Glenn Beck weighs in on the Large Hadron Collider

Black Hole Destroys Earth

The old feeder isn't the only one concerned about the possibility that there will be no September 11th this week. At the risk of being called a twat, Glenn Beck asked on his radio program today:

Could a French made black hole destroy the earth tonight as you sleep? Scientists say probably not, but check back tomorrow....

He wonders if the reason given for taking even a small risk of destroying the Earth is sufficient. He's right; the odds may be long, but the risk is extraordinarily high given the ephemeral value of a successful or otherwise non-cataclysmic outcome.

Eventually, Glenn comes to the same conclusion that I did: fire it up. There are worse things than having no future. Glenn:

When you put it in perspective, it's never what you expect that's going to end it all for you. --- It's like, whatever. So we're sucked into a black hole. I won't have to do the debates. I mean, I don't have to listen to Keith Olbermann for the next two months.

Beck is no twat either.
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IMHO, it doesn't make any difference if the black hole that eats the earth is French-made or not.
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Update: The scientists at CERN are claiming success. What they really mean is that they were able to run a moderately high energy proton beam through the complete circuit of the circular collider without having it fizzle out or escape its magnetic bounds. The world didn't end. End of story? Not quite.

It will be some time before the proton beams are jazzed up to the full energy capacity of the giant collider. Then the really risky part of the planned experiment to 'discover' the Higgs boson can begin. This will involve running two extremely high energy proton beams in opposite directions and causing them to collide head-on. It is at this point that the 'mini' black hole may be created and the elusive Higgs particle detected.

I think today's experiment was a trick. Now the rest of us are supposed to breathe a sigh of relief and say, "Those wacky high-energy physicists are OK. They pulled it off and the world didn't end." These world class fiddlers have only rosined up their big bow. Contrary to what Drudge's headline this morning says, the "Big Bang" recreation has not yet been attemped. The black hole part of the tune is 'way on down the program. Stick your i-pod things back in your ears, folks, you'll hear no big bang this week.

The CERN kids with the big chemistry set won't blow up the garage, even if they have access to more cash and electrical energy than most third world countries. No way, man. Be cool.

All Earth's problems: solved by science this week?

Large Hadron Collider - click to see it in action

I was getting ready to write my 9/11 Islamic terrorist attack anniversary blog post when I saw in the news that there may not be any more 9/11s. Some folks are saying that all of the world's problems might be solved this coming Wednesday, September 10th by a group of high energy physicists in Europe.

The scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), working in spite of death threats from sissies afraid to face a new trouble-free world, will start up the Large Hadron Collider at their gigantic particle accelerator which straddles Switzerland and France near Geneva. The ostensible reason for expending these enormous amounts of money and electricity is to 'discover' the elusive Higgs Boson. This explanation is so transparent and facile as to be worthy of derision. There must be an ulterior motive for all this bother and expense.

I think the idea is to save the earth by destroying it. Remember the famous Viet-Nam era quote (the one that nobody can recall who said it) "We had to burn the village to save it"? I suspect the same reasoning is being surreptitiously applied to the LHC. Human beings are widely thought by the fruits of academe to be bent on ruining the Earth and, eventually, the whole universe. What better way to keep things 'natural' than to get rid of the human pests and the conditions that spawned them?

The old feeder remembers a ride on the cable car up to the summit of the Zugspitze. My first wife was with me and she was so nervous that it was obvious. Someone asked her what she was worried about. She snapped back, "What if the cable breaks?" The other passenger said calmly, "If that happens, all your troubles will be over." The same reasoning applies to the results of powering up the Large Hadron Collider.

If, as predicted, a black hole is created by this device and it grows into a matter sucking monster instead of disappearing via some prophesied Hawkings Radiation, then the Earth will be destroyed and all our worries will be ended. You can bet on it.
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Dr. Brian Cox, one of the boy-scientist whiz kids leading the LHC project, (so young, I wouldn't trust him with the car keys) has this to say to folks advocating a cautious approach to creating black holes here on Earth: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."

Thats good enough for me. I'm no twat. Fire up that black hole!

US to shoot down spy satellite - message to Red China?

Update: Bill Gertz
Satellite shoot-down shows missile muscle


Saber Rattling in Space

This unexpected news just fell into my inbox:

NEWS ALERT
from The Wall Street Journal

Feb. 14, 2008

The Pentagon is planning to shoot down a broken spy satellite that was expected to hit the Earth in early March, according to the Associated Press. U.S. officials said that the option preferred by the Bush administration will be to fire a missile from a U.S. Navy cruiser, and shoot down the satellite before it enters Earth's atmosphere.

Note that the US and other nations were critical of the People's Republic of China when they destroyed one of their satellites with a missile. Some cats claimed China's actions then constituted saber rattling, sending a message to the US and Russia. Others were concerned about the large amount of space junk that remains in orbit from the explosion.

I don't know how the US will avoid the same criticisms. Seems like Cold War II is getting started.
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Read more here.

Just what we need: more 'harmless' rays

Keep your shoes on: T-rays can see right through

From Reuters:

Imagine a trip to the airport without having to slip off your shoes.

A scanner using T-rays, a harmless form of electromagnetic radiation, could make that possible, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory said on Tuesday.

"At airports we have to take off our shoes," Ulrich Welp of Argonne's Materials Science Division said in a telephone interview. "It is kind of a nuisance."

Using T-rays, it would be possible to examine travelers' shoes without the need to disrobe, he said.

Harmless, eh? When have I heard that before. Why is it that the various manifestations and applications of electromagnetic radiation are always presumed harmless until proved otherwise? This presumption has been around since x-rays were discovered, and arguably since the first human became a suntan freak.

Time has proved that new 'forms' of radiation, like new 'forms' of food additives, pesticides, medicines and such sometimes evidence their danger only years after the exposure. Cancers can take decades to form and be detected. Sometimes the harm is visited on the offspring of the exposed person. When scientists can't consistently tell me whether or not eating eggs will kill me, how can anyone say something is harmless?
Examples of the presumption of harmlessness:

• My parents, "Get outside and get some sun. Sunshine is good for you boy."
• The shoe salesman, "Step up and put your feet in the fluoroscope machine sonny, so yer Ma can see how these fit."
• The doctor, "We'd better take a few x-rays, just to be sure."
• The dentist, "You are due for a full set of bite wing x-rays."
• Cell phone kiosk cat, "Thats a rumor, man. Cell phones don't cause cancer."
• Gun shop salesman, "These tritium sights don't give off harmful radiation."
  

It all reminds me of hearing, "Asbestos is inert. It won't hurt you. Now get the last of it out of that bag." If I go flying again, I'll remove my shoes. Its no trouble, and my feet don't smell that bad.
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I'll have a slice without so much rat radiation in it. Check the Feed Trough for video.
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Aren't you glad you didn't waste your time watching the faked-up, rat-filled, dishonest CNN/YouTube debate?

As if we didn't have enough germs here on Earth

Collecting Microbes on Mars

Scientists are saying they have found new evidence of abundant microbial life on Mars. I'm glad these cats aren't getting any of my money to look for microbes on Mars. We have plenty of micro-organisms right here on Earth. And they seem to be getting nastier. Why take a chance on some kind of Martian germ getting loose here?
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I saw the movie.

Canadian Cutting Edge Science

Jonathan Schaeffer - waiting for the solution

From Canada.com (where you can play tunes on their musical navigation buttons) comes this announcement: Canadian scientists crack Checkers code:

A team of scientists at the University of Alberta has reached a milestone in artificial intelligence by using computers to 'solve' the game of checkers.
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To solve the game, the team had to sift through an astronomical number of checkers positions and analyse the best way to move the pieces. Almost continuously since 1989, dozens of computers have been working on the problem, constantly updating Chinook's database with more and more positions.

Seems like a funny problem to put all those computers to work on for years, but the Canuck accomplishment is an excellent example of an inelegant proof. Checkers actually presents more of a geometry problem than a scientific method problem inasmuch as its solution can be posed as a theorem susceptible of proof. A theorem whose proof is inherently inelegant is anathema to both geometers and scientists. A really inelegant proof is one that the mind cannot grasp. In this case, banks of computers working day and night is what it took to grasp the solution.

The first case of such an inelegant proof the old feeder remembers was the computerized solution of the infamous Four Color Map Problem. It has been known since men started to make maps that no more than four colors were needed to keep two contiguous countries from sharing the same color. No matter how many times cats set ink to paper to try to refute this theorem, four colors was all that was ever required. But nobody could say why.

After a number of attempted 'elegant' proofs to the four color theorem were propounded and later shown to be inadequate, computers were invented and set to work finding the solution. Its an interesting story.

The four color theorem was the first major theorem to be proven using a computer, and the proof is not accepted by all mathematicians because it would be unfeasible for a human to verify by hand (see computer-assisted proof). Ultimately, in order to believe the proof, one has to have faith in the correctness of the compiler and hardware executing the program used for the proof.

The perceived lack of mathematical elegance by the general mathematical community was another factor, and to paraphrase comments of the time, "a good mathematical proof is like a poem—this is a telephone directory!"

If you can't grasp a solution with your mind, then maybe its no good? Like everyone else caught up in this philosophical conundrum, I'm not sure. Nobody has come up with a fundamental proof of the gravitational effect that I can wrap my head around, either, but I'm still going to count on gravity to keep my stuff where I put it.
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Beware of Canuck checkers hustlers.