^A With 10 digits to choose from there are 10 possibilities for the first digit, 9 for the second (all but the one you already chose), 8 for the third, etc. This works out to be 10 × 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 10! = 3,628,800. All possibilities, including 9876543210, are equally likely.

^B This doesn’t mean that being random is the best strategy to win in any of these pursuits, whether it be football, business, politics, or war. Because some options are actually better than others and because interactions between people are rarely zero–sum, true randomness is rarely an optimal strategy. (Rock-paper-scissors is one of the few cases where random is the optimal strategy.) Because we are social creatures, two cooperating players are going to be much stronger than two random players. Randomness rarely wins you the game, but it often takes down your nearby opponents as well. We’ll come back to the issue of cooperation in our discussion of morality (Chapter 23). Suffice to say for now that cooperation also depends on the ability to predict what your colleagues are going to do.

^C Giambatista Vico was an Italian scientist and philosopher who lived from 1668 to 1744 (just after Newton and Descartes). Vico is best known for his Scienza Nuovo (New Science), which is one of the main sources for the structure of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.²²

^D You may remember the framing examples that we saw in Chapter 3, where phrasing the exact same problem in terms of gains or losses changed which option someone preferred. In the Asian flu example, being certain to save 200 lives (out of 600, thus losing 400) was preferred against the gamble of saving or losing everyone, but the gamble was preferred over being certain to lose 400 lives.²⁹

^E What people tend to get addicted to when surfing the Internet are things like gambling, porn, videogames, and shopping, so it is not clear whether the problem is the Internet per se or if the Internet is just a new medium enabling other behavioral addictions.