The Corpus Callosum

Doomsday Clock

Posted by Joseph j7uy5 on January 16, 2007
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This thing has fascinated me since I was a teenager, when my father had
a subscription to the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_of_the_Atomic_Scientists"
rel="tag">Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists.  I read it every
time.  They are the ones who keep the famous href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock">Doomsday
Clock.

Now, we hear that href="http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/scientists-to-move-doomsday-clock/20070114093009990001">the
Clock is being changed:

i-229e7a5c0d6b7af5272a8a32800378b7-doomsday-clock.jpg

Also the website
for the Bulletin is being changed.  


Right
now, this is the only thing there:

i-35781a3f159531f2737bb9a69e98edc0-Splash.gif

I must say, I am curious to see what they have to say.  I’m
sure the announcement will be about the moving of the clock, closer to midnight. But what I
am curious about is their reasoning.  The people who write the
Bulletin tend to be very well-informed, and insightful.  My
impression is that their involvement in politics is driven by their
interest in science and in humanity.  This I find refreshing,
even if the subject matter is dreadful.

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Comments

  1. #1 Max Kaehn
    January 16, 2007

    I wonder if they’re going to make the state of the clock available as something that can be trivially queried by a machine? I suspect you’d see lots of user interface widgets turn up that surface them on web pages and status bars…

  2. #2 Joseph j7uy5
    January 17, 2007

    We’ll see soon. But the clock changes only rarely; much less often than, say, the homeland security level. When they change it, it is the result of a serious analysis of world events.