Mark Thomas - close to the speed of light

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understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

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Yesterday (25/9/13) I watched Brian Cox in Science Britannica,online he said he had made a mistake during his piece on the LHC.It turned out that he had missed 4 nines from the decimal percentage of how much the particles at the LHC were accelerated of the speed of light. Whilst the missing 4 nines represent small fractions,the speed of light is so large that the missing digits represent quite a large missing chunk. I remarked on Facebook,making a joke about the missing digits,taking a snapshot of what I had said for back reference. The same evening I was trying to recall the name of the comedian who had taken a balloon over the governments communications spy centre as a protest against covert communication monitoring,I thought he was called Mark something...and tried to hunt him down online. This failed - but I recalled by myself eventually that his name was Mark Thomas. Today, (26/9/13) I found it necessary to look for the snapshot I had taken of my joke about Brian Cox's missing 9's,but could not find it,so I went back to Facebook to generate a new copy,searching for where he had mentioned his mistake. Directly above the entry about the missing 9s was someone else's mention of where they had heard a rumour about The Sky at Night,which Brian is apt to show up on - the source they had used was Mark Thomas's website!
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Date submitted:Thu, 26 Sep 2013 12:06:22 +0000Coincidence ID:7220