct response to financial crisis is to lend on top quality security at very high interest rates. This was notably not done in 2008; instead the injection of liquidity to favored companies was accompanied by pushing interest rates far below inflation. Repeating the monetary stimulus in 2010 and again in 2011, when in the United States at least the financial crisis was over, was inexcusable.

Monetary stimulus causes structural damage to the economy in the following ways:

Normally, as was the case in 1965-79, it causes accelerating inflation. Since 1995, this has not been the case, because the West has benefited from an enormous deflationary force from the Internet and modern telecommunications, which has enabled massive outsourcing of goods and services to locations with much cheaper wage rates. That effect is now ending, while in some countries, notably Britain, the monetary stimulus has been increased to Weimar Republic-like proportions of 40% of public spending. We can expect the inflationary effect to strike with massively multiplied force compared with the gentle zephyr of 1965-79 when it finally arrives. As discussed in this column a few months back, by making capital artificially cheap, monetary stimulus encourages employers to substitute capital for labor to an artificial extent, thus raising the equilibrium level of unemployment. In current circumstances, this substitution takes the form of outsourcing production to emerging markets, thus depressing US and European labor markets further. By allowing banks to make artificial profits from "gapping" - borrowing short-term and investing in fixed rate long term bonds and mortgages - it suppresses lending to small business, thus further increasing unemployment. It must be noted that the true level of U.S. unemployment is far higher than the officially admitted 8.6%, as many workers have become discouraged and left the workforce. Ultra-low interest rates suppress savings (which receive negative real returns on their money), thereby de-capitalizing the economy. Finally if, as happened in 2008, monetary stimulus is directed only at favored banks and finance houses, it destroys the integrity of the market. Beneficiary banks have been shown by the recent Fed audit to have benefited to the tune of $13 billion by profits made on emergency Federal Reserve loans. Had that money been lent at appropriate penalty rates, this profit would have been captured for taxpayers. It was in essence a gigantic subsidy to Wall Street bonus recipients by the corrupt Federal Reserve. Needless to say, damaging cronyism has thereby been encouraged. As recent events have overwhelmingly demonstrated, both fiscal and monetary stimulus are highly addictive, since they appear to provide something for nothing and the cost of reversing them appears unpleasant to the Keynesians who control the levers of policy. As to their cost, the current Congressional Budget Office projections suggest that there is at present a 5% output gap below full employment, and that the output gap will disappear only in 2016. The cost of current Keynesian policies over 2009-16 can thus be conservatively estimated at about 15% of GDP, or $2.2 trillion in today's dollars. To that we can add very roughly 50% of one year's 1929 GDP, for the output lost through Keynesian policies in 1932-40, or another $500 billion, for a very conservative total of $2.7 trillion all-told in the United States alone. That may not sound sufficient to counterbalance the tyrants' depredations, but consider: 1930s Germany, 1940s Russia and 1950s China were all much poorer countries than the modern United States. Very roughly, Germany's 1936 GDP and the Soviet Union's 1940 GDP were both about $500 billion modern dollars, while China's 1955 GDP was about $1,500 billion. Thus Hitler and Stalin could have destroyed their entire output for more than five years, and Mao for almost two years, before doing as much economic damage as Maynard Keynes has wreaked in one country. It's a rough calculation, but illuminating - and while Hitler, Stalin and Mao are long gone, Keynes' depredations continue. Martin Hutchinson is the author of Great Conservatives (Academica Press, 2005) - details can be found on the website www.greatconservatives.com - and co-author with Professor Kevin Dowd of Alchemists of Loss (Wiley, 2010). Both are now available on Amazon.com, Great Conservatives only in a Kindle edition, Alchemists of Loss in both Kindle and print editions.

Winning is everything? Sorry, no

In cricket, as in other sports, it's not about the statistics and the bottomline. It's about how much joy you give, how well you are loved and remembered

Ed Smith

December 7, 2011

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	Mark Waugh: never mind the average © Getty Images Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Greg Chappell | Sir Viv Richards | Mark Waugh

Hundreds of thousands of men and women have played professional football. None, surely, could have so fully lived up to the name Socrates. He played as though football was a creative puzzle, to be teased out like a philosophical enquiry. He played with grace but also with lightness.

Not all of you may have encountered a mischievous theory called nominative determinism. The idea is that people are predetermined to pursue certain professions by their names: your name is your fate. Britain's leading jurist is called Igor Judge (his professional billing is "Judge Judge"); the world's fastest man is called Usain Bolt; and "Dudus" Coke awaits trial in the US for allegedly running the Jamaican drugs mafia.

Socrates certainly lived up to his nominative destiny. He was a qualified doctor, a political activist and an independent thinker. His attitude to life was appropriately philosophical. He knew that smoking and drinking were damaging his health, but retorted, "It's a problem, but we all have to die of something, don't we?"

The same joie de vivre informed Socrates' attitude to sport. He was unflinchingly committed to the joga bonito - the beautiful game. "Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy." Even people who don't like football remember being uplifted by Socrates' grace and audacity. They remember his mistakes as well as his triumphs. They remember his movement and imagination as well as his goals. And they remember that he was unique - perhaps the highest accolade any sportsman can achieve. I almost forgot the most important thing of all: he is remembered, full stop.

A great deal is written about greatness in sport. There is a natural human urge to seek objectivity and proof about who is the greatest. Averages are measured, metrics invented, comparisons fed through the meat grinder of statistical analysis.

But statistics, I'm afraid, can never tell us the whole truth about greatness. Because sporting achievement is not quite the same thing as greatness. Look at cricket. Viv Richards was an exceptional performer in Test cricket, but he wasn't off the map in terms of pure stats. Greg Chappell and other contemporaries pushed him hard. But in terms of greatness, Viv stood alone. The numbers don't quite capture the complete Viv effect - not just on opponents but also on fans. Whenever I remember watching him on television, a smile comes over my face - even now, 25 years later.

Mark Waugh's Test match average was "only" 41 (that still sounds pretty good to me, but it's undeniable that lots of players average 41 these days). But the numbers don't reflect the pleasure he gave. A sublime Waugh flick through midwicket was only worth four runs - the same as an ugly thick edge from a lesser batsman - but it was worth much more to those who paid money to watch.

Some of the most astonishing things Waugh did on a cricket field weren't recorded at all. Greg Chappell tells a lovely story in his book The Making of Champions about watching Waugh field on the footholds at extra cover and midwicket in ODIs. The ball would be bouncing unpredictably on the footholds and Waugh would swoop effortlessly and pick it up without fumbling or diving, like a cat pouncing on a ball of string. Chappell writes that he wanted to stand up and cheer every time. Statistically it was an non-event. For the discerning fan, it was pure magic.

According to the averages, the racist cheat Ty Cobb was a better batter than Babe Ruth. But Cobb was nowhere near as great a sportsman. Not if we use the correct measurement: the extent to which he was loved and remembered.

If you still think that winning in sport is all about the final score, I recommend reading Rafa: My Story, the unflinchingly honest autobiography by Rafael Nadal. When he writes about Roger Federer, his great rival, something strange happens to Nadal. Rationally he knows that he has beaten Federer more often than Federer has beaten him, but he insists that Federer is the greater player. Partly, that is because Federer still possesses more grand slams. But the deeper reason is that Nadal deeply respects - perhaps even envies - the way Federer plays. "You get these blessed freaks of nature in other sports, too."

	If you produce grim, boring and joyless sport, it is reassuring to fall back on the delusion that it is all in a worthy cause. Socrates knew better. He knew that sportsmen are entertainers

Here is the interesting thing. Nadal does not congratulate himself for being the more worthy champion. He congratulates Federer for the more sublime talent. And Nadal may be right. In an era of wonderful tennis players, Federer has been the most elegant, refined and instinctive.

Socrates' death has been described as a terrible day for sporting romantics. In fact, it is a much sadder day for sporting ultra-rationalists. Because the win-at-all-costs brigade has once again been shown to be completely wrong. Socrates never won the World Cup, and lost the biggest match of his career playing on his own terms. And how is he remembered? As a loser? No. He is remembered with respect, with adoration, with love. Over the long term, it is very simple: he won.

Remember Socrates' career and legacy the next time you hear "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." That was American football coach Vince Lombardi's dictum about sporting priorities. And in the 50 years since Lombardi's quip, the reductionism of winning at all costs has hardened into conventional wisdom.

Of course, it is a consoling thought - if you're a production-line automaton incapable of playing sport creatively, or if you're a coach determined to stamp out individuality and risk. Yes, if you produce grim, boring and joyless sport, it is reassuring to fall back on the delusion that it is all in a worthy cause.

Socrates knew better. He knew that sportsmen are entertainers. They must try to win, too (no one is entertained by skill without will). But entertainment is not bolted onto sport as an afterthought. It is at the core of the whole project.

Professional athletes are only the temporary custodians of their sports. Their highest calling is to pass it on to the next generation enhanced rather than diminished. By that measure Socrates won - and he won big.

NIMBY - the death of altruism

With little but economic gloom on the horizon, David Cameron likes to appeal to Britain's better instincts, insisting: "We're all in this together." Whether the average citizen is listening to the Prime Minister's entreaties is open to doubt: Britons appear to be more selfish and less interested in the common good than ever before.

The latest British Social Attitudes report suggests that levels of altruism are falling in these straitened times. People are hostile to housebuilding in their neighbourhoods, less likely to make personal sacrifices to protect the environment and increasingly resistant to paying more for hospitals and schools.

They are also sceptical about the Government's ability to change things for the better, with a growing belief that is down to individuals to sort out their problems for themselves. Support for tax rises to boost spending on services such as health and education has fallen to 31 per cent – half of the 63 per cent of people in favour just nine years ago.

The number willing to pay higher prices to safeguard the environment, such as by buying Fair Trade goods, has fallen from 43 per cent in 2001 to 26 per cent today, while the proportion prepared to pay more tax for the same reason is down from 31 per cent to 22 per cent.

Researchers also uncovered evidence of an entrenched "not in my backyard" mentality over housebuilding, with 45 per cent of people opposing any new development near them, compared with 30 per cent in favour. Opposition is strongest in areas where property is in shortest supply – 58 per cent in outer London and 50 per cent in the South-east of England.

The survey, now in its 29th year, acknowledged that three-quarters of the public believe the income gap between rich and poor is too large. Yet only 35 per cent believe the Coalition should redistribute more to lessen the disparity.

Paradoxically, 54 per cent of the public believe jobless benefits are too high and discourage the unemployed from finding work, up from 35 per cent in 1983, the first year of the survey. And although people were concerned about child poverty levels, 63 per cent pinned some of the blame for the problem on parents who "don't want to work".

The survey, by the independent social research institute NatCen, found Britons increasingly relaxed about private healthcare. In 1999, 38 per cent said it was wrong; today the figure has fallen to 24 per cent.
45 Percentage of Britons who oppose any new development near their homes. In outer London the figure is 58 per cent.

26 Percentage of people willing to pay more for ethical goods to save the environment – down from 43 per cent 10 years ago.

Socrates - Requiem for a wise man!

 

Nirmal Shekar

AP Former Brazil's soccer player Socrates

The Socrates persona was as contradictory as it was compelling

HE was a hard-drinking, chain-smoking free thinker grappling with the higher reaches of truth passed on to posterity by Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx in an awesome Victorian auditorium of a Rio de Janerio University.

He was a head-banded, flamboyant young man with curly brown locks unlocking the splendour of Brazilian country music to an entranced audience.

He was a fiery-eyed left-wing activist, a Che Guevara-type radical spouting slogans while leading a student march to restore democracy in his country.

He was a professional paediatrician hugging sick children at a UNICEF health camp with the missionary zeal of a Mother Teresa.

Socrates Brasilero Sampio de Souza de Oliviera, who passed away on Sunday in Brazil, was all of these…and more. He was one of the most gifted players produced by the greatest of soccer-playing nations, Brazil, in the post-Pele era.

Rebel with a cause

A rebel with a cause, Socrates had a stupendous ability to combine stardom with creative ability on the field. His one-two passing symphony with his team-mate and friend Zico had a Mozartian magnificence.

As the eldest of a middle-rung government official's 10 sons, as a brilliant young medical student, Socrates was intensely in search of an identity in the fragmented world of the late 1970s.

“I am not a footballer. I am a human being,” he screamed at mediapersons early in his career, apparently fed up with their one-track line of questioning. It was the cry of a man trying to free himself from the chains of a media-manufactured image, the struggle of a very intelligent human being trying to shake off a straitjacket.

It is this protean quality that set Socrates apart from some of the most brilliant players of his era. Deeply rebellious against the over-ordering of life, on and off the football field, he was quintessential nonconformist.

“He would sing a song and all of us wound enjoy it. Then, almost suddenly, Socrates would go into a shell, an impenetrable shell of his own. We knew him, yet we did not know him,” said a team-mate of his when Socrates was playing for the Sao Paulo giant Corinthians.

 

Multi-faceted persona

To be sure, it would take more than an average footballer to have come to terms with Socrates' multi-faceted personality. For, the Socrates persona was as contradictory as it was compelling. He was a man in search of individual freedom in an age ruled by conformity and organisation, both in and out of football.

If you ever saw a cold-blooded master of life's capriciousness — someone with knowledge of Nietzsche's amor fati — then you can picture Socrates striding back nonchalantly after missing a crucial penalty in a World Cup semifinal against France in Mexico.

It is not as if Socrates was an incurable eccentric with a finger on the self-destruct button. He loved the game as much as he loved anything else in life. But he knew sport was just sport, not a matter of life or death. He would have been more devastated by the death of a child in a Rio health facility than a missed World Cup penalty.

 

Doctor for the poor

Never one to beat around the bush, Socrates admitted early in his career that it was for big money that he temporarily abandoned his life as a doctor to become a footballer. “As a footballer, I get much quicker to the financial stability I need to be what I want to be: a doctor for the poor,” he said.

On the field, he was a master. With Zico and Falcao, he was part of a midfield that was rarely matched in the entire history of the game. So confident were these men about their own skills that they ignored their defensive weaknesses as a resurgent Paolo Rossi of Italy claimed a hat-trick to dump them from the 1982 World Cup.

He made his presence felt in the 1986 World Cup too, but soon the game was up for Doc. But another one, perhaps more rewarding — serving the poor as a doctor and becoming a sagacious commentator on television — began.

“Life is not about quantity. It is about quality,” Socrates said over 30 years ago. By modern standards, he died young.

He drank his way to his grave, like so many other sportspersons. But the difference is, he was a wise man who did know exactly what he was doing. It was his hemlock.

Why Is Economic Growth So Popular?

By Ugo Bardi

26 November, 2011
Cassandra's legacy

When the new Italian Prime Minister, Mr. Mario Monti, gave his acceptance speech to the Senate, a few days ago, he used 28 times the term "growth" and not even once terms such as "natural resources" or "energy". He is not alone in neglecting the physical basis of the world's economy: the chorus of economic pundits everywhere in the world is all revolving around this magic world, "growth". But why? What is that makes this single parameter so special and so beloved?

 

During the past few years, the financial system gave to the world a clear signal when the prices of all natural commodities spiked up to levels never seen before. If prices are high, then there is a supply problem. Since most of the commodities we use are non-renewable - crude oil, for instance - it is at least reasonable to suppose that we have a depletion problem. Yet, the reaction of leaders, decision makers, and economic pundits of all kinds was - and still is - to ignore the physical basis of the economic system and promote economic growth as the solution to all our problems; the more, the better. But, if depletion is the real problem, it should be obvious that growth can only make it worse. After all, if we grow we consume more resources and that will accelerate depletion. So, why are our leaders so fixated on growth? Can't they understand that it is a colossal mistake? Are they stupid or what?

Things are not so simple, as usual. One of the most common mistakes that we can make in life is to assume that people who don't agree with our ideas are stupid. No, there holds the rule that for everything that exists, there is a reason. So, there has to be a reason why growth is touted as the universal cure for all problems. And, if we go in depth into the matter, we may find the reason in the fact that people (leaders as well as everybody else) tend to privilege short term gains to long term ones. Let me try to explain.

Let's start with observing that the world's economy is an immense, multiple-path reaction driven by the thermodynamic potentials of the natural resources it uses. Mainly, these resources are non-renewable fossil fuels that we burn in order to power the whole system. We have good models that describe the process; the earliest ones go back to the 1970s with the first version of "The Limits to Growth" study. These models are based on the method known as "system dynamics" and consider highly aggregated stocks of resources (that is, averaged over many different kinds). Already in 1972, the models showed that the gradual depletion of high grade ores and the increase of persistent pollution would cause the economy to stop growing and then decline; most likely during the first decades of the 21st century. Later studies of the same kind generated similar results. The present crisis seems to vindicate these predictions.

So, these models tell us that depletion and pollution are at the root of the problems we have, but they tell us little about the financial turmoil that we are seeing. They don't contain a stock called "money" and they make no attempt to describe how the crisis will affect different regions of the world and different social categories. Given the nature of the problem, that is the only possible choice to make modelling manageable, but it is also a limitation. The models can't tell us, for instance, how policy makers should act in order to avoid the bankruptcy of entire states. However, the models can be understood in the context of the forces that move the system. The fact that the world's economic system is complex doesn't mean that it doesn't follow the laws of physics. On the contrary, it is by looking at these laws that we can gain insight on what's happening and how we could act on the system.

There are good reasons based in thermodynamics that cause economies to consume resources at the fastest possible rate and at the highest possible efficiency (see this paper by Arto Annila and Stanley Salthe). So, the industrial system will try to exploit first the resources which provide the largest return. For energy producing resources (such as crude oil) the return can be measured in terms of energy return for energy invested (EROEI). Actually, decisions within the system are taken not in terms of energy but in terms of monetary profit, but the two concepts can be considered to coincide as a first approximation. Now, what happens as non-renewable resources are consumed is that the EROEI of what is left dwindles and the system becomes less efficient; that is, profits go down. The economy tends to shrink while the system tries to concentrate the flow of resources where they can be processed at the highest degree of efficiency and provide the highest profits; something that usually is related to economies of scale. In practice, the contraction of the economy is not the same everywhere: peripheral sections of the system, both in geographical and social terms, cannot process resources with sufficient efficiency; they tend to be cut off from the resource flow, shrink, and eventually disappear. An economic system facing a reduction in the inflow of natural resources is like a man dying of cold: extremities are the first to freeze and die off.

Then, what's the role of the financial system - aka, simply "money"? Money is not a physical entity, it is not a natural resource. It has, however, a fundamental role in the system as a catalyst. In a chemical reaction, a catalyst doesn't change the chemical potentials that drive the reaction, but it can speed it up and change the preferred pathway of the reactants. For the economic system, money doesn't change the availability of resources or their energy yield but it can direct the flow of natural resources to the areas where they are exploited faster and most efficiently. This allocation of the flow usually generates more money and, therefore, we have a typical positive (or "enhancing") feedback. As a result, all the effects described before go faster. Depletion can be can be temporarily masked although, usually, at the expense of more pollution. Then, we may see the abrupt collapse of entire regions as it may be the case of Spain, Italy, Greece and others. This effect can spread to other regions as the depletion of non renewable resources continues and the cost of pollution increases.

We can't go against thermodynamics, but we could at least avoid some of the most unpleasant effects that come from attempting to overcome the limits to the natural resources. This point was examined already in 1972 by the authors of the first "Limits to Growth" study on the basis of their models but, eventually, it is just a question of common sense. To avoid, or at least mitigate collapse, we must stop growth; in this way non renewable resources will last longer and we can use them to develop and use renewable resources. The problem is that curbing growth does not provide profits and that, at present, renewables don't yet provide profits as large as those of the remaining fossil fuels. So, the system doesn't like to go in that direction - it tends, rather, to go towards the highest short term yields, with the financial system easing the way. That is, the system tends to keep using non renewable resources, even at the cost of destroying itself. Forcing the system to change direction could be obtained only by means of some centralized control but that, obviously, is complex, expensive, and unpopular. No wonder that our leaders don't seem to be enthusiastic about this strategy.

Let's see, instead, another possible option for leaders: that of "stimulating growth". What does that mean, exactly? In general, it seems to mean to use the taxation system to transfer financial resources to the industrial system. With more money, industries can afford higher prices for natural resources. As a consequence, the extractive industry can maintain its profits, actually increase them, and keep extracting even from expensive resources. But money, as we said, is not a physical entity; in this case it only catalyzes the transfer human and material resources to the extractive system at the expense of subsystems as social security, health care, instruction, etc. That's not painless, of course, but it may give to the public the impression that the problems are being solved. It may improve economic indicators and it may keep resource flows large enough to prevent the complete collapse of peripheral regions, at least for a while. But the real attraction of stimulating growth is that it is the easy way: it pushes the system in the direction where it wants to go. The system is geared to exploit natural resources at the fastest possible rate, this strategy gives it fresh resources to do exactly that. Our leaders may not understand exactly what they are doing, but surely they are not stupid - they are not going against the grain.

The problem is that the growth stimulating strategy only buys time (and buys it at a high price). Nothing that governments or financial traders do can change the thermodynamics of the world system - all what they can do is to shuffle resources from here to there and that doesn't change the hard reality of depletion and pollution. So, pushing economic growth is only a short term solution that worsens the problem in the long run. It can postpone collapse but at the price of making it more abrupt in the form known as the Seneca Cliff. Unfortunately, it seems that we are headed exactly that way.

[This post was inspired by an excellent post on the financial situation written by Antonio Turiel with the title "Before the Wave" (in Spanish). ]

Ugo Bardi is a professor of Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Firenze, Italy. He also has a more general interest in energy question and is the founder and president of ASPO Italia.