Nightmarch
Nightmarch, foaled in 1925 was an outstanding New Zealand bred Thoroughbred racehorse known as The Kiwi. He won the New Zealand Derby and Dunedin Cup as a three-year-old before going to Australia where he became the first horse to win both the Melbourne Cup (defeating Phar Lap) and Cox Plate in the same year, as well as other Principal races.
He was by Night Raid, the sire of Phar Lap, out of the good racemare and broodmare, Marsa (1911) by Martian, a mare that traced to Manto. Marsa produced five foals, all of which raced and were winners.
Racing record
As a two-year-old he had eight starts and won two, the Dunedin J.C. Juvenile (by two lengths) and Hopeful Handicaps, having dead heated with Full Feather in the latter race.
Nightmarch was then sold privately to Alan Louisson, and won the Canterbury Linwood Handicap, New Zealand Derby, Marton Cup, Dunedin Cup, and Great Autumn Handicap for him when he was a three-year-old.[2]
In the spring of 1929, Louisson took Nightmarch to Sydney where he was unplaced in his first start at Rosehill, New South Wales. The big betting punter, Eric Connolly offered £10,000 for Nightmarch (which was rejected) after a betting plunge by others, had been made on Nightmarch’s Metropolitan Handicap winning chances. Connolly instead became the horse’s “campaign manager” and his training was then altered to suit the one mile of the AJC Epsom Handicap instead of the 13 furlongs of the Metropolitan Handicap. A big betting plunge succeeded then when Nightmarch won the Tattersall's Spring Handicap.[3] A Metropolitan Handicap start agreed upon and was won by Loquacious (a sister to Windbag) with Nightmarch, who carried 9 st. 12 lbs. (75.5 kg), a ½ length away in second place. After the race Connolly received numerous threatening phone calls, some indicating possible personal injury.[4]
Nightmarch firmed from 20-1 to 3-1 favourite before he won the AJC Epsom Handicap (carrying 9 stone 4 pounds). Following this he won the Randwick Plate, the W S Cox Plate and the Melbourne Cup (after another huge betting plunge by Connolly, which netted him at least £100,000) with two pounds over weight-for-age from Phar Lap.[5] After that, until the end of his long career, Nightmarch was seldom unplaced. In Dunedin, New Zealand Nightmarch won the James Hazlett Gold Cup and back again in New South Wales won the Rawson Stakes and AJC Autumn Stakes (defeating Amounis). During his four-year-old season he had a total of 16 starts for 8 wins, 3 seconds and 4 thirds.[6]
As a five-year-old he placed third to Amounis and Phar Lap in the Warwick Stakes and was also third in the Canterbury Stakes. In his next four starts he ran second to Phar Lap each time—in the Chelmsford Stakes, Hill Stakes, AJC Spring Stakes, and Craven Plate. Back in New Zealand he won the New Zealand Cup and Canterbury Cup and was second in the GG Stead Memorial Gold Cup before winning the Trentham Gold Cup and Awapuni Cup, and ended his fourth racing season with a second at Canterbury, New Zealand, in the CJC Challenge Stakes, conceding the winner 43 pounds.[1]
At his first start as a six-year-old Nightmarch was second in the James Hazlett Gold Cup. Back in Sydney, Ammon Ra defeated him into second place in both the Rawson Stakes and AJC Chipping Norton Stakes. His won his next two races, the AJC Autumn Stakes and AJC Cumberland Stakes, which he won from Veilmond on each occasion. In the A.J.C. Plate he was unplaced to Veilmond but finished the racing year by again winning the Awapuni Cup.[7] [1]
As a seven-year-old Nightmarch did not win again, although he was second to Peter Pan by half a length in the Rosehill Hill Stakes next spring. His last stake-earning was third place behind Veilmond in the AJC Spring Stakes.
Summary
Nightmarch was the first horse to win both the Melbourne Cup (beating Phar Lap) and Cox Plate in the same year (1929), a feat repeated by Phar Lap the following year (1930), fellow New Zealand racehorse Rising Fast in 1954, Saintly in 1996 and Makybe Diva in 2005. Overall he had 69 starts for 23½ wins (including a dead heat), 18 seconds and 11 thirds for £32,116. At the time the two greats Gloaming and Nightmarch were considered New Zealand's true champions.[2]
Stud record
Nightmarch stood at stud in New Zealand, where his matings with the Limond mare Praise produced these important winners:
- Regal Praise (won ARC Great Northern Oaks and ARC Great Northern St. Leger Stakes)
- Representative (AvJC Avondale Guineas, ARC Great Northern Guineas and AvJC Avondale Cup)
- Russian Ballet (ARC Great Northern Champagne Stakes and Wanganui Guineas)
- Serenata (WRC Summer Handicap and ARC New Zealand Cup)[8]
He the sire of winners of more than £110,000 in stakes and died in October 1954, aged twenty-nine years old.
References
- ^ a b c Pring, Peter; "Analysis of Champion Racehorses", The Thoroughbred Press, Sydney, 1977, ISBN 0-908133-00-6
- ^ a b Barrie, Douglas M., "The Australian Bloodhorse, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956
- ^ SMH: Eric Connolly played the Melbourne Cup and won - big-time, writes Max Presnell Retrieved 2010-9-18
- ^ Cavanough, Maurice, The Melbourne Cup, Jack Pollard P/L, North Sydney, 1976
- ^ Bookmakers did not wake up to Nighmarch plunge, p. 30, Racetrack magazine, April 1982
- ^ ADB: Connolly, Eric Alfred (1880 - 1944) Retrieved 2010-9-18
- ^ ASB: Nightmarch (NZ) - wins Retrieved 2010-9-18
- ^ ASB: Nightmarch (NZ) – SW progeny Retrieved 2010-9-18
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Thorne–Hawking–Preskill bet
The Thorne–Hawking–Preskill bet refers to a public bet on the outcome of the black hole information paradox made in 1997 by physics theorists Kip Thorne, Stephen Hawking and John Preskill.
Thorne and Hawking argued that since general relativity made it impossible for black holes to radiate, and lose information, the mass-energy and information carried by Hawking Radiation must be "new", and must not originate from inside the black hole event horizon. Since this contradicted the idea under quantum mechanics of microcausality, quantum mechanics would need to be rewritten.
Preskill argued the opposite, that since quantum mechanics suggests that the information emitted by a black hole relates to information that fell in at an earlier time, the view of black holes given by general relativity must be modified in some way.
The winner of the bet would receive an encyclopedia of the losers choice from them.
In 2004, Hawking announced that he was conceding the bet, and that he now believed that black hole horizons should fluctuate and leak information, in doing so providing Preskill with a copy of Total Baseball, The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia.[1] Comparing the useless information obtainable from a black hole to "burning an encyclopedia", Hawking later joked, "I gave John an encyclopedia of baseball, but maybe I should just have given him the ashes."[2]
Thorne, however, remained unconvinced of Hawking's proof and declined to contribute to the award.[3] As of 2008, Hawking's argument that he has solved the paradox has not yet been accepted by the community, and a consensus has not yet been reached that Hawking has provided a strong enough argument that this is in fact what happens.
Hawking had earlier speculated that the singularity at the centre of a black hole could form a bridge to a "baby universe," a term coined by Canadian Astrophysicist Chad Bryden, into which the lost information could pass; such theories have been very popular in science fiction. But according to Hawking's new idea, presented at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, on 21 July 2004 in Dublin, Republic of Ireland, black holes eventually transmit, in a garbled form, information about all matter they swallow:
The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.[4]
Another older bet – about the existence of black holes – was described by Hawking as an "insurance policy" of sorts. To quote from his book A Brief History of Time:
This was a form of insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would win me four years of the magazine Private Eye. If black holes do exist, Kip will get one year of Penthouse. When we made the bet in 1975, we were 80% certain that Cygnus was a black hole. By now, I would say that we are about 95% certain, but the bet has yet to be settled.
—Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988)[5]
In the updated and expanded edition of A Brief History of Time, Hawking states that "Although the situation with Cygnus X-1 has not changed much since we made the bet in 1975, there is now so much other observational evidence in favour of black holes that I have conceded the bet. I paid the specified penalty, which was a one year subscription to Penthouse, to the outrage of Kip's liberated wife."
References
- ^ Hawking, S. W. (10/2005). "Information loss in black holes". Physical Review D (American Physical Society) 72 (8): 4. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.72.084013.
- ^ Hawking, Stephen. "My Life in Physics".
- ^ Preskill, John (24 July 2004). "On Hawking's Concession". California Institute of Technology.
- ^ "17th International Conference". GR17.
- ^ Hawking, Stephen (1988). A Brief History of Time. Bantam Books. ISBN 0-553-38016-8.
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The proposed second Simon-Ehrlich wager
Understanding that Simon wanted to bet again, Ehrlich and climatologist Stephen Schneider counter-offered, challenging Simon to bet on 15 current trends, betting $1000 that each will get worse (as in the previous wager) over a ten year future period.
The trends they bet would continue to worsen were:
- The three years 2002–2004 will on average be warmer than 1992-1994.
- There will be more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2004 than in 1994.
- There will be more nitrous oxide in the atmosphere in 2004 than 1994.
- The concentration of ozone in the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) will be greater than in 1994.
- Emissions of the air pollutant sulfur dioxide in Asia will be significantly greater in 2004 than in 1994.
- There will be less fertile cropland per person in 2004 than in 1994.
- There will be less agricultural soil per person in 2004 than 1994.
- There will be on average less rice and wheat grown per person in 2002–2004 than in 1992-1994.
- In developing nations there will be less firewood available per person in 2004 than in 1994.
- The remaining area of virgin tropical moist forests will be significantly smaller in 2004 than in 1994.
- The oceanic fisheries harvest per person will continue its downward trend and thus in 2004 will be smaller than in 1994.
- There will be fewer plant and animal species still extant in 2004 than in 1994.
- More people will die of AIDS in 2004 than in 1994.
- Between 1994 and 2004, sperm cell counts of human males will continue to decline and reproductive disorders will continue to increase.
- The gap in wealth between the richest 10% of humanity and the poorest 10% will be greater in 2004 than in 1994.
Simon declined Ehrlich and Schneider's offer to bet, and used the following analogy to explain why he did so:
| “ | Let me characterize their offer as follows. I predict, and this is for real, that the average performances in the next Olympics will be better than those in the last Olympics. On average, the performances have gotten better, Olympics to Olympics, for a variety of reasons. What Ehrlich and others says is that they don't want to bet on athletic performances, they want to bet on the conditions of the track, or the weather, or the officials, or any other such indirect measure. | ” |
Simon's thesis is that humanity's life-style will continue to improve, and several of the points of Ehrlich's second bet may increase for wholly benign reasons. For instance, the prediction of less agricultural soil per capita is a trend that Simon observed in The Ultimate Resource which Simon attributed to long-term rises in agricultural productivity.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
Why Ehrlich lost in Simon-Ehrlich wager
According to Paul Ehrlich's website:
In 1980, Julian Simon repeatedly challenged environmental scientists to bet against him on trends in prices of commodities, asserting that humanity would never run out of anything... Paul and the other scientists knew that the five metals in the proposed wager were not critical indicators and said so at the time... They emphasized that the depletion of so-called renewable resources — environmental resources such as soils, forests, species diversity, and groundwater — is much more indicative of the deteriorating state of society's life-support systems... Nonetheless, after consulting with many colleagues, Paul and Berkeley physicists John Harte and John Holdren accepted Simon's challenge in late 1980...[1]
It's not clear if Ehrlich consulted with economists. If he had, the flaw in using commodity prices as the best way to understand biophysical limits might have become obvious. Many economists understand the principle of substitution and the dynamic influence of technology with respect to commodity prices. For example, in the absence of any new technologies, copper prices would indeed be expected to increase as growing economies demanded more copper to meet the needs of expanding communications networks and plumbing infrastructure. Technological changes mitigated much of this expected demand as fiber optics replaced copper wire networks and various plastics replaced the once ubiquitous copper pipes throughout the construction industry.
Julian Simon won because the price of three of the five metals went down in absolute terms and all five of the metals fell in price in inflation-adjusted terms,[1][2] with both tin and tungsten falling by more than half. So, per the terms of the wager, Ehrlich paid Simon the difference in price between the same quantity of metals in 1980 and 1990 (which was $576.07). The prices of all five metals increased between 1950 and 1975, but Ehrlich believes three of the five went down during the 1980s because of the price of oil doubling in 1979, and because of a worldwide recession in the early 1980s.
Yet, it is significant that, according to an article in Wired:
All of [Ehrlich's] grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events. Ehrlich was wrong about higher natural resource prices, about "famines of unbelievable proportions" occurring by 1975, about "hundreds of millions of people starving to death" in the 1970s and '80s, about the world "entering a genuine age of scarcity." In 1990, for his having promoted "greater public understanding of environmental problems," Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award." [Simon] always found it somewhat peculiar that neither the Science piece nor his public wager with Ehrlich nor anything else that he did, said, or wrote seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large. For some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker.[3]
Exponential population growth cannot continue indefinitely for any species, whether it exists as microbes in a petri dish, wild salmon at sea, caribou in the taiga, or a global human society. However, world population is no longer growing exponentially; it has been decelerating for the last half century or so, and UN projections show that it may actually decline after 2040.[4][5]
Simon offered to raise the wager to $20,000 and to use any resources at any time that Ehrlich preferred. Ehrlich countered with a challenge to bet that temperatures would increase in the future.[1] The two were unable to reach an agreement on the terms of a second wager before Simon died.
Inflation-adjusted price movements of the commodities in the wager between Simon and Ehrlich may be seen in the larger 1950–2002 context in the following chart. Prices for these five commodities were generally rising from 1960 up until 1978, and generally falling thereafter.[6]
References
- ^ a b c d "Center for Conservation biology". Stanford.edu. 2005-03-16.
- ^ [1]
- ^ Regis, Ed (February 1997). "The Doomslayer". Wired 5 (2).
- ^ Population Division, UNDESA (2004). World Population to 2300. New York: United Nations.
- ^ Cobb, Loren (October 2006). "Population Implosion". The Quaker Economist 6 (#149).
- ^ Kelly, Thomas D; Matos, Grecia R (2005). "Historical Statistics for Mineral and Material Commodities in the United States". U.S. Geological Survey Data Series 140. U.S. Geological Survey.
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Carr–Benkler wager
Yochai Benkler speaking at UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of law on 27 April 2006.
Nicholas Carr speaking at the VINT Symposium held in Utrecht, Netherlands on June 17, 2008.
The Carr-Benkler wager is between Yochai Benkler and Nicholas Carr about whether the most influential sites on the Internet will be peer-produced or price-incentivized systems.
History
The wager was proposed by Benkler in July 2006 in a comment to a blog post where Carr criticizes Benkler's views about volunteer peer-production. Benkler believes that by 2010 the major sites will have content provided by volunteers in what Benkler calls commons-based peer production, as in Wikipedia, reddit, Flickr and YouTube. Carr argues that the trend will favor content provided by paid workers, as in most traditional news outlets.[1][2][3][4]
References
- ^ "What is the Carr-Benkler wager?". The Guardian. "On the two sides: Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review; and Yochai Benkler, a professor of law at Yale University whose book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, suggests that new types of collaboration let people be more productive than profit-seeking ventures."
- ^ Fox, Justin (February 15, 2007). "Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free.". Time (magazine). "In other fields, it's not so clear. In a critique of Benkler's work last summer, business writer Nicholas Carr speculated that Web 2.0 media sites like Digg, Flickr and YouTube are able to rely on volunteer contributions simply because a market has yet to emerge to price this "new kind of labor." He and Benkler then entered into what has come to be widely known in Web circles as the "Carr-Benkler wager": a bet on whether, by 2011, such sites will be driven primarily by volunteers or by professionals."
- ^ Carr, Nicholas. "Calacanis's wallet and the Web 2.0 dream.".
- ^ Benkler, Yochai. "Benkler on Calacanis's wallet.".
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