MEGA ASTEROID could 'BLOW UP EARTH' - Russian space boss A freshly discovered asteroid, with the classy name 2013 TV135, has a slight chance of smashing into Earth on August 26, 2032 and ruining everyone's day in a very big way. "A 400-metre asteroid is threatening to blow up the Earth,” Russian vice-premier Dmitry Rogozin, who runs Russia's space industry, posted on his Twitter …
I'll be late 70's ... I'll bring a pickup-load of Corneys of miscellaneous homebrews, the wife will drive in a second pickup full of Zin and Souv Blanc, and maybe my daughter & grandaughter will drive in a third truck with a pile of preserved meat, cheese and homemade bread. Might as well share binging on the good stuff, if we're all actually going to die :-)
Live life like you mean it ... it ain't going to last forever ;-)
Looks like the nuke boys are looking for new jobs (remember the CIA wanting to go into copyright enforcement at the end of the cold war)? Well, they may have a case in this case: With need for nuclear weapons questioned, builders find a new target – errant asteroids.
Course there are still several thousand warheads ready to give all of humanity a really bad 6 hours day whenever somebody accidentally farts at the wrong frequency in an underground control room, but hey, you don't get to have an aggressive primate brain without having to take on some risks, right?
The chances of me actually playing the lottery are roughly one in infinity. Lotteries are a tax on people who can't do math(s).
I'll take my chances on the universe throwing rocks in my general direction. Not that I have any choice in the matter. Note that I'm typing about 400 yards from the Rogers Creek Fault, probable home of the Bay Area's Next Big One, and I sleep quite soundly, thank you :-)
"Lotteries are a tax on people who can't do math(s)."
There are some important exceptions to that assertion; in some cases (e.g. after several consecutive rolled-over jackpots, it's quite possible for the prize multiplied by the win probability to be greater than the price of a ticket.
It does get complicated when accounting for all the other factors (taxes, multiple winners with the same numbers, lesser prizes for matching less numbers, etc.), but there are situations it actually makes sense.
No it's jake who needs to learn math(s). The UK national lottery used to be £1 (now £2) a ticket with a 1 in 14,000,000 chance of winning. Rollover jackpots were frequently estimated to be (and actually were) in excess of £14 million, in which case it was perfectly rational to buy a £1 ticket with an expected payout well in excess of £1 (once smaller prizes were taken into account). Of course, you had only a 1 in 14 million chance (per ticket) of winning the big one, but the maths still stand up.
Nevertheless I agree that, in general, lotteries are a tax on the ignorant.
The chance of winning the lottery is around 0,0000003% (small winnings) and winning the big price is around 0,000000020% at any given time (using flat normal lottery system with 10 lines in any game). The question is not how much is spent on the lottery ticket. It's an question if you are just using plain lottery ticket or mathematical ticket (more expensive but give extra numbers and lines in return that increase your chances to win).
It is possible to win the lottery using mathematics. What can't account for is the random factors of number alignment. By using mathematics you can increase your chances by several factors. I also have the rule (and it pays out as expected), the rule that you got more chance to win smaller amount than larger ones.
"Lotteries are a tax on people who can't do math(s)."
People who think that are people who aren't smart enough to understand that the utility value of cash isn't linear.
Small and huge amounts of cash (relative to income) are useless - the stuff in the middle is the life-changing bit.
For example, someone on a reasonable salary can lose £1 a week without it having any effect on their life but winning multiple millions on the lottery is live-changing (whether for better or worse!)
The only people who shouldn't play the lottery are very poor people who can't afford it and people who's life wouldn't be changed by winning (either because they are already as rich as Croesus or because they aren't motivated by money)
"Lotteries are a tax on people who can't do math(s)."
I find Lotteries to be more a tax on Optimists. And I approve, they should be taxed on the half-full glass. Pessimists should get a discount, on account that half of their glass is empty.
Personally, I'm half-way to my next drink.
Well, sort of: some people just find waiting to see if their numbers have come up entertaining; in which case it might be seen as cheap entertainment. For others, they might have a spare pound a week, and consider the miniscule chance of extreme good fortune worth a shot. But going (eg) short of food, heating, or whatever else to play the lottery definitely is not sensible.
I don't think most of the people who play the lottery do so because because they can't do maths: they do it because they have the ticket money, and they like to believe they might win. That's psychology, not (lack of) maths.
Even if one ignores the potentially valuable intangibles of fun and hope there are lots of different ways of doing the calculations for this sort of thing. One of them is that for minimum outlay of money and effort (effectively no opportunity cost) it takes the chances of becoming a multi-millionaire from zero* to non-zero - so assuming that outcome is desirable it's infinitely better to be in than not.
*Zero for most people - certainly for me.
Lotteries are a tax on people who can't do math(s).
I buy lottery tickets three or four times a year because I find it quite fun to imagine I might win even though I'm well aware of the odds. For the amount of entertainment I get out of pretending the ticket I just bought might just be a winner for a few days it's well worth the $2 it cost. And since I'm only pretending I can win there's no letdown when I lose.
Also, the last three times I've bought lottery tickets I've actually gotten back more than I spent on the tickets. The game I normally play when I play pays $3 if you match two numbers, which I've managed to do every time through shear dumb luck. So, technically, I've won the lottery three times this year :-)
(If I ever win a jackpot I'll probably die of shock before I can claim it. That's not what I play the lottery for.)
It really is an unlucky country, America. Or rather North America. Whoops no, I mean the smaller southern portion of North America. Big as countries go sure but for a space rock heading for Earth with so much surface area to choose from, even so much land to choose from not actually large at all. There must be some magnetism effect I guess. Poor merkins.
"Of course I watch the documentaries and there are always a couple fragments that end up in the Eiffel tower and the Big Ben."
Leaving aside the naming of Elizabeth Tower (ne the Clock Tower*), are those the ones in Las Vegas or Europe?
* TIL the name St Stephen's Tower was erroneously applied to the Clock Tower at the Houses of Parliament
So the 2048 one we can just get out of its path... 50megatons, bah...
but 2500 megaton impact... well that is sort of end of world shit right? is this an E.L.E. if it hits?
I guess I have 19 years to build 3 deep bunkers positioned around the world to hide in (a bunker near the impact site would be useless, so better have 3 to be sure..)
2500 megaton is not that huge, you'd easily survive just a hundred km away. Try some of the asteroid impact calculators (eg. http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/ ), the megatonage does vary a lot depending on impact velocity and what it hits, but I'd suggest less than 15km/s with a density of 3000kg/m^3 to get near the 2500 megaton figure.
An article I read a while back (ok, several years back) claimed that if the Czar Bomba had been built to it's original, 100mt specifications the climate change it caused would have been catastrophic. Mind you, I never looked into the credentials of the author and the tone of the article was "OMG WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE FROM....er....something".
By August 26, 2032, 99% of all energy production on Planet Earth will be done by LENR. Coal, natural gas, oil, solar, wind, and geothermal will all be mostly obsolete. And space travel will also be powered by LENR, and our capacity to divert even a huge asteroid such as 2013 TV135 will be greatly enhanced.
...and if you watch most of Jame's Burke's Connections (1970s BBC science series, similar to V-Sauce on YouTube) you'll appreciate this, is how all our discoveries, developments and learning will all have been for naught. Unless of course we can document and archive the best of our work in such a manner that it is legible by other species and will survive drifting through space for millennia on the autonomous space craft we will be launching prior to our demise. #2032ThisWasUs
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