March 2008 Archives
30 March 2008
What they need to produce is an anti-strangelet
Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More (Dennis Overbye, NY Times)
More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.
None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.
Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.
The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.
But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”
I think many places in the country are already suffering from the spread of "strangelets."
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 03/30/08 07:55 | Other | Technorati | Comments (2)
17 March 2008
Ouch
Abba drummer found dead in Spain (BBC News)
A former session drummer with Swedish pop band Abba has been found dead in the garden of his Spanish home with cuts to his throat, police say.
A spokeswoman said the man was 62-year-old Ola Brunkert, and said his death appeared to be accidental.
Police believe Brunkert hit his head on a window and shattered the glass which cut him. A post-mortem is taking place.
What an awful way to go.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 03/17/08 13:44 | Other | Technorati | Comments (1)
12 March 2008
Blog billboard
Driving through Skiatook, Oklahoma earlier, I noticed a crude billboard advertising SkiatookBlog.com
I checked it a while ago, but it seems to have shut down at the end of 2007.
Maybe the crude billboard ad wasn't effective?
Maybe they should have gone with car magnet advertising, like Dan Patrick promised for Lone Star Times once upon a time. :)
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 03/12/08 19:51 | Other | Technorati | Comments (0)
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