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The next morning we wired ourselves up. Claude wore the computer and the radio transmitter and would use his big toes to operate switches hidden in his shoes. I wore the radio receiver with the new steel wires going up my neck to the speaker in my right ear canal. As I stood ready to leave for the casino, Claude cocked his head and with an elfish smile asked, “What makes you tick?” Claude was jokingly referring to the strange sounds (actually these were musical tones) he would be sending from the computer he was wearing to my ear canal, once we went into action at the roulette table. As I look back now from the future, seeing myself wired up with our equipment, I stop that moment in time and I think about a deeper meaning to the question of what makes me tick. I was at a point then in life when I could choose between two very different futures. I could roam the world as a professional gambler winning millions per year. Switching between blackjack and roulette, I could spend some of the winnings as perfect camouflage by also betting on other games offering a small casino edge, like craps or baccarat. My other choice was to continue my academic life. The path I would take was determined by my character, namely, What makes me tick? As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “Character is destiny.” I unfreeze time and watch us head for the roulette tables.
A Man for All Markets
Edward O. Thorp
If a store holds shrinkage below the company’s goal, every associate in that store gets a bonus that could be as much as $200. This is sort of competitive information, but I can tell you that our shrinkage percentage is about half the industry average. Not only that, it helps our associates feel better about each other, and themselves. Most people don’t enjoy stealing, even the ones who will do it if given the opportunity. And most associates don’t want to think that they’re working alongside anyone who does enjoy
Sam Walton
Sam Walton and John Huey
including much of the Wuhan lab’s work with bat coronaviruses, as part of the international effort to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by predicting how it might emerge. The new study was entitled “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses Provides New Insights into the Origin of SARS Coronavirus.” These researchers, the American officials learned, had found a population of bats from caves in Yunnan Province that gave them insight into how SARS coronaviruses originated and spread. But what caught the eye of the US officials was this line: “Cell entry studies demonstrated that three newly identified SARSr-CoVs with different S protein sequences are all able to use human ACE2 as the receptor, further exhibiting the close relationship between strains in this cave and [the original 2002–3] SARS-CoV.” The ACE2 receptor is an enzyme attached to the cell membranes in the lungs, heart, arteries, kidneys, and intestines. It was the primary entry point for the original SARS coronavirus when infecting human lungs, because of a rare, simple, and exquisitely effective compatibility between the virus and the human body: the S protein in the virus linked with the ACE2 receptor in the lung cells of the human victims, allowing the virus to inject genetic material into the host cell, where the DNA replicates and then moves on to infect other cells. Now, these Wuhan scientists presented a paper showing they had found three new viruses that could do the same thing. The researchers boasted that they may have found the cave where the original SARS coronavirus originated. But all the US diplomats cared about was that three new viruses had been discovered that had been found to be potentially dangerous for humans—and that these viruses were now in a lab with which they were largely unfamiliar.
Chaos Under Heaven
Josh Rogin
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