Lost in a Good Book : www.jasperfforde.com
Separate forum for discussions relating to this particular book.
The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and Jasper Fforde walk into a bar...
Posted by: lewarcher (---.175.110-65.q9.net)
Date: October 13, 2009 06:55PM
[www.nytimes.com]
The paragraph that caused me to laugh was this one:
Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.
As soon as I read this, I thought (a la 'Lost in a Good Book'), "Why not just have a jar of rice & lentils on hand, instead of a deck of cards with 100,000,001 cards?"
Fforde should have received some credit on the papers published about this! :)
The paragraph that caused me to laugh was this one:
Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.
As soon as I read this, I thought (a la 'Lost in a Good Book'), "Why not just have a jar of rice & lentils on hand, instead of a deck of cards with 100,000,001 cards?"
Fforde should have received some credit on the papers published about this! :)
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