Well, I'm back.
Hope you've all had a happy, safe, not-too-exhausting holiday season. Happy New Year! I've been MIA for three months, here on Coding the Wheel, and for that I apologize. I haven't been abducted by PokerStars or clobbered by goons from the 2+2 forum, contrary to what you may have read in the comments. In fact, I briefly tried to go to work for PokerStars, on a lark; but for some reason, I never got a response—go figure. I'll tell that story, and say a few words about the recent harassment letter PokerStars sent to Coding the Wheel readers, in the next installment.
I don't want to start the year on a negative note.
Speaking of PokerStars: today marks the first day of the 2009 PokerStars Supernova Elite program.
To earn the rank of a Supernova Elite VIP you must accumulate 1,000,000 VIP Player Points during the calendar year (January 1st through December 31st). Once you have earned the required VPPs you're a Supernova Elite through at least the end of January of the following year.
Not many people have the time or motivation to "go Supernova"...
...and it's too bad, as this particular promotion can be (I've said it before) life-changing. If you can find between six and twelve months of empty time this year, without losing your job, defaulting on your mortgage, and/or getting divorced by your spouse—and if you can hold your own at the poker table—what are you waiting for?
Go for it.
If you do, make sure to check out the Official 2009 Supernova Elite Pursuit thread on 2+2. The signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal, as always on 2+2, but there's still an awful lot of signal. By the end of the year, this thread will have grown to monstrous proportions. To see what I mean, take a look at last year's Official 2008 Supernova Elite Pursuit thread which went 890 pages, with some 13,344 individual comments.
For some, Supernova Elite is a true obsession, and I support that.
What amazes me is that we live in a world where any of this is possible. Sit down at your computer. Click certain locations on the screen. Key certain letters on the keyboard. Congratulations, you've just achieved PokerStars Supernova Elite status, written a best-selling novel, gotten a cushy telecommuting job, or built the next killer app. It's crazy. Keystrokes and button-clicks have transformative power all out of proportion to their muscle cost, and as the world grows more connected, that power increases.
Of course, you have to pick the right permutation of keys and clicks.
If you had enough time, you could mash the keyboard randomly, like an angry child, and eventually, you'd get lucky and end up with one of Shakespeare's plays, or who knows, perhaps the authentic story of JFK's assassination. This, of course, is the million monkeys scenario. Another, more structured, way to go about it, would be to calculate the value of Pi to some arbitrarily huge number of digits and convert to binary, although in so doing you'd be guilty of child pornography, violations of national security, and death threats against every politician in the world.
Jorge Luis Borges gives the classic exposition of the idea in his famous short story, The Library of Babel (also available in this eye-straining online version):
He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
The lesson I take from this, on New Year's Day, is that Borges's Library, the value of Pi, and the cubicle farm with a trillion monkeys all contain the exact, second-by-second account of the next year of your life, in all the languages that have been or will ever be spoken. That doesn't mean the next year is set in stone; contained within the value of Pi is the history of every possible and every impossible permutation of events that could befall you in a minute, a year, or a century.
Choose one.
And that, ladies and gents, is the only New Year's Resolution that really matters.
Posted by James Devlin 30 comment(s)
