Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (67 page)

TAKING ADVANTAGE

The crowds didn’t disperse as the fire spread. They actually grew, and not just to watch: They came to loot. By midnight, police had arrested 750 people, some of whom were business owners trying to salvage stock from their own burning stores. By 2 a.m., even some of the out-of-town firemen, convinced they had no hope of fighting the blaze, had joined in the looting. And to top it all off, many of the firefighters were drunk. As early as 8:00, police had passed out whiskey in a misguided attempt to keep firefighters awake and alert. One news report told of a drunken firefighter who claimed he saw fireballs falling from the sky, signifying the apocalypse. (It turned out to be the flames reflected on the white feathers of some passing geese.)

Why are U.S. Marines called “leathernecks?” They once wore…

TOLL OF DESTRUCTION

In the 17 hours the fire raged:

• Thirty people died, including 12 firefighters.

• Property totaling $75 million was destroyed (worth about $3.5
billion
today).

• A total of 776 buildings, tenanted by 960 companies, burned to the ground.

• More than 300 warehouses full of wool, leather, shoes, paper, and hardware were lost.

• Thousands of people were left jobless and homeless.

• The blocks bordered by Washington, Summer, Broad, and State streets were completely destroyed—an area of 65 acres.

AFTERMATH

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all: The Boston Fire had been predicted. During the Chicago fire just a year earlier in 1871, more than 300 people had lost their lives and over 300,000 acres of the city had burned down. In the wake of that fire, insurance companies surveyed other large cities to assess their potential future losses. Their conclusion: Boston would be the next to go because it had no enforced building code or fire regulations. Many business owners ignored the report, mistakenly believing that granite was fireproof; some didn’t even bother to insure their property. Other businesses understood the message and insured their buildings for up to six times their worth to collect when their businesses were inevitably destroyed. Result: The Boston fire bankrupted 35 insurance companies.

The district was completely rebuilt in less than two years—financed mostly by money from insurance claims. And the fire brought needed changes to the city: Streets were widened to prevent flames from jumping them, a citywide board of fire commissioners was formed, and a uniform building code was passed. As a result, this was the last major fire in Boston—but it wasn’t the last in North America. In the next 40 years, Atlanta, Seattle, Baltimore, and Toronto would all suffer similar fires. But, except for the Chicago fire and the citywide inferno after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Boston’s fire was the deadliest and most costly.

…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.

B
ALANCING 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
.)

T
HE 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.”