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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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The slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact

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ducksIt’s always irritated me when the media runs a story about how standards in science education are falling and illustrate this by asking members of the Great British public a bunch of science-based trivia questions.

My beef with this habit is that science isn’t just about facts. It’s about the scientific method. It’s about a way of looking at and thinking about the world. It’s about empiricism, logic, rationality, trial and error, and being aware of your own limitations and biases.

Facts are fine, but it’s a mistake for anyone to identify science purely with fact-based knowledge.

This particular bugbear of mine has found some support with this study, which concludes (among other things) the importance of developing scientific reasoning skills alongside scientific knowledge:

Researchers tested nearly 6,000 students majoring in science and engineering at seven universities — four in the United States and three in China. Chinese students greatly outperformed American students on factual knowledge of physics — averaging 90 percent on one test, versus the American students’ 50 percent, for example.

But in a test of science reasoning, both groups averaged around 75 percent — not a very high score, especially for students hoping to major in science or engineering.

FWIW I think inquiry-based learning should become it’s own subject in the same way physics, chemistry, and maths already are.

And since so many of the problems the world faces are interpreted through the prism of scientific thought it would be a Good Thing if the true nature of science were more generally understood.

/rant

[from Physorg][image from Gaetan Lee on flickr] [Also what does this have to do with SF? Who can say! Peace.][30/01/2009: Small edit – adding BBC News link to science video quiz]

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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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Does the future of the novel lie with the cell phone?

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cellphones According to a recent report in Japan Today, ten of Japan’s print bestsellers in 2007–selling about 400,000 copies apiece–were based on cell phone novels, or “keitai shousetu.” The genre was born in 2002 when an author named Yoshi wrote Deep Love: Ayu’s Story for the cell phone. It was enormously popular and now lots of Japanese authors are writing short  intended to be read on cell phones. (Via GalleyCat.)

From the Japan Today story, which notes that according to a recent survey, 86% of high school, 75% of middle school and 23% of grade school girls in Japan read cell phone novels:

The way it works is this: novels are posted by members of cell phone community sites to be downloaded for free and read on other cell phones. Reading often takes place in crowded trains during long commutes. The works are published in 70-word installments, or abbreviated chapters that are the ideal length to be read between shorter train stops. This means that, despite small cell phone screens, lots of white space is left for ease of reading. Multiple short lines of compressed sentences, mostly composed of fragmentary dialogue, are strung together with lots of cell phone-only symbols. The resulting works are emotional, fast-paced and highly visual, with an impact not unlike manga.

Of course, you’re probably thinking “if they can write novels in 70-word instalments for cell phones, I could probably write a novel in 140-character installments on Twitter!”

You wouldn’t be the first. A post at ReadWriteWeb lists some attempts in that direction.

The future of reading, apparently, may lie with those with short attention spans, and the future of writing with the terse.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]reading,novels,fiction,cell phones,Japan[/tags]

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