Once upon a time, I accused Nate Silver of being “a numerologist, or a horse race handicapper, and I suspected he was juggling the numbers to fit his expectations”. I was not very perceptive, and I missed the heart of Silver’s problem. He’s a gambling addict. I shouldn’t be surprised.

He has come out with a new book, essentially a confession, titled On the Edge, a 572-page doorstop that is actually a gambling manual. He has this mentality where the purpose of predictions is to win and win big, and he’s constantly angling for the risky bet that pays off on long odds.

This is the blurb for the book.

In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates “the River,” the community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life.

These professional risk-takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. By immersing himself in the worlds of Doyle Brunson, Peter Thiel, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, and many others, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI.

I fwowed up in my mouth a little bit. You, too, can be just like these con artists and charlatans — it’s the future of finance and AI!

Here’s the revelation that shocked me.

Whoa. He’s gambling $10,000 a day on basketball? If you had a friend who was throwing away that much on his gambling habit, wouldn’t you take them aside and suggest that they get help?

Notice also that he was churning $1.8 million into his daily betting routine between October and May, and at the end he comes out ahead…by about $5000. That’s some return on investment.

Also, I don’t believe him. I had an uncle who was addicted to betting on horse races, who claimed to have a system, who told me that on average he was coming out ahead, just like Nate Silver’s graph. Unfortunately, he was somehow living in poverty, getting by marginally, unable to afford the basics, and we’d just sometimes learn that he’d made a big score because he’d come home staggeringly drunk. The only people who profit in the long run from gambling are the race track owners and the bookies and the guys who run the liquor concessions.

I will say that hardcore gambling does have one useful outcome: it’s practitioners tend to be pretty glib about rationalizing their results. Somehow I’m not surprised that a gambling addict can write a 572 page book to justify his methods.

Just asking. I inherited this great big pile of 8mm film recordings made by my grandfather and father in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, which were pretty much unviewable — have you got an 8mm projector lying around? So I dropped them off at a Walmart Photocenter along with $650 to have them converted to digital. They’re sitting in Seattle right now, and I thought it would be a while until I could see them…but, you know, digital, so I just got an email saying I could view them over this thing called the internet.

Oh my god.

There’s my childhood, laid out in grainy, poorly lit, soundless, washed-out color. Christmases and camping trips, my great-grandparents alive again, my grandfather looking hale and sober, my grandmother middle-aged and strong, my father digging clams and picking up his kids, my mother in her 20s looking good, and all my siblings back again. I only had a few minutes to skim through these hours of film, but later I’ll have to watch them thoroughly and wallow in the old days.

Here, for instance, is me hugging my late brother sometime in the early 1960s.

If I’m found dead, drowned in a puddle of tears later this week, you’ll know what happened.

I’m going to upload these many recordings to YouTube to make them accessible to the rest of my family — no one else in the world will care but these are like jewels of ancient cinematography to me.

My son occasionally sends us photos from his location in the Middle East. I thought living in a small rural town in the Midwest was a little less than stimulating, but here’s sunset in Kuwait.

It looks a little strange because there’s a sandstorm about to blow in. The next day…

Next time we get a blizzard or whiteout, I’ll look at that and think, “it could be worse” (which is a very Minnesota thing to say, by the way.)

It’s that time of year when my wife’s garden bears fruit and it’s my turn to get to work in the kitchen. I get to spend my day rendering tomatoes and peppers and onions and garlic into sauce.

Then I have to prepare a lecture that tries to answer the question, “where did prehistoric people think humans came from.” Fortunately, we have a prehistoric historical document.