Monday, October 26, 2009

Could blackjack high count could mean you should stand everything on 16 -- could a low count mean you should hit some on 18?


Could blackjack high count could mean you should stand everything on 16 -- could a low count mean you should hit some on 18?

High count means the dealer is more likely to bust -- and you too. Could this mean you should alter your card play as well as your betting?

Got this idea when learning hold'em poker -- the constant calculation between what to play and what the pot odds are.

Maybe you could keep a side count on 7s or 5s. Illegal (in the casinos) blackjack computers supposedly give a 5% edge by keeping track of every card and telling you how to adjust your card play not your betting.

Adjusting your card play might even be enough to beat the casino and would be relatively undetectable. Adjusting your card play could conceivably throw off the casinos about your betting adjustments -- making you look less like a counter because you are deviating from perfect strategy.

Think: the 17 we stand everything on might really be fractional if we could possibly stand on 16.45. It is extremely unlikely that the math just happens to hit on all even numbers -- right? :-) Only the propeller heads know -- or could figure this out. It is possible the count could push the "true" (fractional) stand everything number up to 18 or down to 16. (Separate question: if the "true" [fractional] stand everything number were 17.5, for example, might it be correct to vary your card play between 17 and 18 -- which option I presume was never considered when testing perfect strategy programs -- another concept borrowed from poker?)

Card play adjustment counting might even lead to wholly different cards being considered as small (7 and under or 5 and under). Have no ability to do the math at all. Just got the general idea.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Excess profit from drug manufacturing diverts most scientific research to cobbling copycat potions?


It just occurred to me that the billions in excess profits wrung from drug patent monopolies only serves to divert much -- or most -- scientific research efforts from discovering new cures to cobbling up copycat potions. Did Pasture or Salk need billions dangling in front of them?

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Ho Chi Minh: would be deemed among history's maddest if...


Ho Chi Minh would be deemed among history's maddest if he had gotten a over a million Vietnamese soldiers and over two million Vietnamese civilians from both sides killed to kick out the French colonialists -- which at least would have been a laudable goal. But to bring about the deaths of three million with another three million permanently maimed and another three million wounded but recovered (normal distribution of combat statistics) our of a population of thirty-five million just to force his version of good government on the other half of the country...
...a police state in which he can force millions to die and in which school children are indoctrinated to inform on their parents if they hear them criticize the state plus a loony economic system that leaves everybody poor...
...even if the South Vietnamese for some reason wanted to live that way...
...they held out a lot longer than the French did and fled in droves (almost a million ended up in the USA) when Ho won...

If Gandhi had gotten almost half the population of India killed, permanently maimed or wounded kicking out the British...

South Vietnamese peasants had no reason to revolt. Why; to give their (70 percent) personally owned land over to government communes (it had been close to 100 percent in the north)? If commune-ization did not happen to South Vietnamese farm land, what was the difference that communism was theoretically supposed to worth leaving millions dead? The people of North Vietnam would never have voted to kill off a million of their military age males (one million North Vietnamese soldiers died fighting in the south) to spread their political system. By the time communism showed its true face in the north folks there may have wished they could have remained under French colonialism instead.