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."
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.
And I suppose that for the biology savvy person, sex is only for transmitting genetic material.
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!
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.