Well, friends and fans, that fickle Lady LUCK has been up to her usual tricks lately, so much so that we decided she deserved a thorny issue of her very own. You never know who this unpredictable lass is going to smile on, so even you non-believers would do well to indulge her whims. Nothing ventured, nothing gained – so let’s roll them bones and hope for the best! 

“I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?” — Jean Cocteau

Chasing luck

When I started to think about luck my mind exploded into a thousand pieces; or rather my thoughts jumped from one thing to another as rapidly as a domino that falls against another and so on and so on…

…Life…other lives…

…Emptiness…

…Probability…

…The Fermi paradox, or if there are billions of possibilities of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, where is everybody? According to the Drake equation, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial aliens so why have they not yet contacted with us?... Are we humans a unique, fortuitous combination of molecules that occurred haphazardly?…

A graphical representation of the Arecibo message (1974)

 - Humanity's first attempt to use radio waves to actively communicate its existence to alien civilizations-

…my mind drifted away…

…Synchronicity, or why both internal and external events meet each other in a way that you can not explain but however make complete sense: the "meaningful coincidence" of C. Jung. The author of the “ morphic fields of consciousness”, Rupert Sheldrake, believes that when you think about someone who you haven’t seen for a long time and almost immediately you bump into him, it is the intention of this person that got to you before and developed in your thoughts…It is not a random incident but telepathic highways that connect the brain…

… I think I'm a little lost. This does not agree with the concept of luck; it is almost the opposite…

… anyway this domino falls onto other…

…The very famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says that the universe has a structure with ten or eleven dimensions and it is possible that some independent spatio-temporal systems could act on our own dimension and provoke synchronicity phenomena here…

 …still on the wrong track and Domino effect continues…

…I hear Einstein saying quite annoyedly: “God does not play with dice”: The battle between those who believe in determinism against those who have been dragged along by quantum mechanics. Einstein saw an innate order in the universe. He initially rejected quantum mechanics as it is inherently chaotic. This chaos negates any sort of predestination and determinism in nature, implying that humans do have free will. The classical vision in physics that would allow the Devil of Laplace to reconstruct the history of the universe and also calculate all the future only by knowing the position of a particle, does not work anymore. Poor Einstein and the Devil of Laplace…

… maybe this time luck has won the match but one more domino falls…

…Chaos theory…Small differences in initial conditions can yield widely diverging outcomes for dynamic systems, rendering long-term predictions impossible in general…Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?... The meteorologist and pioneer of chaos theory Edward Lorenz is trying to find a mathematical model to predict the behavior of air masses found a thin geometric structure, organization disguised as chance: the first Attractor. Somehow chaos is also ordered…

 

Lorenz’s attractor (both images)

Stop! Finally I see it, luck does not come to visit me because I am unable to think of it !

 

Li

Wake up to your luck

I met my friend twenty- five years ago when she was an inmate in the Women’s Prison in Madrid and I was working there.

The new department for mothers had been opened one or two years before and I had just come back from my own maternity leave. Being a mother for the first time and starting to work again is a very sensitive experience. I had been working with mothers in prison for 5 or 6 years at that time, so apparently in some ways I was used to nearly all the problems they had to face, both as mothers and as inmates.

However, the way I perceived their imprisonment was absolutely changed as my point of view had been widened because of my personal circumstances. I felt in the deepest way how incredibly hard situation it is to be separated from your kids for a long time. It was a huge effort for me to spend only a few hours far from my little baby. The fear of my daughter being hurt -or worse- was a threat that lived in my mind.

These were the outlines of the context where I discovered my beloved Antonia.

As soon as I started working after my leave, all my peers told me what she was like.

Aggressive, violent, bad- mannered, heavily addicted, were the adjectives most of them expressed to describe Antonia.

A few days before I returned to my work, she had had a violent argument with another inmate. As a result of this, she was going to be moved to another prison.

Of course she didn’t want be moved. The conditions in the new Mothers Department were, at that time, the best in the country so she came to talk to me about the idea of having once more the opportunity to reform her bad behaviour.

That conversation was the beginning of our long and uncommon friendship. It began as a professional relationship but has been reshaped to a personal one.

What was in that talk that made me strongly beg the Director not to move Antonia was a powerful belief.

Antonia was in prison voluntarily. She had three children and the youngest one was living with her in the prison. The other two were in a school under the care of the Social Services. She had taken that decision as she was determined to abandon drugs. She was able to make me feel her enormous love for her children. Not only with her words but because of the difficult decisions she had taken before entering freely to jail. I admit that my new circumstance as being a mother made me connect profoundly to her feelings.

Recovering from drug addition is not easy and I was aware that strong determination is the first step. I had heard that argument many times. The difficulty is to keep alive that decision for years.

Many years have past and she is completely recovered from her addition. Moreover, she has been working as a therapist in Proyecto Hombre since she finished her treatment.

Looking back the events I can say that she was lucky having a new opportunity but what I think that made possible her recovering is her indestructible will-power.

Likely being luck is mixture between coincidence and ability to take the advantage of it.

                                                                                               Mrs Raga

Hot Hand and Lucky Personality: Could good luck bring good luck and bad luck really bring bad luck?

Hot Hand and Lucky Personality: Could good luck bring good luck and bad luck really bring bad luck?

To look into luck is to take on one of the grandest of all the questions: how can we explain what happens to us, and if we will be winners, losers or somewhere in the middle in relation to love, work, sports, gambling and life.

The studies show that luck can be powered by past good or bad luck, personality and, in a higher twist, even our own ideas and beliefs about luck itself. Lucky streaks are real, but they are the product of more than just  blind fate. Our ideas about luck influence the way we behave in risky situations.

We really can make our own luck, though we don’t like to think of ourselves as lucky - a description that undermines other qualities, like talent and skill-.

Luck can be a force, but it’s one we interact with, mould and cultivate.

Diverse points of view provide different perspectives on luck: if a secular man survived because he had a meeting outside his office at the World Trade Center on the morning of 11 September 2001, he might simply have thought that it was a   casual chance in life without assigning a deeper meaning. A Hindu might conclude he had good karma. A Christian might say God had looked after him. The mystic could insist he was born under lucky stars

Traditionally, the Chinese think luck is an inner trait, like intelligence or a cheerful mood, notes Maia Young, a management expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “My mom always used to tell me, ‘You have a lucky nose’, because its particular shape was a lucky one, according to Chinese tradition”. But there is another cultural difference in perceptions of luck. “In Chinese culture,” she says, “hard work can go hand-in-hand with being lucky. And the belief system accommodates both.”

Nevertheless, Westerners see effort and good fortune from opposite corners of the ring. We are ambivalent about luck. We live in a society that is neither random nor entirely meritocratic, that makes the relationship between “hard work” and “luck” more complex.

To illustrate, when a friend is admitted into a top law or medical school, we might say: ‘Congratulations! You’ve persevered. You deserve it.’ Were she not to get in, we would say: ‘Acceptance is arbitrary. Everyone’s qualified these days. It’s a question of luck.’

The scientists have researched luck often looking to sports –mainly basketball and baseball-, where chance plays a role in even the most skill-reliant players, and outcomes are easy to measure.

One of the most studied phenomena in the field is lucky streaks, where players seem to be on fire, so to speak –the official term for it is “hot hands”.

A landmark paper by Stanford psychologists, published in 1985, declared that the “hot hand” did not exist and was instead an illusion born of the deep established tendency to see patterns in our environments. They called it

‘The Hot-Hand Fallacy’.

However, in 2014 three Harvard University students caused big trouble for hot-hand deniers. They reasoned that, once a player is hot, he might be encouraged to take more difficult shots, supporting then the hot-hands effect. (Previous studies falsely assumed a random assortment of shots by players.) The students examined in detail a video consisting of 83,000 shot attempts from the 2012-13 US National Basketball Association season, giving them enough information to assess the difficulty of the shots. First of all, they showed that players who felt ‘hot’, in fact start taking harder shots. And, after taking in to account the difficulty of each shot selected, they found a small significant hot-hands effect – that is, those who did well began to do even better over time.

Around the same time, another group from the University of California, Berkeley found that opponents intensify their defence against hot players – thereby acting against a hot-hands effect. Previous research didn’t have enough data to account for this sufficiently, and thus interpreted any decline in a hot player’s performance as evidence that he was not on a streak.

Given the above premises, the Berkeley group decided to look at the sport of baseball, where there is almost nothing an opposing team can do to frustrate a hitter on a roll. They were on to something: when they analysed 12 years of data from Major League Baseball, they found that how a player performed the most recent 25 times at bat was a significant predictor of how he would do the next time. They also calculated that a hot player was 30 % more likely to hit a home run than if he were not on a winning streak. Lucky streaks are real and not just an illusion, they said.

But what causes them? Is it truly luck, or something else? Perhaps it is a question of possibilities. That’s the suggestion from research into both winning and losing streaks from University College London. Researchers analysed about half a million sports bets (courtesy of an online gambling company) and found that those on winning streaks were much more likely than to keep winning, and those on losing streaks were more likely to keep losing,  than a 50/50 chances would suggest.

Then the team dug deeper to expose why these streaks were in fact real: it was the bettors’ behaviour. As soon as they realised they were winning, they made safer bets, supposing their streaks could not last forever. In other words, they did not believe themselves to have hot hands that would stay hot. A different impulse drove gamblers who lost. They guessed that lady luck was due for a visit, fell for the gambler’s fallacy and made riskier bets. As a result, the winners kept winning (even if the amounts they won were small) and the losers kept losing.

If behaviour influences luck, do people who think of themselves as lucky behave differently from the rest of us?

A 2009 study assessed whether students believed in stable luck as a trait they themselves possessed. A relationship is found between the belief in stable luck (versus fleeting luck) and measures of achievement and motivation, including whether or not the students persisted at tasks or chose challenging ones to begin with. Lucky people, it seems, are more ambitious. Those who believe in stable luck will be more motivated to pick difficult goals and then stick with them. If they consider luck as a chance, as something ephemeral, then they can’t rely on it because it comes and goes and they might be less motivated to face hard and challenging tasks.

These findings fit together with the work of R. Wiseman, professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and author of the book The Luck Factor (2003). He says that the best way to look at luck is as a stable trait – not one that people are born with, but one they can cultivate. Wiseman searched for people who considered themselves consistently very lucky or unlucky by gathering data from 400 subjects. He found that ‘lucky’ people are skilful at creating and noticing chance opportunities (such as meeting an important businessman at a café), listen to their intuition, have positive expectations that create self-fulfilling prophesies, and have a relaxed and resilient attitude about life’s trials. Poor unlucky souls are more tense and anxious than lucky ones.

Wiseman split the tendencies of the lucky group into behavioural interventions such as getting people to imagine how things could have been worse when they were faced with misfortune or, more generally, asking them to ‘switch their daily routine’. As a result, 80 per cent of the unlucky group reported that, after just a month, they were happier, more satisfied with their lives, and yes, luckier.

The more one thinks about luck and the new insights into it, the more its paradoxes come down. Consider optimism: it was one of the key qualities of lucky people identified by Wiseman. These might win at life, but their sunny outlooks could get them in trouble in Las Vegas.

This is exactly what happened to Archie Karas. Just three weeks after he won $40 million, he lost it all. His ‘lucky streak’ turned into a net loss of $50. In addition to that, in 2013 Karas was charged with burglary, winning by fraudulent means and cheating at a blackjack table in Lakeside, California. But fortune smiled on him, slightly: he was placed on probation, escaping a potential three-year prison sentence.

Things could always be worse.

Scissor Sister

The Cinemaniac Corner: Luck or fate?

Although there have been many ways of understanding the word `luck´ depending the cultural background you are talking from, we can try to define a general idea about this concept that all of us mention so often, maybe too often.

Luck might refer to some kind of unpredictable events that could seriously affect our lives, events that are beyond one´s control. These events are initially purposeless but can simultaneously act on our future in a positive or negative way, that´s the reason why we add the adjective of `good´ or ``bad´ to the word luck.

The concept itself is very different from others such as coincidence, determination, chance or providence. But fate is another thing. Fate refers to destiny. It is conceptualized as the idea of a fixed future completely independent of anything a person can do. You don´t know what is going to happen but these things are undoubtedly going to happen, whatever you might do, as they are fixed in advanced.

You might wonder if there are movies related to this concept of good or bad luck, or any that might have something to do with being lucky in one´s life. Plots can´t be random, by definition. On the contrary, every small detail of a film must be perfectly designed. But some movies have tried to confront this topic.

One might be the classic Ernst Lubitsch film `If I Had a Million´ (1932) starring Gary Cooper and Charles Laughton, among others. It opens with the decision of a very rich entrepreneur who decides to give a million dollars to each one of eight randomly selected people, so that he will not have problems with his last will and his relatives´ ambitions for his heritance. The chance or good luck appears, apparently, when you receive the good news in a telephone call...

Similar in some ways is a Spanish film directed by José Maria Forqué titled `A Million in the Dustbin´ (1967) (`Un millón en la basura´) starring José Luis López Vázquez and Julia Gutiérrez Caba, among others. In this comedy, there is also a touch of tenderness and moral dilemma embedded in the plot. It´s the story of a poor street sweeper, working in the very early and cold mornings of a Spanish city in the fifties, who by chance finds a million pesetas among the litter.

He can´t believe his very good luck, or should we say his certain fate?. He decides to keep it for himself as at that moment he has serious financial problems. But his beloved wife suggests that he could prove himself to be completely honest by giving it back to its true owner...

In the opposite direction, the movie `It Could Happen to You´ (1994), starring Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda and directed by Andrew Bergman, also relates a moral conflict in the main character -Charlie, a good policeman- who has a very stormy relationship with his wife -Muriel, a selfish hairdresser.

One day, Charlie can´t afford to leave a tip for Yvonne, the waitress of the restaurant he usually goes to, so he offers her half of his prize if he wins from a lottery ticket he has just bought. Surprisingly, he wins. His faithful intention is to keep his promise and give half of it to Yvonne, as promised. But unlike the previous movie, his wife Muriel has a very different idea of what he should do.

He finally acts according to his conscience and he discovers that the waitress has a golden heart and buys the restaurant reserving a table everyday to give food to poor people, as she was in the past... I don´t want to ruin the rest of the film for you!.

On the subject of winning lottery prizes, which is supposed to be a very lucky event generally thought to completely change anyone´s life in a positive way, we can find another commercial movie titled `Lottery Ticket´ (2010).

Directed by Eric White and starring by Bow Wow among others, this film focuses not specifically on the main character but on the changes in other people´s behaviors. Kevin Carson, the main character, wins a 370-million-dollar lottery prize with a single ticket, and he soon realizes that his neighbors are not truthful friends but just people trying to get something from their relationship with him. Suddenly, Carson´s defects are virtues, his bad habits are examples for children from that time on, his pals demonstrate how cool he is... everything changes in his `apple polishing´ mates.

More interesting is in my opinion another movie, titled `Mr. Nobody´, directed by Jaco Van Dormael and starring Jared Leto and Sarah Polley, among others. This Belgian science fiction film develops more a philosophical point of view about fate and the vital consequences of dilemma decisions and casual circumstances. The plot has the virtue of narrating for us the different possibilities that condition the outcomes of the main character Nemo´s life.

As he is being interviewed by a journalist at the end of his days, the last human to die in a futuristic world where immortality has been achieved, he narrates his life and how it could have been from three biographical moments: at age 9, when his parents divorced, at age 15 when he fell in love and at age 34 as an adult.

So this is a small review of movies that incidentally touch topics related to luck or fate. I hope that if you have been interested by any of these works of the Seventh Art, you´ll try to watch them.

Thanksgiving Turkey

Beliefs and superstitions

Merrian-Webster dictionary defines “luck” as “a force that brings good fortune or adversity” or as “the things that happen to a person because of chance: the accidental way things happen without being planned”. At the same time, “superstition” is defined by Cambridge Dictionaries as “a belief that is not based on reason or scientific thinking and that explains the causes for events in ways that are connected to magic”. Both words refer to an irrational concept, a matter of unfounded feelings because we can’t manage them.

I mean, “luck” can be good and allude to good fortune but it can also refer to something that operates against us. Indeed, there is no possibility of placing it under our control or domination. On the other hand, with “superstition” we are talking about mere beliefs, blind beliefs to be precise.

There are many superstitions that are rooted in history, ancient culture, religion and other origins. I will only mention several of them, whose beginning points are considerably different.

1.- Chinese (un)lucky numbers. In China, whether a number is considered lucky or not is very often related to the similarity between the sound of its pronunciation and the sound of another word that brings a positive connotation. And so the number 8 is considered to be extremely lucky, partly because of its unique symmetry but also partly because the sound of “8” in mandarin Chinese is very close to the way that “prosperity” or “wealth” is pronounced. Why do you think that the opening ceremony of Olympic Games in Beijing 2008 took place on August 8^th at 08:08 p.m.?

But it is also true that the number 4 is considered awfully unlucky. Why? First of all, because the number 4 sound is very similar to how Chinese people pronounce the word “death”. So, it is hardly difficult to find cellular numbers that begin with 4 and, besides, many flat buildings lack of a 4^th floor. The number 4 is generally avoided.

2.- The four-leaf clover. The four-leaf clover is a rare variation of the common three-leaf one. It is one of the most relevant symbols of good luck, specially if it is found somewhere accidentally. It is well-known that each leaf represents different things: faith, hope, love and the fourth refers to luck, because it is the leaf that makes it unique and completely different from the three-leaf clover. 

 Moreover, scientists admit that there are approximately 10.000 three-leaf clovers for every four-leaf one. Due to the fact that it is so complicated to find a real natural four-leaf clover, there are consequently many theories about its origin. For instance, in the early days of Ireland the druids believed that these kind of plants offered magical protection. Besides this, Christian tradition tells that Eve carried a four-leaf clover with her on the day she left the Garden of Eden.

3.- There is another peculiar superstition in Denmark. It has to do with broken dishes put on your doorstep, in particular on the morning of January 1^st. Danish people are used to keeping and saving old dishes at home during the whole year and, when New Year’s Eve has come, they throw them at the doors of friend’s houses for good luck. In fact, it means that you have many friends and that you will have a very gratifying and fortunate year. In consequence, it is considered good luck to find old broken dishes on your doorsteps on the morning of January 1^st. 

4.- The world of sailors and fishermen remains, of course, full of superstitions, specially in Scandinavian countries. For example, to mention briefly just a few: if a fisherman, on his way to the boat before starting a trip, sees a cat or a nun, he will turn back home and won’t sail. At meals inside a boat, fish will be eaten from the head to the tail for good luck. You mustn’t count the fish your boat has caught until you have reached port because, otherwise, your boat won’t catch any fish during this day. To see dolphins swimming in front of your boat means that you will have good luck. And many more like these…

But one of the most frequent superstitions when we are talking about sailors and fishermen has to do with one day of the week: Fridays. It is very bad luck to start a voyage on any Friday. It is said that its origin is biblical because Christ was crucified on a Friday. Moreover, there is a very well-known tale about this superstition, although the British Royal Navy will never recognize it. On one day in the 19^th century, the Royal Navy was determined to dispel that myth or, as many of them called it, that black fable, and launched one of her HMS (her/his majesty’s ship) on a Friday. Tradition says that it sank. 

In order to finish this maritime theme, it is interesting to know about the evolution of the prow symbols on boats. At first these objects were placed inside the boat, they were made of wood and had religious connotations. Years later, they were moved to the prow of the ship, outside, to guide the sailors, and turned into totem poles or maritime divinities. Finally, during the beginning of 19^th century, it was a female statue that was the most common way to decorate a ship prow because it was believed that her vision might calm the gods of the sea.

5.- Finally, Russia also has its own superstitions. Many of them refer to trips or journeys and how to enjoy them more or have good luck on them. If Russian people want to have good luck they usually pay a minute of silence before setting off and, as long as it is possible, try to depart on a rainy day.

Whenever you try to delve into any topic or whatever theme you are investigating, you will probably find lots of superstitions. But what is really interesting is to have a look at oneself and realize that many of them reside in our spiritual interior.

Bolandres