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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."
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!
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."
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?
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.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 96331
I'm tired of bombing the universe
10000000:1
Science is the Real TRUTH!
...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
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.
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.
this is obviously a troll... thoese couldnt be the odds that longhorn woudl have no security issues in the first month after its release because the odds of longhorn even being released by 2010 are 5000000000:1
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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'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.
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...
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.
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
This actually happened near where I live
sig?
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
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!