All of Alejandro's Comments + Replies

My prior probability for the existence of a secret and powerful crackpot group willing to sabotage the LHC to prevent it from "destroying the world" is larger than my prior probabilty for the LHC-actually-destroying-the-world scenarios being true, so after many mechanical failures I would rather believe the first hypothesis than the second one.

"Naturally, those so-called "lotteries" were a failure. They had no moral force whatsoever; they appealed not to all a man's faculties, but only to his hopefulness. Public indifference soon meant that the merchants who had founded these venal lotteries began to lose money. Someone tried something new: including among the list of lucky numbers a few unlucky draws. This innovation meant that those who bought those numbered rectangles now had a twofold chance: they might win a sum of money or they might be required to pay a fine--sometimes a co... (read more)