Slashdot Mirror
Odds-on Science
utopia27 writes "According to article in New Scientist, a UK-based bookie will be taking bets for two weeks on major science benchmarks (specifically, odds of implementation by 2010). The ponies are life on Titan, 10,000:1,
gravitational waves, 500:1,
the Higgs boson, 6:1,
cosmic ray origins, 4:1,
and nuclear fusion, 100:1."
Wow, this is definately the fastest slashdotting ever.
Duke Nukem Forever -- 25,000:1
(grin)
AC
Sorry! This section of Newscientist.com is unavailable at the current time - every effort is being made to get it back up and running as quickly as possible.
The ponies are life on Titan, 10,000:1
Gravitational waves, 500:1
The Higgs boson, 6:1
Cosmic ray origins, 4:1
Nuclear fusion, 100:1
The New Scientist getting a good Slashdotting: priceless
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I am reminded of a certain phrase:
The lottery is just a tax on fools.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
2 minutes, and "Sorry! This section of Newscientist.com is unavailable at the current time".
sorry. still nothing to see for you here. move along.
We can easily achieve nuclear fusion. The problem is controlling and sustaining it. It should read, "Fusion power plants, 100:1", not "Nuclear fusion, 100:1."
I'll bet whichever way Stephen hawking goes. Even if he hasn't been so good on his past bets.
I do security
I'm putting a few bucks on Longhorn having no security issues in the first month after its release. Unfortunately, the odds are 10000000000000000000000:1.
where do I bet?
As the article is already crunched, is this the same British firm who was allowing you to vote about life on Mars?
This always happens on the stories I was going to actually read.
I wonder how the calculate the odds?
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Stalk Steven Hawking, bet what he bets.
... Or just knock him down and take his winnings. Either way, Bling-Bling!
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
None
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 96331
I'm tired of bombing the universe
So I can give them my money, and not worry about actually losing it until 2010! :D
Honestly, I do think it'll give some insight into which projects get the most 'play' for the average person. But I also see problems...what if 'big bossman scientist' lays out $1000 on cold fusion, and then steers his entire staff and budget into it, with no hope of success? Wasted time and years? Or just the kick in the ass they might need to actually make some progress?
10000000:1
Science is the Real TRUTH!
Duke Nukem Forever 13,000,000:1
If you think
10,000,000 : 1
Chances of me understanding how they achieve any of those benchmarks.
CHEF: "Baby! I got a way for us to pay for that thar new house faster than you can say mass spec vacuum! Pack the bags, call the kennel for YOUR bitch (she pooped on the floor -- she's YOUR bitch now), and call a cab! I'm goin' to the bank and gettin' ready to ride the NUCLEAR FUSION train!"
CHEF WIFE: "What the fuck are you talking about? Shut up. I'm watching 'Trading Spouses.' And clean up that dog shit."
CHEF: [SIGH] "Yes, dear."
IronChefMorimoto
2x10^256 to 1.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Do I take life on Titan or the Redskins winning the Super Bowl? Tough call...
...and go to the bahamas by 2006:
1:1.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
He forgot the most important one:
Odds on the bookie being contactable in 6 years to pay out on all the bets he lost: 1,000,000:1
That was fast.
I'll take those 50:1 odds on transparent aluminum! Oh, wait, that was Monday. Darn.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
Find out by 2010? That's a loser of a bet. Unless Huygens crashes into a Titanian Giraffe, we won't know anything definitive by 2010. It took Cassini 7 years to get there, and 2010 is only 6 years away...
Moo.
Um, can't we make a sustained nuclear fusion reaction right now? I thought the only problem was setting it up in a way that it made more energy than it took to contain and cool.
This, of course, completely disregards the simple fact that there are zillions of stars that are doing it right now.
funny munging
Even high-school freshmen can build a fusion reactor.
I sure hope that bookie specified over-parity fusion, or I am going to make some easy money.
10000000:1
My personal apologies to 10000000 slashdot readers. It is strictly numbers folks.
Good luck next time....
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Betting on the greatest unsolved problems in the universe is no longer the preserve of academic superstars such as Stephen Hawking. From Thursday anyone will be able to place bets on whether the biggest physics experiments in the world will come good before 2010.
For two weeks, British-based bookmaker Ladbrokes is opening a book on five separate discoveries: life on Titan, gravitational waves, the Higgs boson, cosmic ray origins and nuclear fusion.
"We've taken bets on life on Mars before," says Warren Lush, Ladbrokes' novelty bets expert, "and we wanted to provide something completely different." The initiative follows an approach from New Scientist, and the full 10-page feature, Monsters of the Universe appears in the print edition of the magazine.
Bookies' odds are not straightforward probabilities. They also take into account how much the company can afford to lose in case they have to pay out. For example, Ladbrokes reckon the odds of finding the Loch Ness monster alive and well are 66-1, so anyone betting $1 would win $66 if it turned up.
But these apparently low odds reflect the fact that thousands of people have placed bets on Nessie, rather than the likelihood of the monster's existence. To work out the odds on the physics experiments, Lush consulted physicists and astronomers. He expects "the odds will spark debates".
Cosmic rays
Ladbrokes say the most likely conundrum to be cracked is the origin of cosmic rays - high-energy particles from outer space which continuously bombard Earth. No one is certain where they come from or what gives them energies 10 million times greater than the most powerful man-made particle accelerator.
Working on the problem are physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina. Utilising 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, it has been running since January 2004. Ladbrokes are offering 4-1 that the mystery will be solved by 2010.
They are also giving good odds on a successful hunt for the missing Higgs boson which, particle physicists believe, is responsible for giving everything in the subatomic world its mass. And it is one of the key reasons for building the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC should be complete by 2007 and Ladbrokes put the odds of finding the Higgs before 2010 at 6-1.
"I'd be tempted to take a bet on the Higgs at 6-1," says Brian Foster who heads the particle physics group at the University of Oxford in the UK. "I've been quite instrumental in betting the taxpayers' money on us finding it, so I'd better put my money where my mouth is."
Power bet
Ladbrokes are more bullish about the chances of nuclear fusion becoming a commercial reality than most physicists. The bookie reckons the odds of a fusion power station turning on by 2010 are 100-1. Meanwhile, physicists are still wrangling over where to build ITER, the first fusion reaction designed to churn out 10 times more power than it guzzles.
Serious betters might want to take a 500-1 punt on the LIGO detectors finding gravitational waves - tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by colliding black holes and massive imploding stars.
"I will certainly have a flutter," says Jim Hough at the University of Glasgow in the UK and a member of the LIGO team. He is confident that LIGO will catch a gravitational wave before 2010. "I would have put the odds between 2-1 and 10-1."
According to Ladbrokes, the rank outsider is the Cassini spacecraft, currently orbiting Saturn. On Christmas Day, Cassini will release the wok-shaped Huygens probe on a 20-day journey towards Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Ladbrokes has set the odds of finding intelligent life on Titan by 2010 at 10,00
could this be a new way to fund research??
getting laid before 2010?
Is there a mathematical term for "when pigs fly?"
The stock markets are obviously subject to the same risk of illegal insider trading, but they are somewhat protected by stringent rules and enforcement (cf. Martha). An inside trader is basically equivalent to a wise guy, except that being an inside trader is illegal but being a wise guy isn't.
Even if their betting contract says "NASA employees and their families may not participate in the Titan bet" or whatever, scientific information (unlike business information) is generally not under any kind of non-disclosure, so Joe Astrobiologist at NASA can freely tell his buddies about the squirmy things they dug up in the ice and his buddy can freely log on and bet wildly if he wants to.
the odds of developing an infinite improbability drive, by, oh, 2050?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Open source movements toppling closed souce movements within the next two years - 1:3.
10000000:1
My personal apologies to 10000000 slashdot readers. It is strictly numbers folks.
You should apologize to the frightened-looking "1" woman at the right of the colon...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
i (the imaginary number)
wouldn't be a bad bet... I wasn't able to RTFA, but with the LHC going online at CERN within the next 5 years, I imagine the Higgs will be found within the decade, and that's pretty conservative. Most particle physicists are confident the Higgs exists, if only because its inconvenient failure to exist would knock most current unified theories into a cocked hat. Depending on the timeframe, 6:1 odds sounds like some fast cash!
To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ("Ulysses", Tennyson)
I've got an impression from reading the article that the bookie company itself will be setting odds (and, thus, Bookies' odds are not straightforward probabilities. They also take into account how much the company can afford to lose in case they have to pay out.).
I always though that the "proper" way to do this is to make people to bet for/against the event, odds are calculated as the ratio of $$ in those two pots. Then bookie loses nothing (and always gets his fee from both winners and losers).
Are they saying that their odds are fixed numbers and To work out the odds on the physics experiments, Lush consulted physicists and astronomers.?
Paul B.
699:1 ... ;)
This is a great idea, except for the fact that I would doubt this guy could payout any odds greater than 4:1. It's a good deal for him though: if he wins, he wins, and if he loses, he breaks even because you can't get blood from a turnip.
Really, I'm not trying to be clever with my signature.
1,000,000,000,000:1
Now your sure this isn't another Niger scam?
I've been a student of statistics long enough to realize that anything, now matter how unlikely, which can happen, eventually will.
The odds of winning a lottery are remote, yet people do. The odds of three people sitting at a table, with a half dozen raffle tickets cleaning up while everyone else gets zilch nada are pretty remote, but it happened on Tuesday (fortunately they were kind and had enough schwag so I got to walk home with 5 Fullers ESB pint glasses and a nifty bar towel, which I won on my only winning ticket.)
Careful what odds you give people, especially if you're planning to take bets.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why don't you go to tradesports.net? They have been doing this for a long time and seem to offer "services" covering the political and occasionally scientific as well.
This just seems like a total one-off scam. Tradesports seems to be a legitimate market (in Ireland, where it is located) with quite a few happy users and some scientific research on its accuracy.
However, as I'm an AC, the chances of being heard are 25000:1...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Paraphrased quote from the movie Sixteen Candles
Geek's Friends: I'll bet you $20 you couldn't get a pair of underwear this year.
The Geek: One pair? No problem. It's a bet.
[Geek's Friends look at each other]
Geek's Friends: GIRLS UNDERWEAR!
The Geek: "Dang...."
Probably before most of the average Slashdotters' time, but anyway...
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Suppose that a ticket costs a dollar, and there is a 1-in-10 change of winning 9 dollars. Your expected payoff is 90 cents.
If the excitement of playing the lottery is worth more than 10 cents, then playing the lottery is a good deal. Suppose that the excitement is worth 20 cents to you. Well, 90 cents plus 20 cents is 110 cents, on a ticket that only cost you 100 cents!
You could blow far more money watching a movie.
About the same?
"Huygens isn't really designed to find life," he says. "The only way it would is if something sang into its microphones."
Doesn't it take pictures? If there is non-microscopic life, plants and animals, it seems like the cameras would have a good chance of picking it up. Of course it may be hard for us to tell Titanian life reliably from some kind of bizarre mineral formations or something, but if there are fractal-type structures there similar to trees and bushes, people are going to see life.
Scientology: Must make minimum bet of $100K to see odds.
Greys: You knew the odds before we wiped your memory.
ESP: You already know the odds.
The Rapture: 666-1
Creationism: See Blind Watchmaker's Odds Book
Well... the old argument again. I can hear experts telling us that "gambling is for weak minded fools with no thought of odds..." But what about this... you think your average Jack or Joe (depending on demographics) is going to place a bet on this??? I think not! The only people that will bet on this are going to be people like us... slashdotter nerds. I bet you 1:1 odds that we can beat the system. SLASHDOTTERS!!! UNITE!!! Oh yeah... by the way... someone help me place a $500 dollar bet on nuclear fusion (I'm too young to bet)!
Reminds me of The Long Bets
Going a little more on-topic, does anyone remember which UK bookmakers took a £50 bet from a punter in 1963 or so on a Moon landing by 1970? Odds of 1000-1 or so, IIRC. And they paid out!
I bet there's a cat with a piece of buttered toast involved.
And this bookie is offering a tax on those too stupid to realize how easy it is to skip town in 9-1/2 years.
Ofcourse such high tech, power-draining facilities cost enormous amounts of money to construct/operate.
Still I think some money should be kept flowing into this research: it may be terribly expensive, but when succesful, rewards for society could be astronomical too.
Stories Slashdotted so I can't be sure, but no Proof of Life on Mars bet? Do these guys know something the rest of us don't?
I mean I realize were're closing in on 2005, but for some reason when I see 2010 I think to myself "10 years away".
Nuclear fusion eh? It's a long shot but it just might work.
I know, I know RTFA.... etc......Get over it.
Yes- I think it is sqrt(-1)
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
What?! No bets for WMD in Iraq ?
I'd bet on the Higgs Boson, if only because it's speculated that it can be detected at around 20 TeV (Fermilab's Tevatron has a maximum energy of around 2 TeV AFAIR).
Of course, they're gonna try to detect it sometime in the fall (I think), so I'd have to say that it'd be the thing to look for.
Of course, I'm not a betting man. Gotta save my juice money.
www.google.com
... ponies on titan, I could have told you that.
It is called epsilon.
It used to be proving a^n + b^n = c^n didn't have solutions for n>3
So they're betting on whether someone's going to "implement" cosmic ray origins by 2010? Someone alrady did, since obviously, cosmic rays exist ;)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
We've been just 20 short years away from practical fusion power generation for the past 50 years . . .
Interesting, never though about this (but then, again, all I know about bets is from probability theory examples, have not yet had a chance to actually bet on a horse ;-) ).
Paul B.
I wouldn't consider this guy a fool.
My blog
I'll take that bet, because with the money I won I could build at least half a dozen robotic hookers!
Yaz.
These are better odds then I'm anticipating on gains on my 401k funds and me receiving payout of the social security I pay to every pay check.
any pig thrown hard enough will be indistinguishable from a flying pig.
I thought the Titan bet was a great deal until I RTFA and found out it's intelligent life on Titan. I think I'll pass.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
I realize I'm being pedantic here but, for the benefit of those who might not know, the term "odds-on" refers to odds that are better than even or 1:1. None of the events I saw cited had "odds-on" odds.
We would put the odds at roughly 50/50, or maybe 10-to-1. It all depends on whether Mother Nature is kind.
The LIGO weekly reports give a good taste of the real-world science and engineering involved, which is completely awesome. It's humanity's first big quantum system engineering project--very challenging!
Also, LIGO's resident sociologist, Harry Collins, has a new book coming out on LIGO called "Gravity's Shadow". The perfect Christmas 2004 stocking-stuffer for your Slashdot significant other!
a mushroom-shaped fireball
;-)
Tsk tsk tsk
The fireball is shaped like a ball. But as it rises it creates a mushroom cloud, which is, well, shaped like a mushroom.
Here's a little trick to help you remember what they are shaped like, the one called a ball is shaped like a ball, and the one with the 'mushroom" adjective is shaped like a mushroom
You can't take the sky from me...
No, quite the oppposite : you bet what Hawking *doesn't* bet. If you win, great. If you lose, then he wins, so *then* you knock him down. The bookie's term for this is "laying off" the bet.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
go into any bookies' and you'll find four windows for paying in, only one window for paying out.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
re unlikely in that timeframe.
The whole question is how unlikely? Clearly, somewhat unlikely. Is it 100:1 unlikely? Sounds about right to me.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
the Higgs Boson.
What does NASA have in the works for discovering life on Titan, anyways? What would he accept as proof.
And what is 'commercial implementation of a gravity wave?'
I'd RTFA but it's been SDed.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Are you proposing a pig-canon? I'm listening...
I'm really surprised at the odds placed here. I'd switch the odds for gravitational waves and finding the Higgs boson. Gravitational waves have been very well supported from experimental astrophysics evidence (someone got a nobel prize for it - it was based on looking at binary systems with pulsars and measuring the change in the rotation rate, which was consistent with the expected amount of gravitational radiation). Plus, particle accelerator experiments may suffer from other things than 'what we're looking for isn't there', such as the vagaries of funding cuts, delays from damaged equipment, etc. On the other hand, I don't know how close various projects to build the detection equipment are to completion, so maybe this is more of a bet about 'will this experimental device be built by 2010'
Your analysis on the numbers alone are correct. However, you are overlooking a signifigant aspect. Most lotteries are run by some sort of state agency, and the crooked winnings are often added to the state funds. The more people that play the lottery, the more money the state takes in.
The government has to get money somewhere for it's programs. If it isn't through lotterys it WILL be through some other form of taxation. And when was the last time that you got a tax return back from the state telling you that you had won $1 million dollars, hm?
My odds of winning are low and the payoff is 'poor', but they are better than your odds of getting money from the IRS...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
haha. Only on Slashdot could somebody be modded "Insightful" by providing a method for beating a crippled man and stealing his money. *G*
Shouldn't that be in scientific notation?
And it's based on true facts, as written by James Johnson and Floyd Miller in "The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower", a biography of con man Victor Lustig, written in 1961 by the Secret Service agents who finally got him. He was arrested 47 times, but convicted only once, for the last one (20 years for counterfeiting $1.34 million) and died in Alcatraz in 1947. Among many other things, he sold the Eiffel tower, not once but twice. The first victim was too ashamed to tell anybody about it at first, so Lustig did the same trick again.
First off, Fusion does NOT cause mushroom clouds, melt down, or increase gravity. That is movie theatrics.
Last I read in mid 1990's, a magnetic fusion reactor at a university was able to be sustained for well over a week powering the entire university and selling power to the grid for a profit.
I guest they mean in the slashdotted article having a fusion reactor running for a year. Problem with fusion is that it takes massive pressure to sustain the fusion reaction. Once pressure and heat are gone, the fusion reaction instantly stops. Things happen, so it is very difficult to sustain the necessary pressure and heat for fusion reactors to stay operational for more than a month at a time.
There are two popular methods for attempting fusion.
Option 1) A focused magnetic field (tokamak design) that focuses a magnetic field (10 times earth's magnetic field) to compress hydrogen into helium. Problem is it takes LOTS of energy to start and maintain the reaction.
Option 2) A ringed-gyro-laser is used to hit a small hydrogen pellot (located in the middle). Cheaper than option-1 but requires very powerful lasers, hydrogen pellots that consistantly land on target, good timing, and ACCURATE shooting.
I probably should dust off a paper I wrote on the topic 9-10 years ago and republish it.
Odds that we will still be around when 2010 comes around 1:50
Odds that this bookie will actually be around in 2010 when it comes time to pay out 20:1
Hunger is the best sauce.
2:1, even money.
Please consider the above comment. There's no sense in promoting the misunderstanding of basic scientific concepts on Slashdot.
Who cares what odds he came up with! The business of being a bookie means laying off bets on either side and keeping the juice as your profit.
Measure epsilon?
(or is that "Out of the mouth of Mammon"?)
Bookies are very interesting because they stand to lose real money if they predict wrong. This leads, I believe, to rather more accurate predictions on things like election results. In this light, the following are interesting questions:
Which source do UK bookmakers use for weather forecasts? (Hint: not the UK Met Office, the last time I looked)
Do you think you can get odds on whether anthropogenic global warming is happening?
What does that tell us about the current state of climatology)?
-- Jo (even forgot my nick) Calder
A dollar a week is worthless.
A major lottery winning in a lifetime is overwhelmingly valuable.
Factor in entertainment value and social bennefit for the proceeds, and the lottery makes sense.
... not that I play of course :-)
The only silly part is not buying all your tickets in one lump sum. With the odds against you, inflation is against you, and the money does you the most good when you're young.
I think I'll assume I'll live to ~70 or so and go out and buy 52x40 lottery tickets. I'll never have to worry about forgetting to play, and I can claim for a long while at least, that I buy a ticket every week.
I agree, I'm actually considering taking this bet...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
But I can't run down the street to the nearest Ladbroke's, because (AFAIK) the nearest one is 5000 miles away. How does a US person place one of these bets?
One million to one odds crop up nine times out of ten.
Most of IF's predictive markets are based on economic benchmarks, but a month or so ago you could bet on when iTMS would sell its 100,000,000th song.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
...is only part of it for me, but I agree with you. Basically, I like my life just fine - but I easily get $5.00 of entertainment value out of my (rare) lottery ticket purchases. I've come up with some pretty wild schemes. The current winner, assuming a good-sized jackpot of $9 million:
;-)
1) Split about a third between my family and myself (well, my gf counts, too).
2) Give another third to a top-notch university in a city where I'd like to live. Two conditions: Create a world-class population institute, and give me free tuition/books/other fees etc. for life (a "Get Into School Free" card - wouldn't it be great?).
3) Distribute the rest, anonymously, into my friends' bank accounts after *somehow* surreptitiously getting their account numbers. Explain my sudden wealth by saying "Yeah, it happened to me, too - weird, innit?"
And yes, I know I probably couldn't keep part 3 secret because of all the publicity that surrounds lottery winners, but most of my friends watch as much TV as I do (exactly zero), so it might actually work. And that would be too cool!
OK, back to the grind. Feel free to mod off-topic now.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Odds: 10^91023 to 1
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
We'd have to have the mission already in progress I think. I don't think what we have out there now would be able to detect it unless the place was absolutely jam packed and they were throwing a party.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
TradeSports.com allows anyone to trade futures contracts on all manner of assertions, including assertions on the coming U.S. presidential election.
Checkout this site, which displays an electoral vote projection and map based on the state-by-state contracts for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. According to the TradeSports.com/InTrade market, the U.S. presidential election is tight, with Kerry projected to win 262 EVs to Bush's 242. 32 EVs are too close to call.
- James
Have I just thought of something incredibly important? Are the phase change characteristics of structural steel fully considered under temperature loading when designing large structures?
Relevant notes: Steel has a very complex set of materials characteristics depending on its heat treatment - tempering, quenching, so forth. The heat from a large fire could render calculations based on the supplied steel invalid. I'm sure national standards exist for this - perhaps they require review?
The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner had this concept back in ~1975:
"And the tachnical breakthrough odds were also nice and fat. For old time's sake he put another thousand on the introduction of an Earth-Moon gravislide before 2025. That was a perennial dissappointment."
Course in the book there are other areas that are bet on as well, like political areas. You may have heard of the Iowa Electronic Markets with the election so close. It's still gambling anyway you slice it. (Of course campaign contributions still seem to be the place for big payoffs there)
Is there a mathematical term for "when pigs fly?"
Sure - divide by zero.
Aleph sub naught:1?
You should have put your money on Longhorn not having any security patches in the month before its release - that's only 1000000:1.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
The odds of science experiments testing positive? I have one:
Odds of average Slashdotter knowing the touch of a woman reaching 50%: 6000:1
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
70% is pretty normal for a lottery, AFAIK.
Casinos are much better, in the high 90s.
Odds in producing the source code evidence:
"Ladbrokes has set the odds of finding intelligent life on Titan by 2010 at 10,000-1, the maximum odds allowed."
Tree-like fractal patterns probably AREN'T going to qualify as "intelligent life."
-B
Please note, kids-- this is where grammar counts. See, The ponies are life on Titan ... and The ponies are: life on Titan ... convey very different meanings.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
No way man -- maybe cyanobacteria at 10,000:1, or even those little sweet ants that never seem to die, but not ponies!
and now back to the fallout shelter...
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems ... as unnaturally shortened as Slashdot's 120-character sig limit?
... yeah, some of the previous comments in this thread have been rather insightful, one can not always assume that people gone betting on horse racing have had training in probability theory... ;-)
;-) ) and then said what could loosely be translated like "Wow!!! I see it!".
;-)
Paul B.
P.S. A story for you about not "using real money". There was (is?) a bunch of stock-trading-game/education sites on the 'Net, you get all the same feeds and info about the real companies and play virtual money, in the end (if you are good) they tell you 'Yeah, you'd win $2M last year".
Anyway, I mentioned that to my friend back in Moscow, Russia business/banking world (like, 8 years ago) and he stopped for a long second (pint of beer midway between the table and his mouth
The bottom line: it is not easy to get insiders to play on the real stock and know what they are doing (no, not on M.Stewart level, but on the guy-on-the-floor level), but enough of them *just might* play for the game money, and if you see someone constantly winning on one company's stock you start making his bets in real world... Was quite an eye-opener for me!
Paul B.
Yeah, I kind of feel like that too.
"We have got to make Stan understand the importance of voting, because he'll definitely vote for our guy." - South Park
Buildings ARE designed to withstand airplane crashes. It works too, as was demonstrated when the Empire State Building survived having an American B-25 Bomber crash into it in 1945.
The origin of cosmic rays is actually pretty well understood...well, up to about 10^15 electron volts, anyway. Cosmic rays less energetic than this were almost certainly accelerated in shocks in expanding supernova remnants. A cosmic ray can pretty freely pass through the shock front, but will be reflected magnetic mirrors both before and after the shock. Every time the cosmic ray is reflected, it gains a little momentum until the shock either dies away or the cosmic ray manages to escape. The cosmic rays from supernovae are still confined to the galaxy. The real mystery are the ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs), which are more energetic than 10^15 electron volts. Past this energy, the spectrum of cosmic rays steepen, and it isn't thought that shock fronts from supernovae are able to accelerate particles this fast. They might be caused by shocks from galaxies moving in the intergalactic medium...but this is where the mystery is. But whatever UHECRs' source, the magic number is about 16 megaparsecs (galaxies are 1-ish Mpc apart). If cosmic rays are more energetic than about 10^20 or so electron volts, then they will interact with cosmic ray photons in what's known as the GZK effect. So, cosmic rays with this much energy have to be from something relatively local in the universe...but probably not from our galaxy because the magnetic field of our galaxy isn't strong enough to confine UHECRs.
Um, can't we make a sustained nuclear fusion reaction right now?
...
...
In every particle accelerator since the 70's
But it's a negligent yield.
As for energetically and commercially viable reactors, recently neutrons were detected from a fusion pellet using Z-pinch induced hohlraum radiation (ICF). [ press release]
AFAIK this variant on the ICF method holds at least as much promise for a viable reactor as MCF (The Tokamaks and ITERs of the world).
But I must disclaim that I am a grad-student researching Z-pinchs, so I have a natural bias
Working for necessity's mother.
Really now? I think the odds are a lot better than that. I mean, if I can have sex, hell, if I can be involved in a foursome, I think any of you can.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
This is a pretty good idea.
How about I propose a bet:
The chances of humanity genetically engineering war giraffes with chemical sacks for suicide bombing in 5 years, and using them in warfare.
The odds are 1000000:1.
A lot of people come around and pay me cash. I get a nice total of £1,000,000.
I deposit this in the bank at a real interest rate of 3%. In five years' time I withdraw £1,159,274. The "lucky winners" receive approximately 1 pound, leaving me with £159,273 for the effort.
Anyway, those are very long odds on the life on Titan bet.
.01% of what they would run at given a nice balmy 70F for a working environment.
Following the saga of all the predictionists (is there such a word), my bet is that there is. But we'll have to dig fairly deep, and test pretty thoroughly because while the right elements are there, its also cold enough that the chemical reactions are running at
So, given the age of this star system, say 5 billion years, my guess is thats its reached not higher on the evolutionary scale than microbe sized stuff. But it will reproduce, and by that definition, it is life. We will probably have to detect its waste byproducts first, then deduce what could be producing that anomoly.
No, I wouldn't come anywhere near offering those radical sized odds, no more than 5/1 if it was my money on the line. And limited to a total wager of a 5 dollar bill.
--
Cheers, Gene
Disregarding the not inconsiderable ethical and sanity questions for a moment, could you achieve nuclear fusion power generation with energy breakeven using bombs?
I'm thinking a big underground cavern, a shaft with suitable twists and turns and some big blast doors and a lot of thermal power generation kit buried in the rock around the cavern deep enough not to get smashed by the blast.
Now open the blast doors, drop in the large fusion bomb (with small fission trigger) shut the blast doors quickly, detonate the bomb, DO NOT RINSE, repeat. Generate power from the hot rocks.
Could you achieve breakeven over the energy investment of making the bombs and drilling the cavern?
Steve
> No, you merely have to understand that the marginal
> utility of N dollars is not a linear function of N.
A lovely analysis. Won me over the moment I first heard it, and I've always been surprised that people argue against it whenever I say it.
I'm curious, have you seen it in print? I've only ever heard it put forward by one guy (Rich Muller) and he never made it clear whether he had come up with it himself.
But then again, being neither an economist nor a gambler, it isn't all that likely I would come across it even if it were common...
You can't. Sorry.
It's a criminal offense for a non-US bookie to accept bets from a US punter. See the Wire Act (1961):
"Whoever being engaged in the business of betting or wagering knowingly uses a wire communication facility for the transmission in interstate or foreign commerce of bets or wagers or information assisting in the placing of bets or wagers on any sporting event or contest, or for the transmission of a wire communication which entitles the recipient to receive money or credit as a result of bets or wagers, or for information assisting in the placing of bets or wagers, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."
British bookies famously paid out on a long-term moon landing bet. Seem to remember something about a father betting on his son's Olympic medal winning chances too, though I can't find that one through Google.
The article actually says 10,000-1 for intelligent life on Titan. A sucker bet if ever there was one. I mean, how do you define intelligence in this case? If the Titan bookmakers took an unexpected phone call from president Bush, do you really think they would be rushing to pay out?
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
I see LIGO has already moved from 500 to1 to 25 to 1. Looks like some scientists have a better grasp of the science than the bookies (or their advisors) did.
... when discussing movies like 2001 and Star Wars. Fantasy is a genre, fiction merely a label to indicate it didn't happen for real.
2001 = Science fiction
Star Wars = Fantasy fiction
Mmmmkay?
Just think of all the money I could make when I invent fusion backpack. I better go out and get me some tickets.
The woman on the right of the colon... would rather be on the left side of some other body part.
Thought: If you have the cancer surgery, does that make you a semi-colon?
The fallacy of the "expected payoff" is that it is based on the assumption that you can play an unlimited number of times. If you find a one-in-ten-million lottery, and play the lottery a billion times, then yes, you can expect to win a hundred times. But if you buy just one ticket, or a thousand tickets, you can rest assured that you will not win, and your money will be wasted.
Nothing in this world is certain, but losing the lottery is about as close to certainty as you can get. Practically all lottery-playing people will go their whole lives without ever winning a substantial jackput.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
There's a guy in the office here who's a regular better, mostly on horse races. He's a bright guy, but no university grad and particle physics and astronomy are not exactly his thing; he's thoroughly non-technical. I, however, have a good background in particle physics (my astronomy is not what i'd like it to be), but i know nothing about horses. My co-worker tends to do pretty well... he does his homework, knows which horses run well in which weather conditions... and lots of other stuff i don't really understand. I sent him this story. And i think i've just gotten him interested in the topics. He came over, wanted to know where the odds came from, what i thought about the bets and the odds. Will it stick? Who knows. But i think he's at least going to check out the questions. I think Ladbrokes could do a real public service simply by publicizing these more.
Or perhaps someone else should? Dean Kaman wants to make scientists and inventors societies next rock stars? Well, maybe we just figured out how.
The life-on-titan one seems to have been pulled, btw.
Oh, and Ladbrokes is one of the top three bookies in the UK. They've been around for a while, and there's no real chance of them pulling up shop and skiting off to the bahamas.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Is it considered cheating if I build the Titan colony myself using a self-built spaceship utilizing gravitation waves for artificial gravitation and cosmic rays hitting Higgs bosons as a power source with fusion drives as backup and Duke Nukem Forever as entertainment ?-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
20000:1..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
yes, i agree. i would not bet against general relativity in this case. it has had much stranger predictions than waves, which in this case are even anagalous to waves found in electrodynamics.
i think the only real question is if LIGO will be able to seperate gravitational waves from background noise within 6 years. since i've wasted money on worse things than a bet in favor of LIGO, i'm almost definitely putting money down.
(This is a shameless plug, but it's on-topic, honest!) If you hurry you may be able to buy a rare first edition of What is Music? (Solving a Scientific Mystery) . How rare is it? The proof for the second edition is in the post, and once I receive the proof and see it's OK and advertise it for sale, the first edition will be withdrawn from sale (forever!). If my theory turns out to be correct, then first editions of the book are sure to acquire significant value as a collectible.
I can't offer fixed odds (so to speak), as the rarity and value of the first edition will be a function of how many people buy it (it's POD). But you can read about the theory on the website and in the preview, and make up your own mind, decide for yourself, etc. You can also get a very indirect indication of how many copies have already been sold by looking at the Lulu Sales Rank.
Music: a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality. Musicality: a perceived aspect of speech.
Makes me almost wanna bet. A bet of 1 dollar gets you 10k. . . I honestly don't think the odds are quite *that* slim.