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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Introduces the Doomsday Dashboard
Lasrick writes You probably know the hand on the Doomsday Clock now rests at 3 minutes to midnight. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a pretty cool little interactive Dashboard that lets you see data that the Bulletin's Science and Security Board considers when making the decision on the Clock's time each year. There are interactive graphs that show global nuclear arsenals, nuclear material security breaches, and how much weapons-grade plutonium and uranium is stored (and where). The climate change section features graphs of global sea level rise over time, Arctic sea ice minimums. atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and differences in global temperature. There's also a section for research on biosecurity and emerging technologies.
Sure, they added climate change to try to stay relevant when nuclear stockpiles plunged, but there are so many possible doomsdays they ignore entirely.
I see nothing about zombies on the site, for example.
Doomsday Dashboard: Live at Budokan - now available on iTunes!
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Have you ever seen a movie where the bomb was defused with 3 minutes left on the clock. No-one will be interested until its in single digits of seconds to midnight.
Nullius in verba
That clock moves almost as slow as the one in my work computer.
(dear fricking gawd! I swear it's been 17:14 for at least two days!)
it's an HOUR and 3 minutes until midnight.
So if the earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old and this clock is representing a day between creation and doomsday... Hmm, 1440 minutes in a day, 3 minutes till midnight... Carry the two...
We can expect the Earth to exist for another 9.5 million years!
Whew... I was about to panic.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
OK, if they want to guess how far we are from disaster caused by nuclear weapons, that's fine. But why co-mingle "climate change" - is this just a "we need funding" thing?
7 - Unknown.
I wonder how these come to happen.
"Captain Johnson! Where the fuck are the two tons of plutonium you left the base with!"
*shrugs* "No idea."
"WHAT!"
"NO IDEA. SIR!"
"Ok, that's better. Try to be more careful with the next plutonium truck. Shit ain't growing on trees, you know?"
I grew up with the thought that global Nuclear war wasn't a question of "if" but "when" I spent a lot of my childhood lying in bed wondering when that next EBS "test" would be the for real deal or not
And after all these decades of wars, accidents, political and religious conflagrations I just don't have the ability to care about the doomsday clock anymore because it will NEVER END
I'll throw my end of the world fears on the pile of rusted Thunderbolt sirens and move the dial off of 640 AM, peace is war forever
The same as it ever was
At some point I realized that nothing serious ever happened, and things kept getting better and I just stopped believing it.
So by your logic because nuclear war hasn't happened yet, it never will? That's... impressively illogical and dangerous.
This is probably why I'm skeptical that global warming will have a serious negative impact on my life.
If you are over the age of 40 and look at actuarial tables, global warming might or might not impact your life greatly. But if you give a crap about those who are younger than you then there is a very real probability it will impact younger folks in very tangible and serious ways. Within my lifetime glaciers have hugely receded, the Arctic ice cap has shrunken to historic lows, etc. If you think those events (regardless of whether caused by man or not) are not having an effect on global climate and weather right now then you either ignorant or have an agenda.
Sorry, there must be another use of the term "doomsday dashboard" that I wasn't previously familiar with.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
*Klaxon*
Oops!
While the Doomsday clock is an evocative metaphor, nearly 70 years, and mission drift (was originally only encompassed destruction by nuclear war) have rendered it impotent and corrupted.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I understand there is scientific value to be had from this dashboard but honestly as a mad scientist I myself am both disappointed and frustrated by the lack of functionality. By no means am I new to doomsday dashboards (ive been shopping around for months now.) I've used KF245 Deathmaster consoles, BUE44 Death ray destructo console with the liquidator option and then finally im sure we're all familiar with MurderMatic's Dashboard-O-Doom with those oh so lovely cherry keyswitches. But the BAS Doomsday dashboard has not a single modern feature! not even the usual laz-o-tron scope or whir-o-blitz flashitizers. I stood in the shower for almost 20 minutes today practicing THE PERFECT villain speech, complete with "mark my words" and "tremble before the might" and for what? This stupid Doomsday Dashboard cant even target Washington DC?! And dont even get me started on the interface. How the hell do i LAUNCH any of these warheads?! I have ALWAYS WANTED to have site-based launch but i cant find the control ANYWHERE to launch!
In summation Atomic Scientists Bulletin, please, get your act together (you're embarassing the mad community.) Also please let the united nations know (because your dashboard CLEARLY CANT DO THIS) to wire 1 BILLION dollars in currency to skull island in no less than 5 hours, or we will have no choice but to...oh screw it you know what? i just realized i cant control SEA LEVEL OR CARBON DIOXIDE LEVEL AT ALL in this blasted stupid dashboard.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Or is there another use of the term "doomsday dashboard" that I wasn't previously familiar with? (this may dupe - submissions seemed borked for a bit)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I haven't done any research on the clock, but what little I could find on wiki doesn't give any relative meaning to the setting. If it's set to 23:57, what does 00:01 represent? It all seems awfully arbitrary and set to an alarmist tone since anything with only 3 minutes left must be urgent! If you are being arbitrary with the setting then you could calculate the same date to equate to 02:30,. but then no one would talk about it as if it had meaning.
And what's a minute? Since it's clearly not a minute. Or do the mean each of the 1440 minutes to represent .07% of a percentile and being at 11:57 means we're 99.79% likely to end this year?
For a group of "scientists" (and yes I put that in quotes cause I'm not seeing any science), this certainly seems more like marketing hype.
Someone please chime in if there's a real meaning to all of this.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
I haven't done any research on the clock, but what little I could find on wiki doesn't give any relative meaning to the setting. If it's set to 23:57, what does 00:01 represent? It all seems awfully arbitrary and set to an alarmist tone since anything with only 3 minutes left must be urgent! If you are being arbitrary with the setting then you could calculate the same date to equate to 02:30,. but then no one would talk about it as if it had meaning.
And what's a minute? Since it's clearly not a minute. Or do the mean each of the 1440 minutes to represent .07% of a percentile and being at 11:57 means we're 99.79% likely to end this year?
For a group of "scientists" (and yes I put that in quotes cause I'm not seeing any science), this certainly seems more like marketing hype.
Someone please chime in if there's a real meaning to all of this.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
They should start that sea level rise clock about 20,000 years ago, it's been rising since the last ice age. Most of the time at faster rate than it is now.
The signs of the apocalypse have been around for thousands of years. What makes these signs any more relevant than the other signs?
Nuclear weapons were a convenient boogeyman to wave around when you were a hippie in the 70's. "Oh, they're going to blow the world up unless we pour this goat's blood on the gate of the air force base!" Discounting the fact that making a nuclear bomb is really hard (Iran and North Korea have been trying for as long as I've been alive, despite the fact that the general concepts are simple enough for a teenager to grasp,) and making something to deliver it is also really hard. By the time you get done doing all that stuff, you may as well have just leveled a city with conventional weapons. We did a lot more to Japan with conventional weapons than we did with nuclear ones in WWII, by the way. But after all that, some very interesting politics come into play, which is why India and Pakistan haven't nuked each other. And you know, the longer a nuclear device sits, the less likely it is that it's going to work. Your nice pure plutonium core starts getting crapped up with hydrogen bubbles. And those things are already very finicky as Iran and North Korea are finding out.
So yeah, on a scale of things that are likely to kill you, nuclear war is simply not one of them. You're significantly more likely to be shot by a disgruntled co-worker or a road-raging jackass in a giant penis truck. His truck is very very big, his penis is very very small and he's angry! In fact if you asked 1000 random people if they worry more about dying in a nuclear war or to zombies, I'd be willing to bet most of them would say zombies. Which are fictional.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The user could customize the display of his/her Apple Watch with of the real-time status of one of the indicators in the dashboard, with the time display as minutes to midnight in any desired time zone and time display format. It would be a doomsayer's dream.
BoAS has been crying that the world is in *imminent* danger of destruction since at least the 1970s. At a certain point, even they have to question their own credibility insisting that the sky will be falling 'any moment now'.
Look at their logo for the doomsday clock, for pete's sake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... it implies there is no conceivable reading in which we're not in immediate, constant danger.
This is PRECISELY the sort of crap that has led to much of the public disregarding "science" as a thing that can speak to many issues in our daily life - the BoAS may be staffed by nominal scientists, but they're otherwise pretty much typical, naive, left-wing academics trying desperately to parlay their "sciency" credentials into credibility in foreign policy and geopolitics.
Would you read a periodical on Particle Physics written by Michelle Bachman, Henry Kissinger, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi? Maybe for the laughs, I admit.
Then why would anyone give any more credence to a political pamphlet published by scientists?
-Styopa
Just stick one of these in a box with an LED. if the LED is on, it's doomsday.
http://www.maxwell.com/product...
"Maxwell’s radiation-hardened, hybrid, Nuclear Event Detectors (NED) sense ionizing radiation pulses generated by a nuclear event, such as the detonation of a nuclear weapon, and rapidly switches its output from the normal high state to a low state with a propagation delay time of less than 20ns."
http://notanumber.net/
That might be the most hilarious bit in Jane's comedy act, where he wrongly claims that "there is about a 99.9% probability that "RespekMyAthorati" is a man named "Bryan Killett"".
And yet Jane's 100% wrong, despite being 99.9% certain. As always. And Jane refuses to admit he's wrong. As always. And Jane simultaneously insists that he's happy to admit he's wrong. As always.
But at least Jane finally admitted that Jane is suggesting anything. Baby steps.
Good grief, Jane. That link goes to my clear statement that I'm not "RespekMyAthorati". So it's difficult to imagine that Jane's asking that question in good faith.
But maybe Jane's chronic amnesia is kicking in again, so Jane might actually be honestly confused... once again. If Jane's actually just honestly confused, Jane should try to remember that I answered Jane's comment because Jane used my real name to wrongly accuse me of being "RespekMyAthorati":
Sadly, Jane will probably never appreciate the ironic contrast between those first two sentences.
Jane probably also won't appreciate the irony that Jane uses my real name to wrongly accuse me of posing as someone else, while complaining bitterly and threatening to call the police and/or sue whenever I point out that Jane is Lonny Eachus. But again, I'll remember this the next time Jane pretends to be offended whenever I point out that Jane is Lonny Eachus.
Good grief. Once again, the irony of Lonny Eachus's sock-puppet "Jane Q. Public" wrongly accusing me of sock-puppeting is overwhelming.
Once again, Jane's completely wrong. This "khayman80" account is the only account I use at Slashdot. What Jane actually means is that his crippling paranoia has led Jane/Lonny Eachus to repeatedly and
Answered here.
By the way:
Jane/Lonny Eachus accuses Bill Nye of being a liar or suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome, but Jane can't even write down a simple energy conservation equation without wrongly "cancelling" terms.
I've repeatedly explained that only the power passing through a boundary is included in the energy conservation equation across that boundary. I've even linked to textbooks so Jane can verify that this is how "conservation of energy" works.
If Jane ever reads and understands those textbooks, he'd know that the cooler power isn't relevant for the same reason that he could know that a crayon mark doesn't cross the lines in a coloring book. Again, this is really basic physics.
And again, inserting the standard physics definition of the word "net" into Jane's equation reproduces the energy conservation equation that Jane's still adamantly rejecting. That's another independent way for Jane to see that he should consider the possibility that only power passing through a boundary should be included in the energy conservation equation across that boundary.
If Jane can't even master the most basic details about conservation of energy, Jane won't ever be able to analyze how greenhouses work because that depends on understanding conservation of energy.
Jane, you of all people really shouldn't be accusing scientists of being liars or suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
Continued here and here.