All posts by Paul Raven

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Does a massive miscalculation mean the LHC really could destroy the world?

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The LHC will eat your home planet. Maybe.Remember all that beef about the possibility of the LHC producing uncontrollable black holes that could DESTROY TEH WORLD OMG? Well, it’s still highly unlikely, but it turns out that the way these things are calculated aren’t as reassuring as we might perhaps want them to be:

The problem is compounded when the chances of a planet-destroying event are deemed to be tiny. In that case, these chances are dwarfed by the chances of an error in the argument. “If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect,” say Ord and co.

Nobody at CERN has put a figure on the chances of the LHC destroying the planet. One study simply said: “there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes”.

Which means we are left with the possibility that their argument is wrong which Ord reckons conservatively to be about 10^-4, meaning that out of a sample of 10,000 independent arguments of similar apparent merit, one would have a serious error.

In layman’s terms, the above doesn’t mean that the LHC is dangerous, it just means that the assurances of its safety are predicated on flaky calculations. The difference between the two is left as an exercise for the reader. 😉 [via SlashDot; image by muriel_vd]

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Shipping containers redux

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Good grief, is there anything you can’t do with a shipping container? Hot on the heels of speculative mutating condominiums comes this: a nice simple urban newsagents:

A shop in a shipping container

Looks like it has been squeezed into a former front or side yard… this sort of instant architecture is likely to become a lot more commonplace in our cities, I feel.

Makes good business sense, too… locality becoming impoverished? Hire a truck, load her on and ship her out. A fully portable business. [picture by Paul McAuley]

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Harry Potter fandom – the new folklore?

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OK, try getting your head around this one. According to a PhD student in Folklore, the fandom that kids construct around franchises like the Harry Potter series is a global phenomenon which is not (contrary to what many harassed parents might believe) principally driven by official merchandise.

To which your response may well be “so what?” But think about it a little more – if the internet is destined to produce a global culture based more closely on the ritual and oral model ( as some nay-sayers would have us believe) this theory deep-sixes the corollary that said culture will be entirely corporate in nature.

“They weren’t obsessed with having official merchandise,” Small explained. “They were using their imagination and folk traditions combined with popular culture to express who they are.”

Young Harry Potter fans use acting, art and creative writing to express themselves and who they are, and these activities, too, are often a combination of pop culture and folk traditions, Small said.

Granted, this is one small research paper in a maelstrom of branded plastic crapola, but it has a ring of truth to it. Thinking back to my own childhood, sure, I had some Star Wars figures, and I re-enacted plenty of scenes from the films. But when I needed more extras, I drafted in whatever was handy, or made something to suit.

And in a future world where the barriers to creation are lower (think of Second Life, for example, where anyone with the patience and a broadband connection can be an architect), the concept of highly active and productive fandoms becomes a lot more plausible – fandom as genuine motile subculture, no less.

Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End featured warring factions of fandom; can anyone think of any other novels that tread into this territory? [via Techdirt]

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Seasteading startup plans to treat micronations as a viable business

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This Wired piece on the Seasteading Institute doesn’t even attempt to conceal its withering contempt for the possibility of success, and pulls out a big list of previous failed experiments in ocean-borne libertarian havens to support its position. You can’t blame them, really – a lot of people have had a lot of crazy ideas about micronations in the past, and they’ve rarely worked out well.

Technologically, there’s no problem with the Seasteading Institute‘s plan; indeed, what sets them aside from the previous attempts is the input of engineers as well as political visionaries, and the current design [see image below, credit Kate Francis, borrowed from linked article] looks eminently practical.

platform plan from Seasteading Institute

The stumbling block, as the article points out, is political. No nation-state worth its reputation is going to let a cluster of platforms assemble in its offshore waters for the purpose of circumventing legal restrictions, after all.

But then the nation-state is a much shakier concept than it was, and the corporation a much stronger one. And there are a number of countries which don’t have the resources or (in some cases) the will to deal with something like this. Hell, some countries might even actively encourage it; GDP is GDP, after all.

Now factor in projected sea level rises producing a population retraction from many low-lying coastal areas, climate change wrecking land-based agriculture, and the resulting political instability weakening nation-states further still… and maybe the Seasteaders aren’t so much crazy as a little ahead of their time.