I always liked the idea of using nuclear bombs to disrupt hurricanes. Especially if we drop them as they pass over Florida.
There are two other ways of doing it with 4 dice:
D10 + 2D8 + D6 is 21 or higher
D20 + 2D12 + D10 is 36 or higher
I get: D12 + D4 is 12 or higher having probability 7/24, or 35/120
(Check: the valid (D12, D4) pairs are (8,4), (9,3), (9,4), (10,2), (10,3), (10,4), (11,1), (11,2), (11,3), (11,4), (12,1), (12,2), (12,3), and (12,4); that is 14 out of 48 possible, or 7/24.)
Yep. Claude’s script found the same. My buggy script did not. I’m too discouraged to even debug it.
However, it also doesn’t find a solution for 4/9 even with 15 dice. I wonder if there is a mathematical proof of this.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is apparently pretty tired of it though, the idea pops up every hurricane season.
Well, if they’d only try it, it might shut some of us up. Whether or not it actually works.
You can actually do much better than that. Most natural neutrino sources (solar in particular) produce low-energy neutrinos. The cross-section of a neutrino goes up with roughly the energy, however. And it’s possible to build a particle collider (muon colliders in particular) with much, much higher energies. Further, the scaling factors are such that the overall exposure goes up with the cube of the collider energy (basically: the beamwidth goes down, the per-neutrino cross-section goes up, and the energy per interaction goes up).
So it you have a decent-sized muon collider at your disposal, it’s not difficult to beam a message to a target with minimal losses.
If Black Hat had showed up in this strip, he’d further note that you can kill with a neutrino beam that’s within reasonable levels of technology. I cite this paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ex/0005006
The paper does not consider the possibility of intentionally using the beam (or multiple beams) to dose a target. A rather expensive method but the only way to kill someone literally anywhere on (or under) the planet.
On the other hand, if you increase the cross section of the neutrino interaction by making the beam higher energy, aren’t you making the Earth effectively more opaque to the beam?
You are, but the opacity is still very low. It doesn’t change the net result much if 0.0001% is absorbed vs. 10% (totally made-up figures).
I read an article that mentioned the possibility of destroying nuclear weapons on the other side of the earth by beaming Neutrinos at them.
… xkcd 
It’s even in their FAQs. See Hurricane FAQ - NOAA/AOML and click the “Nuclear Weapons” entry below the first bob of text.
I read a Poul Anderson story once where the protagonists had (limited) weather-control tech, based on powerful lasers, that they used to disrupt hurricanes. Even though the lasers had far lower power than the hurricane, they had a much greater local intensity, so they could cause dramatic effects at the spots that they hit. And if you have enough data (collected by heroic figures in jets flying through the storm), you can pick just the right spots to change the course of the whole storm.
It’s like the old joke of the invoice for $0.50 for tapping the machine with the hammer, $499.50 for knowing the right spot to tap.
I believe that’s Orion Shall Rise or possibly another story in the same future-verse.
Yup, that’s the one. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious; just didn’t think that the precise book was relevant.
It wasn’t relevant, but it’s hard to keep an SF nerd from being pedantic.
Maybe on the next one headed towards West Palm Beach.
I’m not sure I get it, beyond the simple absurdity of launching a rocket that somehow omitted a second stage.
Perhaps it’s just wry commentary on the modern habit of people failing to plan ahead and expecting instant connectivity to everyone else involved to save the situation at the last minute. e.g. Made inadvertently (read “sloppily”) ambiguous plans to meet at someplace for drinks and at start time somebody notices there are two locations with that name in different parts of town and half of us guessed one way and half the other? Mobile phones to the rescue.
And/or the modern habit of people expecting same-day Amazon to save whatever goods-related shortcomings they have from failures to plan? It 10am on Thanksgiving and you discover you have no potatoes to mash. Quick, hit Amazon; they can bring us anything in 2 hours flat! Oops, not today they can’t. We are soooo screwed.
I doubt it’s any deeper than that.
Got it.