Happy New 365.242129 Days

There are those who would have us believe that in December of 2012, at or near the winter solstice, the world will come to an end. This ominous prediction is based in part on the conclusion that the Mayan 'Long Count' calendar comes to an end of its days at that time. That some of us subscribe to this is a result of how we tend to think about really big numbers.  
In my last blog,"Want to Make a Million?", I danced with the decimal point in order to illustrate a human tendency to believe in "magic" numbers like the fish and loaf that fed the multitudes, or "lucky" numbers that defeat all odds, or simply a dogmatic faith that playing a number often enough must mean that 'my time' will come regardless of the odds stacked against me.
A side-effect of my research for that piece was the growing realization that in this day and age we are called upon to deal with very many very large numbers. Not so long ago numbers on such a scale were quite rare but today they are almost routine, numbers of a size beyond normal comprehension, a size for which I (for one) was never adequately prepared. I am unable to visualize these numbers and so they tend to pass right through me like a bullet through jello.
I read recently about the discovery of a new planet and learned that it is 330 times farther from the star it orbits than the earth is from our own sun. I was not overwhelmed by this. I know that the earth is very far from our sun, farther than I can possibly comprehend. If you tell me that this new planet is 330 times farther than that from its star, or if you tell me that the actual distance is about 454 million kilometers, it makes no difference. The moment I know that it was farther away than, say, Chicago, I lose interest. Such a distance has no meaning for me.
Which may be why we find it so difficult to become alarmed about very large numbers that probably should alarm us, such as our national debt. Our national debt is 15.1 trillion dollars. My first tendency is to kiss off the point one trillion. I mean, who cares, really? It just gets in the way of the math. But how much is point one trillion dollars? Well, it's one hundred billion dollars. Oops. Maybe we need to hang on to that, after all. That might be what we owe Jamaica.
Another incomprehensibly huge number is what we are paying toward that debt. How does $454 billion sound? That's the amount the Treasury Department paid from our 2011 tax money toward the interest on that debt alone. Again, I feel I should be alarmed. It's my patriotic duty to feel alarmed. But I don't. The number is just too large to grasp. It does seem like a waste, though.
Members of congress, financial experts, candidates for office all rattle off stunningly huge numbers constantly. We hear about fraud on a scale of millions, of corporate bailouts in the billions, of deficits in the trillions.  Shouldn't we be more shocked? Or has that become impossible as the number grows beyond our comprehension?
In an effort to better grasp very, very large numbers experts in fields that commonly use them began creating new names for them. Take computer speeds, for instance. By now we've all had to become familiar with terms like megahertz or even gigahertz. But some computers go really, really fast. The fasted computer in the world today, I've read, is the Tianhe-1A supercomputer in China. It hums along at 2.5 petaflops. Petaflops? That is one thousand trillion floating point operations per second, apparently too fast for previous nomenclature. Hence the need for petaflops. Am I astonished? Of course not. I was left behind at megahertz.
Any time I flip on PBS I may be called upon to discuss the distance of a planet from earth in Astronomical Units (An AU is equal to ~149,600,000 km.) or to define time in SI seconds (a second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom), or learn the width of the Milky Way (between 90,000 and 160,000 light years)(one light year = 9.4605284 × 10¹⁵ meters). But the fact remains that my brain refuses to conceptualize such vast numbers and instead relegates them to an obscure portion of my understanding in which there is no relationship to my real world.
So what does all of this mean in terms of the world coming to an end? I believe that the average Mayan dealt with numbers in the same way as me.
Does the Mayan calendar predict the end of the world this December? Let's look at the numbers.
The Mayan's had more than one calendar - they had three. One, the Divine calendar, with a 260 day year, another, the Civil Calendar, with a 365 day year and the Long Count calendar for historical and future events. The Mayan calendar was an amazing tool, more accurate than the Gregorian Calendar in measuring the fluctuation of days and hours from year to year, with 365.242129 days to the year as opposed to the Gregorian 365.2425 days. All of the Aztec calendars cycled but it was the full cycle of the Calendar Round, a mathematical combination of the two short term calendars which resulted in a 52 year cycle that drew panic from the Mayan people concerning the end of the world. As each 52 year cycle came to an end they would hold their collective breath until Pleaides successfully crossed the horizon. But much like our world as we came the end of the Millennium, their world always continued and began another cycle - at least until it didn't.
The Long Count calendar measured time from the inception of the Mayan era in cycles of 13 baktuns, each 144,000 days (kins), or roughly 394 years (tuns). Thus each full Baktun cycle of 13 is 5125.40 years. There is disagreement as to the exact date the Long Count calendar began, but two of three proposed dates are scheduled to bring us full cycle on either December 21 or 23, AD 2012. The third suggested date would put the full cycle two plus centuries later. In that case, the end-of-world posters would have to be stored for a while.
Just as I must rely upon the experts, the every-day Mayan relied upon his priest to count the days and years, to do the math, and to deal with the really large numbers. From all accounts they dutifully celebrated the harvest or planted the corn or sacrificed the odd virgin in accordance with the pronouncements of the "Keepers of the Numbers" without questioning the results too closely, much as I do today. While 52 years, the span of a lifetime, is not so difficult to conceptualize and consequently might be anticipated fearfully, 5125.4 years is a whole different matter, the end of which I contend was far from the conscious minds of the Mayans, as the end of the world or anything else. Quite the opposite. To the Mayans the conclusion of 13 Baktuns would have been seen simply as the start of a new 13 Baktun cycle, a time to begin the count over again. In fact, a renewal. And although just five positions in the Long Count calendar have been found scribed, the Mayans had calculated it all the way to 19 positions, culminating in what we now call the Alautun, a period of 23,040,000,000 days or about 63 million years. Now there's a big number! Happy New Year!

References: Marq deVilliers The end, www.webexhibits.org/calendars, K. Garcia Atlantis Rising magazine issue 9.

Vanquish Poverty with the Lottery (and take home a million!)

The lottery intrigues us. And for good reason. It appeals to our humanness. And it has a long history. The Chinese are believed to have financed the Great Wall of China with a lottery. New Jersey-ites decided which colonials should fight the British by lottery.  Queen Elizabeth I chartered the first official lottery to be designed as a means to do public work.
The lottery appeals to the human traits of eternal hope, of personal destiny; it satisfies our need for risk behavior and the desire for instant gratification, all of which define us. And we are drawn to its dark side, the numbers games that are so profitable to racketeers.
The lottery has moved constantly between crime and politics, between mob coffers and state coffers. The game lately has justified itself as a means toward community benefit. Most states now have a lottery system realizing huge profits that are returned in part as prize money for a few lucky individuals and, after administrative costs, in part to the community to meet its needs. Two multi-state games exist, PowerBall and MegaMillions, that are subscribed to by almost all of the states, with the two notable exceptions of Hawaii and Alaska. Portions of the profit from those games are divided by state members.
Being taxed has never been more fun.
And some prizes won by individuals are staggering, in the multi millions of dollars.  A Morristown, New Jersey school board member, for instance, won the March 13, 2010  Powerball jackpot to the tune of $211.7 million. When I hear about such large winnings I find myself doing the math. Had the game been organized differently, 211 people might have won one million dollars. I ask myself, would we really rather watch one person receive an un-spendable amount of money than spread the wealth to 211 people, or even 422 people? Intrigued by the possibilities, I decided to do some research (and some math).
My present home state of California, for example, received almost 3 billion dollars from its 2009 lottery ticket sales. In that year California put 50% of those receipts toward prize money, 34% toward education, and the remaining 16% toward administration. In 2009 California had a population of 19,953,134 souls, 14.2% of whom existed below the poverty level. Now just suppose California, in that one year alone, decided to take that prize money,  {50% of 3 billion dollars (1.5 billion dollars)} and instead of awarding huge prizes to just a few winners, divide that amount among all of its citizens, all 19,953,134 people. I did the math. Had my state done that, every citizen would have been awarded over 75 million dollars.
Whoa! What? This can't be right. If this were true, in that one year alone the California lottery and state officials held in their hands the means to completely eradicate poverty in California. More than that, to make California the wealthiest state per capita in the United States. Maybe in world.
Something had to be wrong with this picture, I thought. I decided to explore other states. I thought about New Jersey, where that woman serving on the school board of my old alma mater won the $211.7 million. In that year, 2010, the population of New Jersey was 8,791,894, 9.4% of whom resided below the poverty level. I learned that  the New Jersey Lottery had broken its own record in terms of ticket sales for the fiscal year 2010, a record $2.6 billion in ticket sales, the most in its history. And it came amidst one of the biggest global recessions in recent history. It seems that those who don’t normally play lottery games do so during harder times in a bid to change their fortunes. I could find no firm percentage for the division of lottery receipts in New Jersey, but I did find that in 2006 the state claimed it put 59.2% toward prizes. This may have changed, but I decided to assume  a nice round fifty percent for my purposes and did the math once again. So, 1.3 billion dollars divided among 8,791,894 New Jersey citizens in 2010 alone comes to over 147 million dollars each.
Holy smokes.  How could this be?
I looked at one more state, Pennsylvania. In this state 60.9 percent is paid out as prizes, 29.9 percent goes to programs, 6.7 percent is paid as retailer and vendor commissions and 2.5 percent is consumed as operating expenses. In the fiscal year 2010-2011 the Pennsylvania State lottery had sales of 3.2 billion dollars. Sixty percent of 3.2 billion is 1.92 billion. With a population of 12,702,379 in 2010, an equal division of the prize money that year in Pennsylvania would have awarded 151 million dollars to each and every citizen.
But where is all that money coming from? As we saw from the numbers, even if everyone in the state bought a lottery ticket the amount would not begin to approach the actual ticket sales. Of course, unclaimed prizes grow with interest, quite quickly.  And people buy multiple tickets. Many, many tickets, I learned. Imagine: once a jackpot approaches enough millions of dollars to become a reasonable investment, well funded individuals and corporate groups could buy a high percentage of number combinations in certain games, virtually ensuring a profit. In one year in the Virginia lottery, an investment group "came tantalizingly close to cornering the market on all possible combinations of six numbers from 1 to 44. State lottery officials say that the group bought tickets for 5 million of a possible 7 million combinations, at $1 each, in a lottery with a $27 million jackpot. Only a lack of time prevented the group from buying tickets for the remaining 2 million combinations".
And foreign interests get involved as well. It was an Australian group behind the effort described above. And apparently they were successful. Here at home, a New York investment firm recently bought up massive ticket amounts in an upstate New York lottery. The treasurer of the firm said that "he performed a risk assessment for large-scale investments in such a game and found that a profit could be made if played properly".  States have since taken measures to make such "buy-outs" more difficult. But they cannot be prevented entirely.
But there is another reality, a sadder reality. Research confirms the those who can afford it the least tend to pay the most in terms of percentage of income. A Washington Post investigation of the Virginia, Maryland, and District of Columbia lotteries found that they "rely on a hard core of heavy players, who, on average, have less education and lower incomes than the population as a whole. The 1995-6 Virginia Lottery sales were concentrated in 8 percent of Virginia's adult population, who accounted for 61 percent of Lottery sales. Those heavy Virginia players on average spent $47 for lottery tickets in two weeks, the equivalent of more than $1,200 annually. Yet one in six had household incomes of less than $15,000."        
Clearly, some players play desperately.
And so I pondered the possibility of a redistribution of prize money in a way that benefits more people. Smaller prizes of, let's say, one million dollars each. Who would not be satisfied with one million dollars? You'd be surprised. I learned that when prizes are smaller, fewer people purchase tickets. The MegaMillions blog confirmed this. "…we actually started that game," the representative said. "No one played." The United States apparently enjoys the accumulation of massive wealth as a spectator sport, a competition in which a few manage to grab most of the pie while the majority of us watch, fascinated. We would rather posture and compete, we would rather admire and envy, we would rather look down in our turn upon the less fortunate, than make a serious attempt to eliminate poverty.
The Chumash band of Indians in my local Santa Ynez Valley must be chuckling at this. The band runs a casino (which tribe does not?) which is, to say the least, profitable. And no tribe member is left out. Much of this information is confidential, yet I did learn that in 2007 the tribe paid each of its members $30,000 a month from casino earnings (Slate, March 5, 2007). They know how to take care of their own.
And so I propose that my state do the same. Announce that every citizen of the state who buys a lottery ticket at least one time during the year will receive one million dollars at tax time. Then skim 36 million of the total lottery ticket sales for one year from the prize money for that purpose, leaving only 1.465 billion (so sorry, California!) for the jackpots. Pay the million dollars out to each citizen who played (only 18 and over legally). And keep what remains after distribution of the 20 million as a tax adjustment. How's that for an economic boost?
Is this too simplistic? I will be told so, no doubt. I'm sure state officials will quickly offer reasons why this would never work. But I hold to a core view: if Americans truly wish to eliminate poverty, we could do so. Not some distant time in the future. Right now.

For those still unaware, tongue is firmly in cheek! RLG