As Kennedy's ambassador to India, Mr Galbraith preferred to write to the president direct: sending letters through the State Department, he told Kennedy, was “like fornicating through a mattress”.

Google's seemingly endless “betas”, also known as “technical previews”, when new products are not yet officially launched but available, ostensibly for testing and review. Traditionally, beta reviews were meant to last weeks or months and were targeted at testers who would find and report bugs. Google seems to use betas as dogs sprinkle trees—so that rivals know where it is.

The man who created the world's most valuable brand remains an elusive figure when not in his grotto, often shielded by the tinted windows of a personalised executive sleigh that serves as his mobile office. Friends say that money is not his motivation, even though he is apparently seeking now to sell off all or part of his privately held empire. Talking to the elves, seeing the children smile, guiding the creative side of Christmas, these are the things that drive him, he says.

Yet the owner of the trademark beard and belly-laugh is also a man shrewd enough to have grasped the money-making potential of Christmas when nobody saw it as a commercial enterprise at all, and many thought it doomed to merge with New Year. Santa Claus, a former bishop from Asia Minor, thought differently. He did not invent Christmas, he likes to say now, but he did re-invent it. Probably nobody has ever seen the link between reindeer and revenues more clearly. “Besides”, says one high-ranking elf, “he throws great parties.”

Santa's quirky management style, combining large quantities of mulled wine with a tight grip on the reins, has turned the ho-hum into the ho-ho-ho. Once just a two-day affair in churches and private houses, Christmas is now the biggest-spending item in most western countries after health care and defence. The logistics of that success require Santa to be in thousands of malls by day and down millions of chimneys by night. Advisers say he relies on a series of proprietary algorithms derived from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which allow him to be in an infinite number of places simultaneously so long as nobody believes he is really in any one of them.

Thomas Bihl, winner of a recent HORSE tournament, in which players have to show mastery of five different styles of poker, thinks the game has more in common with finance than it does with basic forms of gambling, because it requires the constant pricing and repricing of risk. Mr Bihl, a former stock trader, says the move from his old job into poker was a natural progression. Though his £71,000 win was “a huge lift”, he says that he is motivated not by money but by the chance to use his brain to outfox opponents. This is a common refrain among regular players. As Ms Coren put it in a recent article: “Cash is nothing more than chips, just the tools of the trade, like fishing rods to an angler. The game is all about money, and nothing to do with money.”

One consequence of the growth of microelectronics has been an exploration of the periodic table reminiscent of European navigators' search for the spice islands half a millennium ago. Then, as now, the objective was material of great rarity and value, which was needed in only small quantities but which did jobs that nothing else could manage. In the case of spices, such as nutmeg, cloves and mace, this job was to enhance the taste of food and demonstrate wealth and sophistication. They were so valuable that wars were fought to control their supply in some cases.

In the case of indium, gallium and tantalum it is their unique electrical properties that are of interest. Indium-tin oxide, for example, is both transparent and electrically conductive. Without it, liquid-crystal display screens would be much harder to make. Meanwhile tantalum (used as an insulator in mobile-phone chips) once became so valuable that it, too, helped drive a war—the civil war in eastern Congo, where its ore has been dusted over the countryside like icing sugar by ancient volcanic eruptions.