Conspiracy

I spotted this little story the other day; some boffin at Oxford University has come up with a paper that shows (using maths/statistics) that the amount of time a conspiracy stands depends on the number of people involved in it, essentially the more people involved the less time it stands before being exposed. To anyone involved in managing people this is simply common sense, especially when it comes to office romances (not that I'm involved in one of course, that's just a vicious rumour). The paper looked at some of the more famous events that are most often accused of being hoaxes and worked out how long they should have lasted based on the equation developed. For example,  the US Moon landings involved 411,000 people and would have been exposed in (maximum) 3 years, 8 months. Climate Change theory involves 405,000 people, time to exposure  (maximum) 3 years, 9 months, i.e. for all of the big ones (vaccinations, cancer etc.) the paper shows that if there was a conspiracy then it would have been exposed long, long ago, i.e. the probability of there being one is vanishingly small.

Of course this paper won't mean a thing to the conspiracy theory nuts out there whose level of belief tends to be inversely correlated to the evidence, the less concrete evidence the better! The fun for them is clearly more around the myth making itself, joining dots where there are none to be joined and hiding behind the un-falsifiability of the crazy stories they invent, but then again, that's exactly what they'd want us to believe isn't it....