googlegambling

Gambling lacks the honest appeal to the body of the other vices. If the little devil perched on my shoulder ever wins over the angel on my other, the three of us will go for gluttony or sloth or good old lust. No one in his or her right mind would want to spend eternity in Heavenly Vegas, would they? The point of winning is you can then go out and truly celebrate.

My problem with gambling is not the possible moral corruption, it’s the stupidity. It’s worth remembering that even the venal are purchased. For the innocent among us, that means you get some money for being corrupt. If your pure mind still can’t quite get that idea, just think Dick Cheney. But gambling even taints corruption! At the roulette wheel or at the Lottery kiosk, you pay someone else in order to be corrupt. Isn’t that perfectly dumb?

The essence of the stupidity is simple: the odds are bad, very bad. A Vegas veteran interviewed in Frontline’s excellent attack on gambling couldn’t resist this corny but accurate old saw: “The odds are slim and none…and Slim just left town.”

The mathematics of gambling do have a place, however, if you’ve got some way of handling enormous numbers. Evolution, for instance, depends on the endless and vast spinning of the wheel of DNA. As in Vegas, the mutants almost always lose. But when the chance-driven change happens to fit with the environment, the bug or flower or fish or human can actually win and their likelihood of reproduction increases. (Please note that the real pay-off is in sex.)

What makes the winning possible is the incomprehensible fecundity of nature and the inconceivable extension of time. In other words, the numbers need to be VERY BIG for the mathematics of gambling to work. Which only begs the question:

How can we make big numbers work in our favour?

Googlegambling is a good example because web searchers face similarly large numbers. Each day over a billion people go online looking for stuff - and the number will jump dramatically when the $100 laptop hits the dusty streets of the planet. Every day each one of us makes half-a-dozen searches and two out of three of the requests go through Google. Managing this quantum query-fest is, of course, quite a task but generally - and amazingly - it seems to work! Meanwhile, like martini-powered punters on a short-lived winning streak, we don’t even contemplate what’s really going on. Numbers that are as big and bad as those thrown at us by the roulette wheel start to work in our favour! The Googlegamble pays off.

And what about our winnings?

Even when gambling is good, the house wins: Google takes home the gold.

The actual cash comes from two sources: Google’s sale of its search expertise to other companies and all those not-quite-invisible ads. Whatever the source of revenue, the reason people choose Google is that they believe they’re going to win, that is, find out what they need to know. And a number of experts have calculated what that’s worth to Google; we even know what each question yields in the way of cold, hard cash. Don Dodge of Microsoft has figured out that each search query produces $0.12 ad revenue. Emre Sokullu worked the numbers and came to the conclusion that it comes to about $1 per month for Google from each and every internet user.

Two questions come to mind:

• Where does the money come from?
• What does this mean to educators who want to create personal learning environments?

Next week, I’ll try to answer the first question by relating a real-world example from my own experience doing website design for a Canadian university. (It will probably send you out to buy Google stock.) The second question I’ll tackle the following week in the same Thursday slot.

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