The counter-intuitive appeal of the lottery

Every day I read reports of how the jackpot for the Powerball lottery, one of the many lotteries run by states in the US, keeps increasing in size. Under the system, if a drawing does not produce a winner, the jackpot rolls over with the value of the new bets added to the old. Currently the prize is about 1.2 billion dollars.

In an interesting article, Kathryn Schulz discusses the history of how the lottery became a ubiquitous presence in American life.

How this came to be is the subject of an excellent new book, “For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America,” by the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the heart of Cohen’s book is a peculiar contradiction: on the one hand, the lottery is vastly less profitable than its proponents make it out to be, a deception that has come at the expense of public coffers and public services. On the other hand, it is so popular that it is both extremely lucrative for the private companies that make and sell tickets and financially crippling for its most dedicated players.

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John Oliver on the need for bail reform

On the most recent episode of his always excellent show Last Week Tonight, he focuses on the abuses of the cash bail system where people can be held in jail for a long time before trial simply because they do not have the money to post bail. This hurts poor people the most. One of the worst abuses is to use the system to coerce people who have been held in jail for a long time before trial to confess to crimes they did not commit with the promise that the time they have already spent in prison will be sufficient punishment.

I think that people should be released on their personal recognizance unless they are a risk to society or have the means to flee. Most poor people who commit petty offenses can easily be caught if they do not show up for their trial. Bail in such cases is punitive.

Wordle and cheating

I do the daily puzzle known as Wordle. For the three people in the country who have never heard of it, it consists of a hidden five letter word and one tries to guess the word in as few tries as possible, with a maximum set at six. After each guess, you get three kinds of feedback: a letter is highlighted green if it is the right letter in the right location; yellow if it is a letter that is used in the word but appears in the wrong location, and grey if the letter is not used at all. The puzzle is similar to the game Master Mind. The answer is from a list of 2309 common words but guesses allow from a pool of about 15,000 words (fewer than the average vocabulary which is estimated to be between 20,000-35,000 words), many of which can be quite obscure.

The puzzle is a little diversion during the day that takes about 10 minutes at the most. But it has attracted an enormous amount of interest and this article looks at the strategies that computers and expert players use to try and get the word in the least number of tries. Computers take an average of 3.41 tries to get the word while expert players average slightly less than four.
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Second Walker accuser speaks on camera

The second woman who accused Georgia Republican senate candidate Herschel Walker of pressurizing her to get an abortion in 1993 when they were having along affair has revealed herself on camera, though she has kept her name secret and wants to be known as just Jane Doe. You can see the interview in the above link. It is an explosive interview full of details that substantiate her charges against Walker.

Responding to the ABC News interview, Walker issued a statement Tuesday saying, “This was a lie a week ago and it is a lie today. Seven days before an election, the Democrats trot out Gloria Allred and some woman I do not know. My opponents will do and say anything to win this election. The entire Democrat machine is coming after me and the people of Georgia. I am not intimidated. Once again, they messed with the wrong Georgian.”

But the woman has produced copious documentation including photographs of them together as recently as in 2019 that clearly show that he is lying about not knowing her at all.
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Film review: Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

My tastes in art are decidedly lowbrow. I am the kind of person who would benefit from reading certain authors (James Joyce, William Faulkner) and poets (T. S. Eliot) and seeing the films of certain directors (Luis Bunuel, Frederico Fellini) within the framework of courses taught by experts in those areas who can explain to me what the hell is going on. If ever I needed to be reminded of this, my recent viewing of this film by director Alain Resnais and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet certainly did so. I had heard of this film ages ago and was intrigued by the fact that some film connoisseurs rave about this film (it has a 95% rating of critics at Rotten Tomatoes) while others have placed on the list of the fifty worst films of all time. So when I finally got a chance to stream it, I did so.

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