Where do you think this peculiar practice is going down?
OK, let me get this straight. A bunch of muttonheads are burying idols in their yards thinking it will magically get someone to buy their house, the Strib runs it as a straight story, yet the right wing somehow claims that the mainstream media is hostile to religion? Unbelievable.
Yeah, nice middle-class neighborhoods in suburban Minnesota.
Then there was the guy at the booth behind me at the coffeeshop bragging about how his “system” at the slots in his weekly trips to the casino was paying off, and he was investing all of his winnings in gold and silver. It was very distracting: I had to grit my teeth and restrain myself from turning around and giving the poor old fool a lecture in probability.
Oooh! I know this one! Without even reading the article, I predict that the statues being buried are ones of St. Joseph, and there are all sorts of different places that people are saying it should be buried to get the house sold. Am I right?
Superstition is a term that describes magic-religious thought at its basic. Religion is the same thing, coupled with some moral or heroic messages to get more appeal. Both are the result of concrete thinking, the thinking at the pre-adolescent level.
Brilliant! Yes, and they’re buried upside down and facing in particular directions.
Fools and their money, etc… Vegas and state lottos thrive on just such mathematical illiteracy.
My wife did that and swears it worked. Yes, someone did come off the street and ask us if we were planning to sell our house and we did…it was the last house to sell for below market value in the DC area. I’m holding out for a statue of St. The Donald next time.
Yeah, upside down, rightside up, in the flowerbed, under the “For Sale” sign, facing the “For Sale” sign, facing the house, facing the street, facing North, facing South…I could just go on and on about the various permutations of this little superstition. There’s even an urban legend about a frustrated seller who threw away a St. Joseph statuette and read two weeks later “Local Dump Sold.”
I’m really not too surprised a bunch of suburbanites bought into it.
Yes, because the Omnipotent/Omniscient Creator of the Universe and Everything in It really *does* care whether or not you get your asking price for your McMansion, so be sure to bury that made-in-china-by-slave-labor Plastic Jesus(TM) in the right spot … this also explains why things are so screwed up in the world: the Almighty is too busy looking over the “for sale” listings to fix them.
You know something is wrong with the world when you read something and can’t figure out whether it was originally published in The Onion or the NYT. At this rate the Onion might have to stop making up crazy stories and just report on what people are actually doing.
This is one of those old urban legends that gets recycled from time to time. Jan Harald Brunvand wrote about it in (I think) Curses! Broiled Again!
At least now you’ll know which of your neighbors is going to credulously tell you the story of The Hook or the Old Lady with Hairy Knuckles and a Hatchet in Her Purse.
At least now you’ll know which of your neighbors is going to credulously tell you the story of The Hook or the Old Lady with Hairy Knuckles and a Hatchet in Her Purse.
And we can only hope that when the credulous neighbors employ the awesome power of St. Anthony and leave Morris that they have the good fortune to move into the Neighborhood of Friendly Mafiosi.
But it has to be cheaper than realtor commissions!
I don’t agree with your second example. It is true that the average winnings, with the average taken over gamblers, must be negative for a casino to stay in business. But from this it does not follow without additional assumptions that the average earnings of a particular gambler, with the average taken over weeks, must be negative.
A casino may tolerate a situation where clever gamblers win on an average as long as the losses are made up by a large number of dumb gamblers. If that sounds unbelievable, just take a look at the stock market.
Not to mention the fact that a particular slot machine may actually be a deterministic system and someone who can reverse engineer it in sufficient detail may not be gambling at all.
I don’t get it – why St. Joseph? Is St. Joe the patron saint of real estate or something?
Who do you have to bury if you want your neighbors to move?
Shades of Animal Crossing? (google it) Although obviously the idols will be less musical than their Nintendo counterparts.
Your neighbour’s dog.
I was in southern California for grad school and made a lot of trips into the southwest for hiking. We would usually hit Las Vegas on the way back for a cheap buffet breakfast. I really couldn’t see the attraction of gambling. Roulette: 38 possibilities and it pays 35 to 1. No disguises, just please give us your money. And tip the waitress for the drinks.
“Not to mention the fact that a particular slot machine may actually be a deterministic system and someone who can reverse engineer it in sufficient detail may not be gambling at all.”
Considering the number of plays that it takes to establish with enough confidence that a simple coin is deterministic (ie fake; 16 throws if I remember correctly) I think it’s safe to say that since that guy wasn’t broke, he was deluded.
This was the best part:
Magic statue = ridiculous, omnipresent being who responds to your request for a quick sale = perfectly sensible.
Roulette: 38 possibilities and it pays 35 to 1.
As crude and unsporting as European croupiers rightfully find the trick, I have to admit that whoever came up with the idea of adding 00 to American wheels was an evil genius.
Hah, I was expecting the crude clay statues Gyroids are based on. How disappointing that it’s just a saint.
The slot machine “system” isn’t completely implausable, but random-dude-in-coffee-shop is probably just deluded. Slot machines are constantly redesigned because people can and do reverse engineer them and create devices to manipulate them.
Also, many video poker machines pay out over 100% with perfect play (casinos will advertise this fact.) However, perfect play is difficult (but not impossible). The rate of return isn’t probably good enough to be worth it.
There usted to be a quasi-secret math class at MIT that trained and sent students to Vegas and Atlantic City to win at blackjack. They were actually incorporated, had investors and turned a profit. The students would often get blacklisted and resorted to disguises. I don’t know if it still exists, as the casinos have taken countermeasures against card-counting (using more decks at once, or machines that constantly reshuffle the shoe).
OTOH, slot machines give you a better return (95%, I believe) than those CoinStar change-rolling machines in supermarkets (92%). But the drinks are cheaper at the super.
When did the switch occur, RavenT? Were there ever 0 only roulette wheels in the US or did the first guy to import/make them have the cunning idea?
The only thing that successfully stopped them was using facial recognition software and the MIT yearboook. Anyone from MIT is now effectively blacklisted from Vegas. It hardly seems worth it, when card counting that can give you a minimal edge over the casino given certain common rule sets is actually very easy. The tricky bit is either increasing the edge to more than about 0.5%, and/or disguising the very obvious betting patterns the method generates without losing your edge. Frankly it strikes me as a very boring way to make money even if you’re good, with the added risk of beatings from casino security.
Don’t know, Ginger Yellow–it’s been the design for at least 25 years, but how long before that, I can’t say.
It would be interesting to know how many of the skeptics here have their own secret talismans. I bet the number is not zero.
Plastic St. Josephs seem harmless enough. Feng shui costs real money sometimes.
You know something is wrong with the world when you read something and can’t figure out whether it was originally published in The Onion or the NYT.
Or Weekly World News… Then again, there are apparently many people out there who lack the ability to even recognize there’s supposed to be a difference.
Anyone from MIT is now effectively blacklisted from Vegas.
So much for my foolproof plan for paying off my student loans.
Something bothers me about the MIT story, though. I know capitalists often do all kinds of stupid crap, but high profile long lived ones like those who run casinos surely know how to calculate odds and would design a game that the house has the edge on. I did remember seeing somewhere that the odds in blackjack are still against you even if you play perfectly, so something is fishy.
Roulette: 38 possibilities and it pays 35 to 1. No disguises, just please give us your money.
Actually, if you ever saw the CSI episode on this, then, “It was based on real people.” But roulette is a whole lot bigger of a problem to do, since you have to have a calculation device with you, which isn’t, unlike card counting, actually legal. Slots are even worse, while cheat devices that fake out the machine have been created, its generally very hard to get more than general probabilities off them. Unless there is a bug in the random number generation, you are looking at a “minimum” of three reels with 40-50 stops, of which only one is a jackpot and all the rest are adjusted to give between 92-95% returns.
Now… There *was* a bug in the poker machines random number system that someone figured out over time that let them win continuously, but… Still, its can be an interesting time killer, as long as you don’t throw too much at it, and there is always a slight chance you will come out ahead on any given day, its just not something a sane person takes seriously. Some of the newer ones though are not unlike simple arcade games, albeit a lot more irritating when you lose. lol
The odds are against you even if you play perfectly (ie with a given set of cards and a particular dealer’s hand you always make the appropriate play – there are tables easily available on the net). It depends on the specific rules a casino is operating (there’s a calculator here: http://tinyurl.com/8qlvu ), but the house edge in blackjack is typically around 0.5% and can be anything up to 1%. This is still far less than most casino games, which makes it more susceptible to techniques such as card counting that increase the player’s edge by a small amount. If the house edge is only 0.5%, then a shift of 1% in the player’s favour means he/she makes a profit.
“Slot machines are constantly redesigned because people can and do reverse engineer them and create devices to manipulate them.”
Um, yes, I have heard that before, but forgot. So it’s feasible and I was wrong.
And the fact that slot machines seems to give 90-95 % return hints by itself at feasibility. I didn’t know that and am a bit surprised. I thought the psychology in play was the fishermans; few “wins” make ones reward system give a big and hooking :-) jolt each time.
Maybe I should spend more time at casinos. What one can learn here!
Beginning in 1996 there were some slot machines which gave an edge to a savvy gambler (actually there were some few machines that did this for a few years before then, but the edge was terribly small). This got better and better for the next few years, then got a bit out of hand (too many hustlers annoying the patrons) and the vast majority of these machines were taken out a few years back. The others were retuned to give worse odds for the hustlers. The machines with edges are essentially gone for any practical purposes; certainly the days when you could guarantee $200-300/day in slot machine winnings are long gone (that was around say, 1997-2000).
However, note that in virtually every case when you hear someone talking about a “system” with slot machines, they are NOT talking about these machines — they are just talking about some personal ideas about winning that are pretty much a casino’s dream — they love these customers because they typically lose, but fool themselves into thinking they don’t or won’t. (It’s typical, for instance, for gamblers to remember their wins and forget their losses — something a pro would, and could not, do to win regularly.)
Pro forma protest thet they’re not idols; they’re sacramentals…
Yeah, OK.
When we had to move in a hurry because the landlord sold our place, a well-meaning Unitarian friend gave us a plastic St. Joseph to bury in, um, I guess it was the yard of the house we wanted to buy. Anyway, his inexperience showed: What he’d actually bought us was a statue of St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes. No we didn’t bury it; it’s in the guest room next to the row of glow-in-the-dark Virgin Marys and the wind-up Nunzilla.
In case you ever need it, here’s how to tell St. Joseph (the Jesus’ stepdad one) from the rest of the bearded guys in robes: Sometimes he’s got a carpenter’s square and/or a baby Jesus* but usually he’s holding a walking stick that’s got flowers blooming from it. St. Jude has a sort of round medallion held in front of his chest. A skinny guy with a pig is St. Anthony of the Desert, not to be confused with St. Anthony of Padua, who wears a habit and is usually holding a book. The latter is the one you pray to when you’ve lost something. Well, it worked for my mother.
I do have a holy card on the dashboard, of St. Rita, the patron saint of parking. I figure she’s an avatar of the Goddess Asphalta.
*Don’t confuse him with St. Christopher, who carries the baby Jesus up on his shoulder. Though he’s been demoted to the status of legend in the last few decades, so I guess he’s just Mister Christopher now. Same thing happened to Saint/Ms Veronica. Hmph.
Oh, no…not Saint Veronica! She was hot.
I hope St. Betty and St. Jughead are still worshipped.
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