It can cut you like a knife, if the gift becomes the fire

Memo to self for future reference: when attempting to explain my research interest in Monte Carlo methods, emphasize early and often that they do not constitute any sort of special information or particularly useful method to gamble better, nor are they particularly applicable ways to study the ways of professional gambling, nor of Monte Carlo casinos. This comes after spending altogether too much time in an online discussion trying to explain my particular interest (fluid dynamics through Monte Carlo methods), with the person I was speaking to repeatedly trying to drag things back into the casino or at least looking for tips (I imagine) about how to gamble more usefully. And then there was the mess following from that when I tried to explain that my work is in statistical mechanics, but that it has essentially nothing to do with statistics. (Statistical mechanics is based on the assumption that we can do complicated problems by looking at averages of particular traits of the problem that are easy to work on, which is what makes it ``statistical'', but what's needed for that constitutes maybe one chapter out of a basic Statistics book.)

For the record, Nicholas Constantine Metropolis (1915 - 1999) and Stanislaw Marcin Ulam (1909 - 1984) named the Monte Carlo methods that because the inspired notion -- finding approximate solutions to a problem through methods that rely on having lots of random numbers and trusting in the Law of Large Numbers that probability is, eventually, on your side -- reminded them of the gambling methods of Monte Carlo casinos. The method is one of the Great Algorithms of the Twentieth Century because while it takes a lot of computer work to get a reasonably good solution, roughly speaking, how much work it takes doesn't grow all that much as you add more variables into the mix, and the algorithms themselves are really, really easy to code. Metropolis was a great namer of things; he also gave the name ``technetium'' to the first synthetically produced chemical element, and ``astatine'' for another. In 1952 he also named his digital computer the ``Mathematical And Numerical Integrator And Computer'', or MANIAC, in the hopes that he could crush the indecent love computer science types had for acronyms by torturing one beyond endurance. Everybody has their off days.

Trivia: The first automobile to use the Phillips-head screw, supplied by the American Screw Company, was General Motors's 1936 Cadillac. Source: One Good Turn, Witold Rybczynski.

Currently Reading: 722 Miles: The Building Of The Subways And How They Transformed New York, Clifton Hood.