Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  …leather collars to protect their necks from being slashed by sabers.

  WHY YOU GET MOTION SICKNESS

  If you’re reading this book in a car on a windy road, you’ll know why you feel queasy.

  BALANCING ACT

  Your ears do more than just hear—they are also home to your vestibular system, the set of tiny organs that your brain uses to maintain your balance. Even when you’re sitting still, your body is moving ever so slightly. Your vestibular system is so sensitive that it is able to detect these slight movements and send signals to your brain, which responds by instruct ing various muscles to counteract the movement. This continuous process of movement and response is how your body maintains its balance when you’re sitting, standing, walking, running, or moving in any other way. The bad news is that the organs of balance are so sensitive that when they’re overstimulated by too much motion, they can cause motion sickness. Here’s a look at how the organs of balance work…and how they can make you sick as a dog.

  ON THE LEVEL

  The anatomy of your vestibular system is pretty complicated—so complicated, in fact, that scientists still haven’t unlocked all its secrets. But the general principle is simple. Have you ever used a carpenter’s level to straighten a picture on the wall? The level contains a small round cylinder filled with liquid, and the liquid has an air bubble floating in it. You put the level on the picture, then adjust the picture until the bubble moves to the center of the cylinder. When the bubble is centered, the picture is level.

  The vestibular system works kind of like a carpenter’s level: It consists of several chambers in your inner ear, each of which is filled with liquid. But instead of containing bubbles of air, each chamber contains tiny hairs that sprout from the bottom of the chamber like blades of grass. When your body begins to move or accelerate, the fluid in the chambers begins to slosh around, which causes the hairs to move, too.

  Q. What’s the all-night diner’s term for 2:30 a.m., when the bars close? A. “Drunk Thirty.”

  Each time the hairs move, nerve cells at their bases send signals to the brain. Your brain then interprets the signals coming from the different chambers to determine how your body is moving through space.

  It takes only one carpenter’s level to straighten a bookshelf, but it takes several fluid-filled chambers to detect and measure all the different kinds of motion your body is experiencing. Some are sensitive to linear acceleration—whether you are moving in a straight line, up or down, forward or backward, left or right. The chambers that sense linear acceleration also sense the Earth’s gravitational pull. Are you lying on your side? Hanging upside down? Other specialized chambers detect angular acceleration—they can tell when you’re spinning in a circle, turning left or right, or tumbling head over heels. Your brain processes the signals coming from these chambers to figure it out.

  WHY YOU GET SICK

  This complicated system has its limits—if the motion your body is experiencing becomes too extreme, the vestibular organs send more signals to your brain than it can handle.

  The situation is made even worse when your eyes send contradictory information to your brain. For example, if you’re riding in a car that is travelling on a winding road, your organs of balance are sensing the car’s movement and reporting all of it to your brain. But if you’re staring at the seatback in front of you, your eyes see a more stable scene—you and the seatback are moving more or less in sync—and they report much less movement to your brain. So are you moving a lot, or a little? Your brain can’t tell, and the confusion caused by the mixed signals makes you more likely to get motion sickness.

  FALSE ALARM

  So how do mixed signals end up as nausea? Scientists who study the vestibular system have uncovered evidence that it has a second purpose: helping your body detect when it has ingested poison. When certain poisons are detected in your bloodstream, your vestibular system bombards your brain with more signals than it can process…just as it does when you’re rocking back and forth on a boat.

  Astronauts get “spacesick” so often that the space shuttle toilet has a special setting for vomit.

  Scientists theorize that when your brain becomes overloaded with signals reporting lots of motion, it may be misinterpreting the signals to mean that you have eaten poison. Your brain then tries to limit the damage by causing you to expel whatever poisons may still be in your stomach before they can enter your bloodstream and poison you further. It does this by making you vomit.

  Why are some people more susceptible to motion sickness than others? It could be some people are better at telling the difference between poison and rapid motion than other people are. Another possibility: Some people are sensitive to even the tiniest traces of poison in their system, and the price they pay for this powerful survival trait is getting sick in the car a lot.

  HOW TO AVOID MOTION SICKNESS

  • If you take Dramamine or another motion-sickness medicine, take it at least an hour before you leave on your trip. Eating food containing ginger may also help.

  • Don’t overeat, and don’t drink a lot, either. If your stomach isn’t full, you’re less likely to get motion sickness.

  • If you’re travelling by plane, try to get a seat over the wings. The plane moves the least there. Taking a cruise? Ask for a cabin near the center of the ship.

  • Don’t read in moving vehicles. Look out the window and off into the distance. That allows your eyes to report more of the motion that your vestibular system is also sending to your brain, which minimizes the contradictory signals that make motion sickness worse. If you can’t look out a window, try closing your eyes.

  • Put your head against the headrest. That minimizes movement by keeping your head in sync with the rest of your body. Recline your seat or lie down, if you can. Another thing to try: Open a window (air blowing on your face seems to help).

  * * *

  IS THIS WARNING LABEL NECESSARY?

  On a smoke detector: “This product will not extinguish a fire.”

  On a bottle of drain cleaner: “If you cannot read these directions and warnings, do not use this product.”

  The Russian Imperial Necklace has appeared as a prop in 1,215 Hollywood films.

  CARD SHARKS, PART II

  Part II of our story about card counting and how some kids from MIT won millions at gambling casinos with a system that was unbeatable…almost. (Part I is on page 251.)

  THE HOUSE RULES

  The casinos in Nevada had developed ways to uncover and thwart card counting…but they had no idea that the greatest threat to their control of blackjack gaming was being quietly developed 2,500 miles away.

  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has some of the smartest minds in the world among its student body. What’s less known is that MIT students are notorious for their maverick attitude: They love to crack seemingly unsolvable problems just for the fun of it. Sometimes the problems can involve quantum mechanics and string theory. In this case, the question was: “How do we beat the casinos?” The answer was elegantly simple—and, for the casinos, very expensive.

  DREAM TEAM

  In 1992 a group of MIT students formed an underground club innocently named “Strategic Investments.” Their real intent was to apply Thorp’s card-counting system in a radical new way. Previous card counters were all lone wolves. They worked solo, using a technique called bet spreading—betting low when the deck is against you, betting high the minute it turns in your favor. And that made them easy targets for casino security.

  The MIT card counters played as a team. One person was the “spotter.” His job wasn’t to play but to observe the game and count cards, watching for the crucial moment when a deck went positive. Next was the “controller,” a decoy who bet small while verifying the spotter’s count and, most importantly, calculating when to make the big bet. The controller wouldn’t make the bet, though. That was the role of the aptly named “big player.” He’d wait for the controller’s signal
, then sweep up to a table and wipe it out with one massive bet. To all appearances—and to casino security—he was just another high roller who happened to get lucky one time.

  1st pick in the 1st NFL draft: Jay Berwanger (1936). He never played—he became a writer.

  The MIT team trained for months before trying out their system. Then they went to Las Vegas…and proceeded to win millions. At their peak they had 125 people working the tables. For months the casinos couldn’t figure out what was going on, but they knew that, whatever it was, they had to stop it quickly or they’d be out of business. It was that serious.

  RAISING THE ANTE

  To make matters worse for the casinos, in 1993 three of the best MIT players split from Strategic Investments to form their own group. Semyon Dukach (big player), Katie Lilienkamp (controller), and Andy Bloch (spotter) were one of the most successful SI teams in the field. But they were tired of sharing their winnings. Why was this a bad development for the casinos? Because the new team (they called themselves the Amphibians) was convinced they could come up with a system that was even better.

  Counting cards is difficult for most blackjack players, but it had never been an issue for the nimble brains of these young math wizards. The Amphibians decided that if they were going to raise their game they had to focus on the betting side of the equation. They started by writing a complex computer program that could run simulations of every type of hand they had encountered. Their analysis brought them to a level of hand recognition that was simply awesome, and the new combination—perfect card counting and flawless betting strategy—was devastatingly effective. The Amphibians went on a winning rampage. But the casinos were about to respond with a powerful counterpunch—a woman named Beverly Griffin.

  A FACE IN THE CROWD

  Griffin ran a private-investigation company specializing in casino operations. In the summer of 1993, she was hired by a consortium of desperate casino owners. Their instructions: Find a way to stop the card counters for good. She started by creating a database of suspected card counters based on information supplied by the casinos. Then she started looking for connections. Names weren’t very helpful, as many gamblers (including the Amphibians) routinely used aliases when they played. Addresses—required by the casinos before they can pay out—were another matter, and that’s where Griffin made her breakthrough.

  How about you? The average American uses about 57 sheets of toilet paper per day.

  She noticed an unusual concentration of winners from the Boston area. More telling was that most of them appeared to play only on weekends and were in their early 20s—college age. Acting on a hunch, Griffin got hold of some MIT yearbooks. She opened one up and, as she said later, “Lo and behold, there they were. Looking all scholarly and serious, and not at all like card counters.”

  Working with the casinos and using the MIT yearbooks to build a new database, Griffin and her team helped develop some of the first facial-recognition software. Using images taken from the hundreds of security cameras on the casino floor, a suspected card counter’s face could be compared against the computer database and picked up before he or she reached the blackjack tables. Once the Amphibians learned of the casinos’ “secret weapon,” they knew their card-counting days in America were over. So they decided to take their show on the road. They went to Europe.

  THE LAST STAND

  For three weeks the Amphibians—Dukach, Lilienkamp, and Bloch—played and won in London, Paris, and other major gambling locales. Finally they arrived at the mecca of gambling—the Grand Casino in Monte Carlo. The evening started well. All three played the same table, and they were winning. Then Katie Lilienkamp decided to take a potty break. On her way back to the table she was stopped by four security guards and ushered into a side room.

  Semyon Dukach and Andy Bloch were already there. A picture of the three of them was scanned and uploaded to the Griffin Investigations office in Las Vegas. The Internet had made the Las Vegas database a global one, so when the identification came back positive (since they were all known Las Vegas card counters), they were unceremoniously shown the door. As Bloch recalled, “The guy said if we ever set foot in the country again we were going to be really hurt.”

  Wisely, the Amphibians chose that moment to disband their club and retire.

  ENDGAME

  The war between the casinos and the best card counters in the world was over. As for the Amphibians, they went on with their lives. Although they had won lots of money, the whole operation had been mostly a lark, an intriguing hobby that paid out as much in adrenaline as it did cash. (None of the MIT groups will say how much cash they won.) “I love playing,” Semyon Dukach said later. “I love beating the casinos, knowing that my team was ahead of them, and tricking this huge $50 billion industry.” Remember, what they did was not illegal (only Taft’s personal computer fell into that category). Katie Lilienkamp went back to MIT and became an engineer. Andy Bloch became a professional poker player. Dukach teaches blackjack for a living.

  Owls cannot move their eyes. (They have to move their heads.)

  And what about Edward Thorp, the genius who started it all? He took his mastery of probability theory to the biggest gambling table of all: Wall Street. He founded hedge funds and made untold fortunes managing them using techniques based on his understanding of the odds—and his willingness to place well-calculated bets.

  * * *

  GAMBLING TRIVIA

  • The expression “rolling the bones” means to roll dice. And it used to be literal. Dice were made from animal bones—the Romans used sheep’s knuckles—for thousands of years.

  • The oldest known dice with regular sides were found in northern Iraq. They’re made of baked clay and date to about 3000 B.C.

  • President Richard Nixon won $6,000 playing poker in his first two months in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He used it to help fund his first campaign for Congress. (He won that, too.)

  • More than 50 million decks of cards are sold in the U.S. every year.

  • Do you know the book According to Hoyle? It’s considered the seminal book on the rules of poker (and many other games of chance). It refers to Edmond Hoyle, who wrote the book A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist in 1742 (whist was a popular card game at the time). Hoyle died 150 years before poker was invented.

  The Eiffel Tower is repainted every seven years. (The paint weighs 60 tons.)

  RALLY ’ROUND THE FLAG

  Every country has one of its own; so do the queen of England and the president of the United States. Here’s a look at the history and traditions associated with flags.

  POLE POSITION

  If you had to guess what came first, the flagpole or the flag, what would your answer be? If you guessed the flag, you guessed wrong: The pole predates the flag by thousands of years. It dates back to prehistoric times, when rulers of civilizations as diverse as the Aztecs, the Mongols, the Persians, and the Egyptians carried decorated ceremonial staffs or spears as symbols of their authority. These staffs were often topped with ornaments carved in the shape of animals, gods, or other religious symbols. Some were also decorated with feathers, horse tails, strips of cloth, or dried grasses, which gave the staff a broomlike appearance. Soldiers marched with these staffs in ceremonial processions and even carried them into battle.

  It wasn’t until after the Chinese discovered the secret of making silk in about 2,700 B.C. that they became the first civilization to attach banners to ceremonial staffs. Silk was well suited for the purpose—it was lightweight and strong, which allowed flags to flow freely, even in the lightest breeze. In the centuries that followed, flags spread to Mongolia, India, and Persia, and then to Rome and on to the rest of Europe.

  QUITE A SIGHT

  These early banners had important ceremonial and symbolic value, just as national flags do today. They also served a practical purpose. They could be seen from great distances in battle, which meant generals could follow the course of the fighting by watching the flags,
and even use them to signal subordinates. Flapping flags also indicated how strongly and in which direction the wind was blowing, which enabled archers to adjust and improve their aim.

  Wardrobe malfunction: Jayne Mansfield “popped out of her dress” during the 1957 Oscars.

  “Defending the flag” was more than just an expression—soldiers literally fought to defend their colors, and if the person carrying the flag was killed or wounded, the other soldiers “rallied around the flag” to prevent it from being captured by the enemy. If the flag was lost, the battle was more likely to end in defeat.

  FLAG ETIQUETTE

  There is no single international set of guidelines detailing how national flags should be handled and displayed. Nevertheless, many countries have adopted similar rules. For example:

  Respecting the Flag

  • National flags should be displayed during daylight hours and taken down at sunset. They should only be left up all night if they are well illuminated, and they should not be allowed to fly if the weather is so severe that the flag could be damaged.

  • Flags should be treated with respect—never made into clothing or used as curtains, tablecloths, and so on. Indoors, they should not touch the floor; outside, they should not touch the ground or water. Flags should not be printed on napkins, shopping bags, or anything intended to be disposable.

  • The national flag has precedence over regional, local, and other flags. In ceremonies in which more than one flag is being raised, the national flag should be raised first, followed by state, county, and city flags, in that order; and it should be lowered last.

  Flying Many Flags

  • In centuries past, it was common in wartime for a conquering army to communicate its victory over the enemy by hoisting its battle flag over the enemy’s on a single flagpole. Because of this, when the flags of more than one nation are displayed together, each flag must be flown on its own flagpole, and every flag must be flown at the same height.