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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."
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?
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
And of course, not killing thousands of people in a mushroom-shaped fireball in the process. Once they get past that hurdle, we'll be home free.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Hmmm, despite his "achievements", Dr. Hawking is not all that highly respected in theoretical physics circles - mind you, he is well respected, just nothing as extraordinary as the rest of the world would like to believe. He's like Feynman - someone who is quite smart, shows off a hell lot but is just another smart physicist - nothing more.
And yes, I'm a physicist.
Vote for a Man, Vote for Bush!
Not a liberatarian flipflop hippie.
No, you can control and sustain nuclear fusion in a Farnsworth Fusor. The real problem is generating more power from the reaction then you invest into it. This is a threshold that various labs have been using exotic technology to approach (like Tokamak reactors).
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)
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)!
Everbody, put a lot of money on fusion. Then say HA WE ALREADY DID IT and collect. Because we have, in several different expieraments, one of which is the VX VASMIR project headed up by the ASPL, which will take us to Mars.
I think I may make some money this way.
Translation: The odds of a particular person winning the lottery are remote. The odds of anyone winning the lottery are much, much better.
Probability is all about what question you are asking. :)
Worse if it needs to be "intelligent".
The bookie is nuts. It's pretty certain that nobody would even get a permission to build a fusion power station, let alone build one in the next 6 years. Heck, solid plans for a plant are unlikely in that timeframe.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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!
The point is that in order to be able to get excited playing lottery, you have to be bad at math. Let's suppose I offer you a heads or tails game with fair 50-50 probability split for both options. If you win, I pay you $1 (one US dollar), if I win, you pay me $100 (a hundred US dollars). You won't get excited by this game - at least not in a pleasant way. You'll rather say "what kind of a crooked game is this?". The point is that all the lotteries and casino games are as much crooked as this game, but they try to hide it in complex score counting systems. This scheme works good enough for weak minds, but I for one couldn't feel any "excitement" playing a fundamentally crooked game. I can be excited playing poker with a trusted friend, when I know it's just luck and betting strategies for both of us, but there's no point of playing if I know that he has a hidden ace under the table. That's lottery for a math-savvy person.
Fire has never caused a steel structure to spontainously collapse before this.
Maybe because you haven't looked hard enough? Ignoring the collapses of WTC 1 and WTC 2 from fire, several early skyscrapers (of the ten-story variety) collapsed from fire. Look into the Chicago and San Francisco fires for examples.
I think someone's a little jealous...
And I suppose that for the biology savvy person, sex is only for transmitting genetic material.
Fusion reactors do not utilize a self-sustaining reaction the way fission reactors do. No possibility of meltdown. Also, no heavy radioactive isotopes created. Heavy radioactive isotopes are the really bad stuff used/created in fission reactions. They include things like uranium, plutonium, cesium, strontium, etc. None of this stuff is created in fusion reactors.
go into any bookies' and you'll find four windows for paying in, only one window for paying out.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
And yes, I'm a physicist.
So am I. Your characterization of Feynman vis-a-vis Hawking is silly, I think.
As you suggest, Hawking is indeed considered to be quite smart, but to have made contributions that haven't been that major to physics as a whole. Such concepts as the Hartle-Hawking equation, black hole evaporation, etc., have been quite interesting to people working in comparatively narrowly-defined areas; that plus their removal from unambiguous observational testing makes them at most curiosities to most of the physics community.
That's a pretty far cry from the contributions of Feynman. His work on QED, weak interactions, superfluidity, and the makeup of hadrons are each individually closely tied to experiment, and all of that work related to issues that nearly all theoretical physicists spend at least some time in their careers considering. Hell, pulling Feynman rules out of interaction Lagrangians, and using the diagrams that follow for solving perturbation expansion problems, are now staples not only of particle physics, but of solid state theory as well. He was tremendously influential. Nothing Hawking has done compares in its influence.
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*
SCO showing code in Linux that They own the copyright to: Infinity:1
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
I only very occasionally play the lottery, but there is another factor. It doesn't really matter to me if it's $100 million or $50 million, it would be enough to change my life. it doesn't matter that it's only half (or a quarter or whatever) of what it would be to be "fair" - it's a large enough amount to make a big difference.
...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.
To get excited, you have to be bad at math... or you have to have been reduced to a ad-soaked stupor by the scores of mindless lottery advertisements on the radio, TV, etc. I usually turn down the radio during the ad breaks, and even so I have half the speels about "more excitement, more action, more fun!" running though my head whenever I look at a Powerball billboard (with its ever changing running total).
.. spoken by Ray Charles, no less. I'm not sure what the saddest aspect of this is...
Or the other line that sticks with me..
"Powerball, it's America's game!"
1) Ray Charles advertised for these people practically from his deathbed
2) What the sentence itself says about Powerball
or worse
3) What the sentence itself says about America.
I'm going home now... try to ignore the Powerball billboards... but I know I'll have to read the number anyway. To anyone strapped for cash, constantly bombarded by stories about the winners, and maybe lacking a basic knowledge of the real odds.. the lottery must be a pretty addictive and frustrating thing.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
9/11 was the sort of event that it is not practical to design for. Structurally it worked. The building stood up. The impact load from the plane (from a documentary i saw) was less than the deisgn level wind event, albeit focussed in one part of the building. There was no way to fire engineer that sort of event, short of a anti-aircraft missile site on the roof.
You just have to pray that you are all sorted with the almighty when that sort of thing happens
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14