LINKS - July 24th, 2024
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Professional Poker Players Know the Optimal Strategy but Don’t Always Use It
By Jack Murtagh, Scientific American
“Most players agree that to stay competitive at the top levels of poker they must use a blend of game theory’s optimal and exploitative play. Optimal is more defensive, whereas exploitative is more offensive. Some teachers recommend that you should begin a tournament by emulating optimal play—and only after you’ve had time to observe your opponent’s weaknesses should you sprinkle in your exploits. The flexibility to switch between strategies separates the fish from the sharks. ‘This whole process works better the more certain you are that you’re smarter than [your opponent] about the game,’ Kurganov says, adding that ‘you do less exploitative adjustments when you feel like they’re as good or better than you.’”
Math teacher argues Pi Day should be July 22
“This horrible day that transfixes the nation,
is built on a lousy approximization.
22 over 7 comes closer to pi.
So let’s wait till that date, out in mid-late-July.”
Why don’t straight men read novels?
“Generally speaking, reading is an indulgence that women permit themselves more than men. In 2022, Deloitte predicted boys and men would continue to spend less time reading books and read them less frequently than women and girls. They were right: in 2023, women made up 80 per cent of the book-buying market in the UK, US, and Canada, and accounted for 65 per cent of all fiction purchases in the UK according to Nielson BookData. The bookish man is a rare species. Case in point: 1.2 million people follow the @hotdudesreading Instagram.”
Efforts to Build Climate Resilience Do Not Protect Human Health
“Resilience fails to appreciate that harms to human health caused by the climate crisis are innumerable and unrelenting, and potentially impact everyone, everywhere, always. For example, the World Health Organization concluded in 2022 that 99 percent of the global population is exposed to air pollution that threatens their health. More specifically, a recent study concluded that for the more than 60 million Medicare beneficiaries, no safe threshold for exposure exists for the chronic effect of fine particulate matter (particles 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter), largely the result of fossil fuel combustion. Another 2022 study found that nearly 60 percent of known infectious diseases can be aggravated by hazards or pathways related to climate breakdown.”
We may finally know how the placebo effect relieves pain
“Further experiments revealed a pathway connecting these pain-processing neurons to cells in the pontine nuclei and cerebellum – two brain areas with no previous known role in relieving pain.”