Good morning Charlotte Jane
we christen you today
with a name that's sure to make your mother cry
when she looks into your eyes
your life lies in visions before her mind
and mine as we lay awake to fires of night
hoping just to see you smile
as we change from day to day
for each--let this poem remind
that each sun rise
it says to you
Good morning Charlotte Jane
In poker lingo, saying you have "the nuts" is used metaphorically to describe an unbeatable hand. A player flopping the nuts in poker can not be beaten.
A common and certainly apocryphal folk etymology is that the term originated from the historical poker games in the colonial west of America, where if a player bet everything he possessed, he would place the nuts of his wagon wheels on the table to ensure that, should he lose, he would be unable to flee and would have to make good on the bet. Since it would be expected that a player would only make such a bet when he had the best possible hand, the folk lore says that this is how the best possible hand came to be known as the nuts. It is also rumored that these historical games were played only in the winter, and therefore, the nuts that were placed on the table were "stone cold", hence coining the term "stone-cold-nuts" link
Whatever the origin, I think of the nuts that I get at local big box store Target as pretty unbeatable. They are tasty, minimally processed, and cheap. Typically I'll pay $9.99 for a 32oz pail of either raw almonds, roasted(but unsalted cashews), or raw mixed nuts(almonds, cashews, pistachios, walnuts, and hazelnuts).
Acceptable paleo nuts include almonds, Brazil Nuts, cashews, chesnuts, hazelnuts, pecans, pine nuts, pistachios, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, and walnuts.
Most co-ops and higher end grocery stores of Minnesota like Lunds/Byerlys/mount royal foods in Duluth also have good nuts, however they are typically far more expensive(like $6 or more for for 12-16 oz.)If price is of no concern these are the best you can get(They often have more unique flavors) which I think is a cue of certain minerals/vitamins although I can't be sure.
Other lower price stores like Cub Foods and Walmart have cheaper nuts but they tend to be overly salted, or roasted in un-paleo oils(like cottonseed/peanut/soybean). I consider them ok options if you can't find anything else but I wouldn't consume them frequently.
Another good strategic tip that can be used anywhere is that nuts sold for baking tend to be slightly cheaper/less processed than nuts sold individually in the nuts section. I know as a paleo dieter you're not used to going down the baked goods aisle but it does create a unique opportunity to pick up some value if you can avoid the temptations that await you.
The past few years I began to look around for books concerning evolution in practice. I had read a lot of Dawkins, Mayr, and Jared Diamonds books about evolution. However I wanted to switch from that type of learning to learning from people who were doing things where they used evolution in their everyday life. As far as I know Dawkins does not use evolution to think about the things he should and shouldn't eat, nor is he any type of doctor, geneticist, or grower that is using evoultionary ideas in his everyday life. His evolutionary life seems confined to academia. What I found in my search was a book about a man who was the quintessential evolutionary doer: T.V. Munson. His most famous work wasFoundations of American Grape Culture originally published in the early 1900's and still in use today.
I know for a fact Elmer Swenson, the pioneer of the Minnesota wine industry, used what he learned from Munson's book to begin adapting cold hardy grapes to the Minnesota climate. I have been to a few of the wineries/vineyards here in Minnesota like the Cannon Valley winery, and they are making some really excellent wines and growing great tasting grapes. I learned a rather good evolutionary principle by reading Foundations of American Grape Culture where he talks about how breeders will often take their "star" vines and hybridize them together, which Munson argues leads them towards greater and greater fragility. He argues that the best method of hybridizing is to match the vines that are strong at certain characteristics, with vines that compensate for areas in which the star vine is weak.
I would like to start growing my own vines in the next couple years. I started a garden for the first time last year with good success and my wife and I made our own wine this year(with purchased grape must) as we are just wetting our feet.
I want to learn about natural systems by doing. Louis Pasteur when he discovered germs and came up with his germ theory of disease wasn't a doctor, he was working for the French wine and poultry industries.
For any interested in learning about Munson, his only biography was written by Sherrie. S McLeRoy and Roy E. Renfro, titled The Grape Man of Texas.
There is really interesting passage from Foundation of American Grape Culture that I wanted to share that I think tells me a lot about T.V. Munson the person. He entitled it "Personal Qualifications Necessary in the Originator." Which he meant to mean those who would take up the practice of hybridizing and breeding grape vines. He said :
"This work requires not only theoretical knowledge, but also direct personal knowledge, experience, skill, and much of the intentive faculty, with greatpatience and perserverence, without the stimulus of money-making in it, for there is little to the originator. There is no law providing protection to the inventions(varieties) of an originator, as there is to the less meritorious mechanical inventor. The originator must have a great fund of enthusiasm, and an ambition to add somethingto the general fund of human development for the benefit of the world at large, and, that he may reap some some personal compensation, or enjoyment, he must have an intense love of close communion with nature, causing him to admire the infinite correlated life movement; to study the loves and hates prevailing in all organic life and growth, discovering the great fundamental turth in ethics, as well as in the development of organic bbeings, that love breeds life, hate breeds death."(pages 129-130 of Foundations of American grape Culture.
Most people don't know what they're talking about when they speak the words "variance" or attempt to do analysis. There are a lot of statistical Platonists out there, doing math based upon faulty assumptions, rendering their conclusions of little more relevance than if you were to go and ask a priest about your downswing(or upswing). Perhaps they should set up a confessional.
Is poker normal? For the last 20 years poker has been explained by classical ideas of statistics, the normal(or Gaussian) distribution, statistical mean and variance, based upon flipping coins. Yet there are things in poker which traditional theories have never quite been able to explain. Once winning players go on larger(and longer) than expected losing streaks, players win thousands and even millions from unexpected rich fish. These would have been labeled “outliers” and anomalies to the traditional theories, but upon closer inspection it appears that some of the applications of normality are fundamentally flawed.
I have been delving into statistical inference for awhile now; I have not shared what I have discovered from writers like Taleb, Hume, Popper, and most importantly the mathematics of Benoit Mandelbrot because I felt I had not yet understood it. Unlike many mathematicians, I worry about false precision.
The truth I have discovered is this. Many of the ideas of the normal distribution as they are applied to thinking about swings and risk in big-bet and internet poker are incorrect. True, the card distributions you receive will be normally distributed, however your poker results will be dependent, "fat-tailed", and may exhibit skew. The latter two I leave for a later explanation.
Dependence is an important idea, and it is one that can be analyzed. Over 50 years ago the Hydrologist Harold Edwin Hurst set about to build the dams along the Nile River, which were used to regulate water flow and irrigate the cotton fields of Egypt. The Engineers of Hurst’s day made the same assumption many mathematicians today would about the year to year deviations of rainfall. Independence. The amount of rainfall from year to year is simply random Brownian motion. They turned to the mathematics of coin-flipping to construct the height of their dam. They wanted to be able to store enough water to protect against drought, but also to hold water in a series of wet years. They gathered data on the past years average rainfall and jumbled it up, and found a bell curve. Luckily for the Egyptians, Hurst was an empirical scientist.
He examined the actual data and found that the year to year accumulations did not follow a normal distribution. The distinction was this; that if you took the predictions of an assumption of a normal distribution to the data, it would not predict correctly the highest accumulations, nor the lowest troughs. Jumbling up the data was philosophically corrupt, as the order of occurrence was paramount. The engineer’s assumptions would leave the dam height far too low. What Hurst found was a clustering effect, that wet years and dry years tended to occur together at a rate that wouldn’t be predicted by independence. This wasn’t exactly an entirely new observation.
“What God is about to do he showeth unto Pharoah. Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land or Egypt; and there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt; and the famine shall consume the land.” Gen 41: 28-40
Enter Benoit Mandelbrot, and what he calls “the Joseph Effect”, after the biblical character . It is the idea of long dependence and can be measured by a test called a rescaled range statistic and the Hurst exponent(H). H is a measure between 0 and 1 that assumes no underlying distribution of data. Rather it is test that asks the question, so what is the distribution of data?
Hurst gathered data, lots of it. He gathered records of rainfall from wherever he could find them. He examined not only the deviations of rainfall, but also the order of the occurrence of the rainfall and found the same thing over and over. Dependence.
So the obvious question is what relevance does this have for poker? Fast forward to the present day, with the internet poker boom, Poker Tracker, and an abundance of data and you will shortly see. When we play poker we build up bankrolls to play in certain games, and that Hurst’s task of building of a dam is similar to our building of bankrolls.
We can use the same equation Hurst did to test the distribution of our poker results. H = log (Range/standard deviation)/log(N/2). The range is the value difference between the highest and lowest accumulations and N is the number of points in the unit you measure your results in.
If normality was true the Hurst exponent for the data would be .5, indicating normal Brownian motion. A Hurst exponent of less than .5 would indicate that the data tend to keep doubling back on themselves. Yet he found and approximated that deviations in annual rainfall had an exponent of .74, which indicated the persistence of long runs.
Each hand movement today is likely to be recorded; both the dollar deviation and the order of occurrence. In all of the data I have analyzed on internet and big-bet poker I have found dependence(and an absence of normality), however in order falsify the earlier assumptions I need more data, which is why I am asking for it from 2+2ers.
It is quite easy these days to gather data and analyze, and so I understand why it may have been difficult to see some of these ideas past, however the continuance to adhere to an idea in the face of contrary evidence is against the principles of falsification and I believe of science, as outlined by the philosopher Karl Popper.
The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in the beauty of symmetry and the perfection of nature. They believed in ideals. For example they thought the height of the highest mountain had to equal the trough of the deepest depth of the ocean. This is not a view that corresponds to reality. The way that many fit a bell shaped curve to their view of reality, and poker results, has this same ideal at heart.
Some of the swings you go through have an independent and normal aspect to them, and these can be large; however those will all be cancelled out by the law of large numbers. If you look at the measure of your standard deviation, if these were the biggest cause of your downswings, this should converge relatively quickly, say a few thousand hands. However, everyone I have analyzed sees big fluctuations in their standard deviations and it never seems to settle down to anything. So why do you go through a variation of results?
I offer the following explanations as some alternative hypothesis for the reasons you experience deviations, apart from those of the normal distribution of cards.
The first is the way in which you deal with swings, and the way others respond to you. Poker players know this as tilt. If you play worse after losing a hand in which you were a statistical favorite, there will be a heavy dependency to your results. Hours and days later may still be thinking and making plays because of the path dependence of that hand. Your results in this case are not linked to the normal distribution, rather your response to it. This is also similar to the idea that a single butterfly flapping its wings in South America, can cause a hurricane in Florida, while the same butterfly wing flap a day later might not do anything. In this case the normal deviations were a cause of your downswing, but it was not the biggest cause.
The second factor is ecological luck, and I would stress this point. The opponents you are playing against, the amount of money they have, your access to games, are all aspects of luck that are far under emphasized by people that delve into "uncertainty" and then tell you about the deviations of the normal distribution.
Consider the following thought experiment. You are a winning Pot Limit Omaha player over the last few years and join a new site and employ your strategy. You are in luck as its quite effective against the majority of the players on the site. You win 20 buy-ins in the span of a month. Now think about this from your opponents’ perspective. The people who you are best against may now avoid you, they may adapt or they may go broke. The people and strategies you are now playing against are different than the ones you were playing against before. The tough part is that it’s so difficult to notice. You do not notice the big pots you would have won the previous month in the exact same "normal" situation if the other player was playing. You start losing, maybe due to some slight normal randomness of cards, maybe because you use the wrong strategy against someone. You make many of the same bets you did before, however this time maybe you get played back at, or your better hand reading opponents fold their losers and call your bluffs.
Before you know it you've lost 10+ buy-ins. You are stuck as to why. You go to the confessional of your local Gaussianist minister. He tells you about sample size, and the swings of the normal distribution, and although he has no evidence that this was the biggest cause of your losses, or even a cause, he assumes that is why, because that’s his belief. He does some math that you don't quite get, but he assures you, you'll be better in no time and regression to the mean will take care of everything. You feel a little bit better.
You go to poker tracker and find some "mistakes" that you have been making. Basically you adapt, or if you don't you'll go broke. You experiment with some new plays and think about what you are doing wrong. "Wrongness" and "rightness" can be such fickle phrases. Maybe the previous opponents you won so much against come into some money and start playing again and when you go back to the tables and employ your old strategy you win. Maybe you adapt, get better and win. If you do the process starts all over again. If you don’t you go broke.
Over time you seem to go through some rather large deviations and changes that your minister never predicted. One time you even have to switch game types, as no one seems to want to play that old game anymore. Everyone knows how to play it, and there’s a much more exciting game now.
What your minister didn't tell and what is the truth, is that you are involved in an evolving dynamic system. One in which past success does not guarantee future success, like effects may not produce like causes, and you can not make accurate long term predictions. The idea that your risks can be managed by, and that the area of luck you must be most concerned about is bell curve card deviations is a delusion. You must continually adapt your strategies to a changing environment and there can be a great amount of ecological luck and variance in your results.
panayz asked: "Paleo Dieter? Can you provide a definitive explanation, definition or describe what this term means in non confusing language.:)"
A paleo(paleolithic) dieter is one that eats based upon the principle that we are best adapted to eating the types of foods that our ancestors ate in the paleolithic period of our history(10,000+ years ago) and that many of the foods introduced since the beginning of agriculture produce short term and long term stresses that our hunter gather bodies are not used to.
I shall start posting my meals. I am going to include costs and potentially consequences as well. If I eat something and get sick now, or have an expense I can link with the initial meal I will factor it in later.
My general advice is to stick with meat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Mimic combinations that are popular and that your are familiar with but cut out the potatoes/sugars/industrial oils. Drink water, coffee, and tea without milk or sugar. Go for bright colors and and good tastes.
Breakfast with prices:
Ham steak and eggs + grapes
Est cost for 2: $9.50
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