The builders of the world’s biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.
[From Atom-smasher fears spark lawsuit – Science- msnbc.com]
These mini-black holes would suck matter out of this universe and send it into other dimensions, where it would never been seen again. I was wondering if this might be what happened to the THIRTY SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS that’s gone missing from UBS recently. It certainly cannot be explained by conventional physics. If the chairman of UBS had stood in front of a roaring bonfire and thrown $100 bills into the flames at the rate of one a second for the last two years, he would have lost a mere $6.3 billion. Oh wait, perhaps he was burning 500 euro notes not $100 bills. They have much higher money density: in that case I stand corrected and he could just about have done it without string theory or 11 additional dimensions coming into play.
All he had to do was resign though. The Hong Kong Standard reports a more robust line on gambling bankers who pick the wrong horse. Two employees of the Agricultural Bank of China came up with a better strategy than UBS. They took about three million quid from the bank vaults. They then used the money to buy lottery tickets: their plan was to replace the missing money with the lottery winnings and hope that no-one noticed (much the same plan as Jerome Kerviel of Societe Generale fame as far as I can tell). Generally speaking, Chinese bank employees are not familiar with the work of Adam Smith:
Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.
[From Adam Smith Quotes]
In the U.K you get to keep the Porche and the massive pension and take a few weeks gardening leave. In China, the rogue traders with the novel asset management strategy were executed.
