A science suit.

No, not a suit made of science; that's something else. I'm talking about a lawsuit, filed in the US District court of Hawaii, against CERN (roughly, Central European Nuclear Research), asking for an injunction against them that will prevent them from starting up their Large Hadron Collider. It seems that there are some fears that the thing could create a black hole and destroy the solar system.

For legal reasons, the plaintiffs are required to state why they think an injunction is the appropriate relief, instead of waiting for actual harm to occur and, if it does, have monetary or other reparations for the actual harm. I think that's the easiest part of the lawyers' job on this one: I mean, if you don't have a solar system any more, how's the post office going to deliver that check?

(By the way, allow me to alleviate your fears: black holes are caused when a certain body reaches so much density that light passing near the body gets pulled into it. Under current theory, this happens when a massive star collapses in on itself. I'm reasonably certain that there is not enough mass in our solar system to cause this to happen, and the LHC is not adding mass to the solar system. We're safe from this one. Or if we're not, blame me after the world ends.)

The Future Soon.

Two articles were referenced on Slashdot today. Their chronological proximity made me laugh. Here is a song which shares their communal subject matter.

Interesting discussion.

There is, in the world, a movie of recent interest. It is about the horrible oppression of a people based on their religious beliefs. Of course, they're being "oppressed" because they're trying to force their beliefs on the rest of the world, but let that go for a minute. You can go back to being irate when you're finished here.

This movie generated a bit of press, but that press is at the New York Times website, which requires a login. So here's the upshot: Evolutionary biologist PZ Myers was kicked out of a screening of the movie, because he believes in evolution, and does not believe in God. This movie is about allowing people with dissenting viewpoints to express their ideas freely. Yeah. It hurts me, too.

Anyway, there is a video about it, straight from Mr Ed's mouth. (Fair warning: this video takes a fair bit of processing power. Avoid multitasking while it's running.) You may wish to bone up on your film theory here, though. Trust me; you'll be glad you did.

I don't have much to add that hasn't already been said; it's an intellectual travesty, it makes a mockery of the very theme of the movie, hypocrisy, assholery, blah blah blah. I just felt that your attention needed to be drawn to it.

...

Here's something I just found out. (This is in addition to the post above, which I wrote before I discovered this interesting, interesting fact.) This film stars Ben Stein. I did not know that, despite everything I'd read and heard about it. Nobody is mentioning that it's Ben Stein in the movie. The full title of the movie is, in fact, "Ben Stein is EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed." I only found this out when I went searching for the movie's website to make that first link up there. It took me several tries, mostly because I couldn't fit what I believed about Ben Stein with what I believed about this movie. Obviously, I am going to have to shift some of my beliefs. I will now spend some time in penance and feeling gullible. If you need me, check penance. I'm probably there.

Well, damn!

I quit my job today. Called up my boss, gave my two weeks' notice, and now I'm not looking back. I'll be moving across the country once I'm out of this job, and it should be quite the adventure. I've been told that this trip will take me:

• Three days


• A week


• As long as it takes

... But I figure I'm pretty likely to get there at some point and in pretty close to one piece, so I'm really looking forward to it. One of my brothers suggested that I bring along books on CD, to make the going more enjoyable. My dad immediately suggested The Grapes of Wrath, and I couldn't help but think of On the Road. I've already got a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; what else would make good cross-country listening? If I'm feeling practical, perhaps a cookbook from the RoadKill Cafe? Or maybe something light, like Misery? Thoughts?

Progress!

I saw a couple of stories on Slashdot that, taken together, provide a nice example of how I often feel about the world. I know I usually keep you in suspense until you click the link, but here I'm going to outline them directly, because that's called "trying something new".

The first one describes an advanced kind of cooling fan for your computer's processor. It is ingenious, efficient, and will make computers easier to build and operate. This is a good thing on all accounts, provided it can be produced in a way that is not prohibitive. Really cool, right? (Sorry, it's early- ignore the pun.)

But then comes the second story, in which scientists have managed to make a room-temperature superconductor. What's so great about that, you ask? Well, for starters, superconductors don't generate any noticeable amount of heat when electricity flows through them. So if you build a processor out of this stuff, you can probably get away with not installing a cooling unit. At all.

So we have an invention which does its job better and more efficiently than previous inventions of its genre, and is a kind of revolutionary. Then, two seconds later, there's an invention that totally invalidates and obsolesces (hey, spell check didn't ding me on that!) the first gizmo. (There's the spell check ding.) I kind of feel for the folks who came up with the first invention. They're obviously very bright and talented; they've made something that should, for all the world, change the way we think about cooling processors. Except that if this superconductor thing gets off the ground, we won't have to think about cooling processors at all.

Kind of makes you think, huh?

Drowning in information...

I'm having some kind of fun here. It's the kind of fun that's scary and intimidating and humbling and makes me want to crawl under the covers and never ever ever come out. Yay!

I'm trying to learn to code. I don't feel the need to develop Turing-tested artificial intelligence or make a billion dollars; I just enjoy being able to write a program and have it work. If I could make enough money to afford food, that might be nice too, but honestly, I don't want to dream about that fancy upper-crust stuff. Anyway, my brother (a professional coder) sent me a link to a blog. This guy seems to have a lot of requirements for someone he'd hire. I'm in absolutely no position to argue; he codes for a living for a well-known outfit, and I don't code for pay (yet, I hope). Still, it is intimidating to see all that stuff I don't know, and have someone say "Yeah, I know it's all basic, but you'd be surprised at how few people know all this stuff".

Looks like I have some studying to do.

Oh noes!

There are a couple of doom-based news stories floating out there. The general gist is, "We're all gonna die!"

Well, I, for one, am not surprised. I have known, for a long time now, that I was doomed. I didn't intend to make it forever. This is kind of laughable to me. So, in order, my analyses of these stories:

1. Drinking water contains chemicals.

As I understand it, these drugs are the residue left over after people take the drugs, pass a fraction of the drug into the sewer, where it gets processed by the municipal water utility, and a portion gets put back into circulation. No one knows what kind of effect this has on the human body.

Other stuff in the sewer: E. Coli! Oh crap! There's e. coli in the water! No, wait; I'm sure the good people at your local water utility thought of that, and treat the water with antibiotics. Now, all they have to do is figure out how all those damn drugs got in the water supply...

2. Death ray star.

I was reading about the death ray star, and they make the claim that

Since the initial blast would travel at the speed of light, there would be no warning of its arrival.

Further down the article, they point out that

This pinwheel is about 8,000 light years away, roughly a quarter of the way to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

So, it travels at the speed of light, and it's 8000 light years away. Granted, we won't know that the thing exploded until the light from the explosion hits us (right along with the gamma rays), but nobody said "The way this thing looks to us, right now, it appears 7999 years away from going boom.", which would actually scare the hell out of me, since we only see an 8000 year old snapshot of the star. Instead, they're talking in the hundreds of thousands of years range. If we, as a species, don't wipe ourselves out by then, I'm not going to worry too much about this planet getting fried; we might not live here anymore!

At least, I won't.

Emotions.

Sad.

Happy. (You'll need this link if you followed the last one.)

But more seriously, today marks the passing of a massive name in geek culture. I feel like I should wear a black armband to work tomorrow or something.

Man, even Code Monkey Dance isn't cheering me up. The knowledge that the voices of a billion geeks cried out in unison, only to be silenced, does ease the pain somewhat. (In a commiserating way, not in a schadenfreude way.)

Sigh.

No Numa Numa, but still fun.

I found a video on YouTube while researching my last post. It has many versions. I thought it might be enjoyable. Tell me if you enjoy it.

The science makes me smile.

Here, we have a couple of sites that have amazing videos on the subject of (drum roll please): Science!

Let's face it: chemists are the badass punks of the lab-rat set. "Oh, look, my sleeve caught fire" is less a cause for alarm to these folks, and more an opportunity to study the exothermic reaction caused by the various kinds of fiber in the garment. "Hmm, I seem to have spilled some acid on my arm" is their version of "I'm now in the club". They blow things up just to see why things blow up. Man, I should've taken a few chem courses in college. Oh well; that's just one more bad decision I made that I can learn to live with. That, and my face, which is neither horribly disfigured by having hydrochloric acid melt my forehead, nor shorn of its eyebrows from an unexpected reaction in what I thought was my snack, but was actually a volatile solution that should not under any circumstances be moved. I have to live with that, too.

Oh well.

For more information on Science!, consult the authorities.