"Nothing is but what is not."

4 February 2024

By Frank Scoblete

This article has to do with playing casino games that should be random but might not be. It’s the “oh, my lord what is going on?”

I am now in another universe. That means out there in space all the way to the beginnings of everything and also right here on our little Earth, a planet that used to make some sense to me.

Follow me on this and you will see why I am now disoriented and wondering about the foundations of everything I knew to be foundations of everything I knew.

I am so confused.

I am sure most of you have heard of the 10 billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope, the most precise and greatest telescope mankind has ever invented. It is out there in space over a million miles from Earth honing in on everything we never, ever, ever saw all the way to before we saw everything out there so far, far away.

This telescope has revolutionized our view of the universe. It has found structures that could not have ever existed based on our “big bang” theory of the universe. It has found galaxies (that might no longer exist) as old as the universe, far older than anything that we have ever seen. Where the heck did they come from? The ‘big bang” might not have created what we are seeing. Oh, nuts!

Astronomers and physicists are going ape trying to reconstruct what our universe actually is, as opposed to what we thought it was.

I follow all of this on YouTube, my source for much of my outer-space information.

Okay, okay, that is out there so far that all of this is way before our section of the universe existed. I will let that rest for now because I am not sure what is really going on in reality out there.

The next piece really shattered me. It has to do with coin flipping. A study of hundreds of thousands of coin flips has put the concept of randomness on its head – so to speak.

We have always believed that a coin flip was a 50-50 proposition. Indeed, 50 percent of the flips would be heads and 50 percent would be tails. Massive studies have now shown that the 50/50 proposition is (shall we say) BS!

That’s correct. You see the side of the coin that is facing up will wind up being the winner of the flip 50.8 percent of the time. The side that is down will be the loser of the flip.

Oh, come on, really? That ruins one of the truisms we use in gambling about odds and probabilities. Could it be that random doesn’t actually exist in the universe?

You know on a slot machine the RNG is called the random-number generator. Except that it actually isn’t the random-number-generator. It is the pseudo-random-number-generator as in pseudo doesn’t actually mean the device is really random! Nuts! Now we find that flipping a coin is just a pseudo coin flip that is not 50/50.

Okay, my universe is slowly falling apart.

So, how are you doing today?

Frank Scoblete’s books are available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, e-books, libraries, and bookstores.