Bookies Stop Taking Bets on Life on Mars

[onehandle]

LONDON - The information coming in from the Mars rovers is exciting for NASA, but it's ending some of the action for bookies in Britain.

snip..

A Ladbrokes spokesman says the latest odds in favor of past life on Mars were 16-1. Back in the '70s, when the first bets were placed, the odds were 1,000-1.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=624&ncid=757&e=10&u=/ap/20040303/ap_on_sc/britain_mars_bets

Keep in mind that Bookies are almost always right. Cash is king.

[slackmaster]

1. Also in my local fishwrap today...

This seemed to dovetail with the article about bookmaking about life on Mars. Better science through bookmaking?

...DARPA is known to have a high failure rate, and one recent spectacular example was a project called FutureMAP. Through FutureMAP, the agency sought to generate ideas about the likelihood of future terrorist attacks by setting up a system for people to bet on potential strikes.

Critics called it a sick idea, and the project was called off because of the possibility that terrorists could utilize the information FutureMAP supplied. DARPA's director, retired Admiral John Poindexter – who was previously involved in the Iran-Contra scandal – resigned.

Still, DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker defended the agency's unconventional approach to research.

"If you are charged with revolutionary technological breakthroughs, you have to be out of the box and creative," she said. "There are always ideas that won't pan out, but we have to stay on that edge." Walker noted there are many instances of ideas that initially seemed useless or ill-conceived but turned into successes down the road. The Internet, for example, was considered outlandish when it was first envisioned, she said....

For full copyrighted article please see:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040303/news_1c3raceside.html

:shrug:

[Dogmudgeon]

2. Then it's official

There is life on Mars.

NASA should have attached a lottery ticket to one of their probes instead of a chemical analysis package. We would have had the answer back in 1976.

--bkl