Incidentally, while I am a fan of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Nuclear Notebook, I’m not a huge fan of their flagship product, the Doomsday Clock.
Mainly because, whilst it has the appearance of being quantitative—the Doomsday Clock is currently at 100 seconds to midnight—it doesn’t translate well into probabilities. At 100 seconds to midnight, how high, actually, is the risk of destruction? What about at 60 seconds to midnight? Is the scale linear? For more on this, I recommend Christian Ruhl’s post, “Building a Better Doomsday Clock”.
Incidentally, while I am a fan of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Nuclear Notebook, I’m not a huge fan of their flagship product, the Doomsday Clock.
Mainly because, whilst it has the appearance of being quantitative—the Doomsday Clock is currently at 100 seconds to midnight—it doesn’t translate well into probabilities. At 100 seconds to midnight, how high, actually, is the risk of destruction? What about at 60 seconds to midnight? Is the scale linear? For more on this, I recommend Christian Ruhl’s post, “Building a Better Doomsday Clock”.
Also, here’s a meme I enjoyed: