Postponing doomsday

doomsday around the corner ? ”

We make corrections on the paper by González-D ´ iaz [Phys. Lett. B 586 (2004) 1] where the false illustration of Eq. (10) for the case of β = 0.5 (relevant to Fig. 1 (II) therein is pointed out and illustrated.

Doomsday Book, Vol. II

For humans, power is in part control over their lives. History is a collection of past experiences that empower informed actions. A repertoire is the catalog of your things. A large diverse repertoire can be critical or it can be irrelevant. A great hammer is nice if the job involves a nail. You might have lots of wrenches, but not the one that bends the right way for the “tough nut”. The wrong...

Notes on "doomsday models".

I would like to state, briefly and bluntly, why I think the various "Doomsday Models" are worthless as science and as guides to public policy. I hope it will not be deduced that I believe the problems of population control, environmental degradation, and resource exhaustion to be unimportant, or that I think an adequate response to them is a vague confidence that something will turn up. They ar...

Postponing Branching Decisions

Solution techniques for Constraint Satisfaction and Optimisation Problems often make use of backtrack search methods, exploiting variable and value ordering heuristics. In this paper, we propose and analyse a very simple method to apply in case the value ordering heuristic produces ties: postponing the branching decision. To this end, we group together values in a tie, branch on this sub-domain...

Observational Bounds on Cosmic Doomsday