Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.

Samuelson, however, hedged his personal bets - by putting some of his own money in Berkshire Hathaway.

Kelly was aware that there is one type of favorable bet available to everyone; the stock market.

The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes.

People tend to be clueless about prices. Contrary to economic theory, we don't really decide between A and B by consulting our invisible price tags and purchasing the one that yields the higher utility, he says. We make do with guesstimates and a vague recollection of what things are “supposed to cost.”

The engine driving the Kelly system is the "law of large numbers." In a 1713 treatise on probability, Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli propounded a law that has been misunderstood by gamblers (and investors) ever since.

Are there any mythical beasts which aren't simple pastiches of nature? Centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, griffons, chimeras, sphinxes, manticores, and the like don't speak well for the human imagination. None is as novel as a kangaroo or starfish.