A Thai doctor recently shared photos of a patient’s hand and the magnetic plates he had embedded in his fingers to help him cheat at a popular dice game without raising suspicion.

Dr. Wat Lun of the Wiwat X-ray Clinic-Lab in Chon Buri, Thailand, regularly shares photos of his medical cases on social media, but it was one of his most recent patients that drew unusual levels of attention on Facebook. The Thai doctor posted a couple of photos, one showing two black plates and another of the patient’s sewn fingers following minor surgery. The photos aren’t that impressive, but it was the story behind them that caused the post to go viral. Apparently, one of his patients had magnetic plates embedded in his fingertips for 40 years to help him cheat at Hi Lo, also known as Sic Bo, a popular dice game.

“You probably won’t believe it but a patient inserted magnets into the fingertips of his left-hand middle and ring fingers for 40 years. He put them there to play Hi-Lo,” Wat Lun wrote in his Facebook post.

The Thai doctor explained that the man, whose name has not been disclosed, only came in to have the magnets removed because he needed to board an airplane and he was afraid that the agents would be detected by airport security devices. His days of Sic Bo gambling were probably behind him as well, so he decided to visit a clinic.

Photo: Edge2Edge Media/Unsplash

“He came and asked to have them taken out because he wants to take a flight and is scared the magnets will set off an alarm at airport security,” the doctor wrote. “When I cut open his fingers, I found two very tightly embedded magnets.”

Popular in East-Asian countries, Sic Bo is a dice game in which players bet on whether the combination of three dice will be a high or low score. If the sum of the dots is up to 11, it is considered a low score, and anything between 11 and 18 is high. Although the exact cheating method was not disclosed, some Thai news outlets claimed that the man used the magnetic plates in combination with a small magnet in one or multiple dice to manipulate the score.

To commemorate the death of his friend, Canadian artist and designer, Tobias Wong, Frederick McSwain has created a giant portrait of him, from 13,138 dice.

The artist says:

The idea of a die itself was appropriate—the randomness of life. It felt like [a medium] he would use. Because [Tobias] was a very street-level force, I thought it was appropriate [to install] the portrait on the floor. Its not something I wanted to suspend on the wall; I wanted it to be right there on the floor where you almost interact with it.

The idea of every decision you make and everything you’ve done in your life, defines who you are. All of those days symbolically makes up the image of Tobi.

Tobias Wong was 35-years-old when he passed away, more accurately 13,138 days old, so McSwain used a die for every day he lived…

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Ari Krupnik uses dice and various other materials to create intricate pixelated mosaics of celebrities and historical figures.

A Software Engineer, in Silicon Valley, California, Krupnik says he uses dice as an art medium because they offer six different shades of gray, depending on which facet is up. He uses a computer to calculate the size of his mosaics and render several variations of the dice. But that’s the easy part, putting them together, by hand, and finding the right adhesive to glue the dice, those are the tough parts.

Apart from dice, Ari Krupnik has used M&Ms and bullet casings, to create some of his mosaic masterpieces. The bullet casings mosaic depicts Eric S. Raymond, author of “The Art of Unix Programming” and features about seven thousand .40 brass casings.

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