In case you’re not sure, you can go to hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com for a definitive answer. The site even has an RSS feed so you can get periodic updates through your aggregator.
I don’t know about you, but I feel much better knowing there’s a way to verify at a moment’s notice whether we’re still here. Because sometimes I honestly can’t tell…
So, are you wondering exactly what this Large Hadron Collider doohickey actually does? When it’s not creating black holes that are going to suck us into the Bearded-Spock dimension, that is? Then check out this informative video that was created by Chris Mann, an employee of CERN (that’s the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the scientific group that actually built and operates the LHC):
Pretty fascinating, eh? Of course, everything seems more interesting when it’s narrated in an erudite-sounding British accent. This guy could recite his grocery list and make it sound like the most significant bit of scholarship ever conceived. That’s just one of those curious facts of life…
(Hat tip to Neatorama, my latest morning-coffee read.)
Today is the day scientists in Switzerland activate the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest particle accelerator ever built, which will boost two streams of protons moving in opposite directions to just under the speed of light and then smack ’em together. The goal is to re-create the exotic particles that are theorized to have existed right after the Big Bang, increase our understanding of how all this wonderful stuff around us actually works, and maybe even figure out the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
You may have heard some scary talk about this thing creating a black hole that will pulverize the earth and rip a hole in the very fabric of space and time. Reliable sources say this is bull. Personally, I’m hoping that if we do get sucked into a parallel dimension, it’ll be one where I’m taller, cooler, and still have a full head of hair.
Of course, it’s possible we’ve already been pulled into another universe. That would explain so many things that have occurred over the last few years…
[Extra credit to the first Loyal Reader who can identify the image above…]
Just checking my various news feeds here as I while away the last few minutes of a long work week…
I see that Roger Bergendoff, the crackpot who was making ricin only a stone’s throw from my house, has pleaded not guilty to charges of possessing a biological toxin and various weapons. That’s interested, considering his Vegas hotel room was full of nasty little toys. Maybe his logic is that he was in the hospital at the time those things were discovered, so he technically wasn’t in possession of them. Or something.
Meanwhile, in a related story, Thomas Tholen, owner of the Riverton home where Bergendorff was brewing his poisonous crap, threw Bergendorff out after he figured out what his cousin was doing down in the basement because he “feared for his family’s safety,” but he didn’t report Bergendorff to the authorities because he didn’t want to get in trouble himself for the guns and explosives that were stored on his property. Real heroic there, Tom. He faces charges for “falsely telling federal agents he knew nothing about his cousin’s production of ricin.”
Sticking with local news, a new report from the American Lung Association places Salt Lake and Logan, Utah, in its list of the top-ten most polluted cities in the country (at least when you’re talking about short-term particle pollution). Another Utah city, Provo, shows up at number 12. You know, when three of your state’s four or five biggest cities are in the top 15 most polluted cities nationwide… well, it makes a guy proud.
The problem is the Wasatch Front’s infamous “inversions,” the cold-weather phenomenon that occurs when high-pressure zones in the upper atmosphere trap stagnant air at the bottom of our mountain valleys… which, of course, are where all the cities are located. We’ve always had cruddy air in the wintertime because of those damned inversions, but it’s gotten much, much worse in the last couple of decades, a direct result of the booming population along the Wasatch. (Briefly, for my online friends who’ve never been here, just about all of Utah’s population clusters in a line that runs north-south through the middle of the state, snuggled up nice and cozy against the Wasatch Mountains, hence “Wasatch Front.”) I have a lot of reasons for hating all the development in the Salt Lake Valley that has transformed the rural pasturelands of my youth into a wall-to-wall (literally, since we’re surrounded by mountains) subdivision, but the fact that we can’t even see our beautiful mountains for a good chunk of the year now because the air is so filthy is right up there at the top of the list. If I could only turn back the world like Superman…
Finally, a Japanese company called Cyberdine has prototyped a robotic exoskeleton called HAL which is intended to help augment human strength or move paralyzed limbs. According to this article, the thing can even operate autonomously based on data stored in an on-board computer. That all sounds really cool… unless you’re a sci-fi fan, of course. Then you can’t help but think about that other Cyberdyne and HAL and it all becomes rather ominous, doesn’t it? Hell, the exoskeleton even looks vaguely like stormtrooper armor, complete with some glowing bits like in Tron! How can an autonomous exoskeleton that looks like a stormtrooper, is built by the creators of Skynet, and is named after a murdering AI not lead to some kind of trouble?
On these happy notes, have a good Friday, everyone…
While I was seeking out links for the previous entry, I came across the photo below and thought it was too awesome not to share:
Hm… I just read some news that kind of startled me: the Air Force is retiring its F-117A Nighthawk fighter planes — a.k.a. “the stealth fighter” — this month. Next week, in fact. Monday, to be precise.
And why is this startling, you may ask? Mostly because it doesn’t seem like these weird little black arrowheads have been around all that long, but the article I read reveals that they’ve actually been in service for over twenty years, ever since 1983, although the Air Force denied their existence until 1988. (Makes you wonder how many UFO sightings prior to ’88 were actually Nighthawks being tested out and then flown on secret missions, doesn’t it?)
Among my various esoteric interests is a curious — some would say morbid — fascination for the infamous tragedies of history: Pompeii, the Hindenberg crash, and of course, the grandmother of disaster stories, the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
Today is the 96th anniversary of what author Walter Lord called “a night to remember,” i.e., the night the supposedly unsinkable ship struck an iceberg while on her maiden — and only — voyage. (Technically, the ship hit the iceberg late on the night of April 14, but it took two and a half hours to go down, so it actually sank on the 15th.)
Public interest in this particular shipwreck never seems to wane, for some reason, and to this day people are still debating over what exactly happened out there in the North Atlantic. Oh, sure, everyone knows the ship hit a ‘berg, but was it ripped open like a giant can of anchovies by a sharp spur of ice, as so many movies have depicted? Or was the damage actually something more… subtle? Caused by something innocuous that nobody thought would be a problem, like the stupidly mundane combination of rubber o-rings and freezing temperatures that brought down the space shuttle Challenger?
Here’s a theory: it was the rivets that held the ship together. More precisely, according to two authors of an upcoming book, it was rivets made of inferior, brittle materials that shattered when the iceberg gently brushed — not ripped into — Titanic‘s side. According to this theory — which is backed up by observations of the wreck itself on the ocean floor — the ship wasn’t torn open, as everyone has believed; rather, the broken rivets allowed the hull plates to simply open up along their seams. The end result was the same, of course.
I love this photo:
Why? Well, why not? It’s in groovy black-and-white and has the slightly flattened, zoomed-in perspective that I often shoot with myself. There’s some awesome mid-century googie architecture in the background, and it looks like that’s probably the famous Randy’s Donuts to the right. Oh, and there’s frickin’ Dr. Zaius sitting on a bus-bench in modern-day (well, 1968, anyway) Los Angeles. How could you not love this?
I found it here, via Boing Boing, of course. I recommend checking out all of the photos in that set. There’s a lot of beautiful, nostalgic, and somewhat weird stuff. Be warned, though — there is some hippie-style nudity. If that sort of thing bothers you.
Following up on the possibility that a new clue to the fate of hijacker D.B. Cooper had been found, Earl Cossey, the man who packed the four parachutes given to Cooper on that night in 1971, says the ‘chute discovered by some children in Washington state is definitely not one of Cooper’s. Cooper’s parachutes were made of nylon, and the mystery ‘chute is silk. (I’m guessing that would make it much older than Cooper’s, possibly even World War II-vintage.)
For the record, Cossey sounds like something of a dick. He apparently told some reporters that the ‘chute really was Cooper’s, just to yank their chains. I’m sure it must be tiresome being the go-to man whenever anyone turns up a rag that they think might be Cooper-related, but still… playing games like that strikes me as very uncool, especially when it might get somebody fired.
And for the other record, I still think Cooper survived his jump, made off with the bulk of the cash, and spent the rest of his days drinking margaritas in the sun… it makes for a better story that way.
I have a real affection for unsolved mysteries, the kinds of stories that forever fascinate people so long as we never definitively learn what actually happened. Did Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan run out of fuel, crash in open water, and drown, or did they manage to set down on some uncharted rock somewhere and live as castaways, at least for a time? Were Butch and Sundance killed in a shootout with government troops in Bolivia or did one or both of them manage to slip away and return to the U.S., where they assumed new identities and lived to be old men? Was Brushy Bill Roberts really Billy the Kid, as he claimed, or was he just crazy? The possibilities are invariably more exciting than mundane (and frequently very grim) fact, which is why I always find myself rejoicing a bit when some new piece of evidence in these cases raises more questions than it solves.
Consider, for example, this story about the discovery of an old parachute in southwestern Washington. In a nutshell, some kids found a ‘chute partly buried in the woods near where the notorious hijacker D.B. Cooper is believed to have jumped from a 727 way back in 1971 with $200,000 in cash, and there’s some speculation that the ‘chute may have been his.
That’s pretty cool on its own, but here’s the interesting thing about today’s news: Some of Cooper’s money was found on a beach near Vancouver in 1980; the official theory has long been that Cooper did not survive his jump and the recovered cash had washed down the Washougal River to arrive on the beach. But if Cooper came down in the area where this parachute has been found, there’s no way that recovered cash could have naturally ended up in the Washougal. In other words, Cooper may have survived his landing and somehow lost some of his dough miles away, or else somebody else found the money and later dropped some of it in the Washougal. Either way, it’s a far more interesting thought than the image of a dead hijacker hanging in a tree somewhere with a broken neck and his ill-gotten booty falling into a river. (For the record, I like to believe that Cooper survived, eluded capture, and lived it up somewhere. I also like to think that Butch Cassidy returned to the States and visited his sister in 1925, just as she claimed. What can I say? I’m a romantic with a thing for lovable rogues.)
The FBI is currently examining the parachute to determine if it’s the right type and age to have been Cooper’s. I hope it is, for the sake of a good story…
