Atom Smasher Sets Record - WSJ.com

Atom Smasher Sets Record - WSJ.com

After two false starts Tuesday, the Large Hadron Collider—a $10 billion particle accelerator near Geneva—smashed together its proton beams for the first time, marking a new era in physics with a clash of subatomic "cymbals."

It was a critical milestone in a troubled project that has brought together scientists from 34 countries. They are drawing on money and material from 150 universities and dozens of government agencies in a 15-year scientific gamble designed to reveal secrets of the universe hidden since time began.

OK, so if any of you went out without your keys yesterday or noticed any other disturbance in the space-time continuum, now you know why.

Next week we'll be trying to find out if it is possible to fall into a black hole and survive.

Don't worry about that tingling sensation in your feet.

msnbc.com:The presidential teleprompter

MSNBC finally develops a sense of humor about Obama.

Note though the reporter's inept use the the keyboard.

I guess on-air-heads aren't used to typing.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Giant laser experiment powers up

This intense energy will be focused on a ball-bearing-sized pellet of fuel, ablating the surface and compressing the remaining material inwards.

"This process will create temperatures of 100 million degrees and pressures billions of times greater than Earth's atmospheric pressure, forcing the hydrogen nuclei to fuse and release many times more energy than the laser energy required to spark the reaction," said Dr Moses.

Sometimes you wish California were farther away. And it soon may be.

Sinatra - My Space

Disappearance of Disc With Clinton Data Investigated

"May 20 (Bloomberg) -- Federal authorities are investigating the disappearance of a computer disc from the National Archives containing Social Security numbers and Secret Service procedures from former President Bill Clinton’s administration, congressional officials said."

Has anybody checked Sandy Berger's sock drawer?

Swine flu hogs news coverage, sows fear - Washington Times

Dear Obama: Please consider open-source a waste of your time • The Register

For government workers, open source is too much of a risk. They have used Microsoft and others in the past, and they works. Everybody is complacent with software they know. If one day somebody shows up to work and Microsoft Word has been replaced by OpenOffice, well, meetings will be called. Of course, nobody will get fired over open source software (very few things short of a felony conviction will get you fired from a government job), but there will be forms filed in triplicate, maybe even quadruplicate. It's not that government employees fear risk. They just have nothing to gain by taking one. Mandating that open source be considered doesn't alter the path of least resistance.

Well, I hope he's wrong on the thesis, but he sure nailed the nature of our government workforce.

Army Biolab’s Missing Vials May Never Be Found (Which, Oddly, Isn’t That Scary) | Danger Room

The Army has found “no evidence yet of criminal misconduct,” the Washington Post reports. And the virus usually causes only “a mild flulike illness” — although “brain inflammation and death” are possible, too. “It has potential for use as a biological weapon but is far less lethal than some other agents the lab works with.”

Oh, that's helpful.

The Monty Python Channel on YouTube

Official Google Docs Blog: Online petition for an organic farm at the White House

If things go as predicted there will be no shortage of fertilizer.

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Early Conceptualization of the Internet

Potrzebie System on Google Calculator

I didn't know that!

Not only didn't I know that Google now supports the Potrzebie measurement system, but...

1. I didn't know how to spell Potrzebie.

2. I didn't know that it was a measurement system.

3. I didn't know that Donald Knuth invented it.

Learn something new every day (several somethings on most days).

Wedding Anniversary:

Ed was in trouble. He forgot his wedding anniversary. His wife was REALLY angry.

She told him, "Tomorrow morning I expect to find a gift in the driveway that goes from 0 to 200 in less then 6 seconds AND IT BETTER BE THERE!!"

The next morning Ed got up early and left for work. When his wife woke up she looked out the window and sure enough there was a box gift-wrapped in the middle of the driveway. Confused, the wife put on her robe and ran out to the driveway, and brought the box back in the house.

She opened it and found a brand new bathroom scale.

Ed has been missing since Friday.

Please pray for him.

The Value of e-mail, a Holiday Story

Got this from a friend the other day, thought it was insightful:

An unemployed man is desperate to support his family of a wife and three kids.

He applies for a janitor's job at a large firm and easily passes an aptitude test.

The human resources manager tells him, "You will be hired at minimum wage of $5.35 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address so that we can get you in the loop. Our system will automatically e-mail you all the forms and advise you when to start and where to report on your first day."

Taken back, the man protests that he is poor and has neither a computer nor an e-mail address.

To this the manager replies, "You must understand that to a company like ours that means that you virtually do not exist. Without an e-mail address you can hardly expect to be employed by a high-tech firm. Good day."

Stunned, the man leaves not knowing where to turn and having $10 in his wallet, he walks past a farmers' market and sees a stand selling 25 lb. crates of beautiful red tomatoes. He buys a crate, carries it to a busy corner and displays the tomatoes. In less than 2 hours he sells all the tomatoes and makes 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 and arrives home that night with several bags of groceries for his family.

During the night he decides to repeat the tomato business the next day. By the end of the week he is getting up early every day and working into the night. He multiplies his profits quickly.

Early in the second week he acquires a cart to transport several boxes of tomatoes at a time, but before a month is up he sells the cart to buy a broken-down pickup truck.

At the end of a year he owns three old trucks. His two sons have left their neighborhood gangs to help him with the tomato business, his wife is buying the tomatoes, and his daughter is taking night courses at the community college so she can keep books for him.

By the end of the second year he has a dozen very nice used trucks and employs fifteen previously unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. He continues to work hard.

Time passes and at the end of the fifth year he owns a fleet of nice trucks and a warehouse that his wife supervises, plus two tomato farms that the boys manage. The tomato company's payroll has put hundreds of homeless and jobless people to work. His daughter reports that the business grossed over one million dollars.

Planning for the future, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. Then the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order to send the final documents electronically.

When the man replies that he doesn't have time to mess with a computer and has no e-mail address, the insurance man is stunned,"What, you don't have e-mail? No computer? No Internet? Just think where you would be today if you'd had all of that five years ago!"

"Ha!" snorts the man. "If I'd had e-mail five years ago I would be sweeping floors at Microsoft and making $5.35 an hour."

Which brings us to the moral of the story:

Since you got this story by e-mail, you're probably closer to being a janitor than a millionaire.

Sadly, I received it also.

Apple: Zune outselling iPod on Amazon

When you've nailed the analysis, I can't think of any reason not to brag about it (quoting myself):

I imagine it has a lot to do with Apple not allowing retailers of their products to compete with one another on price.

If I'm going to buy an Apple product online I might as well buy it from Apple where it can often have it monogrammed and gift wrapped for free. If you could get them significantly cheaper at Amazon I'm sure they would be selling more of them.

Add to that the fact (I think) that you can ONLY buy a Zune from retailers, not directly from Microsoft:

http://www.zune.net/en-us/products/wheretobuy.htm

and I really don't think there is any validity to this comparison.

I do think though that Apple's lead in this area will die a slow death unless they do something new to differentiate themselves. At the volume the innards for these things are being cranked out by whatever godforsaken country they are coming from, there is just no way for any US "maker" to claim a leadership position.

They are positioning themselves as a general purpose upscale consumer electronic company (some might call this painting themselves into a corner).

Keep an eye out for the iBeam (a small white radar detector that once you're stopped will actually try and talk the officer out of giving you a ticket), the iContact, a knobless no-moving-parts stereo entertainment center that you control by staring at various parts of it and the iCUP for which no product details have been, uh, leaked.

Nokia 810 Fan Video

YouTube - The Day The Routers Died...

Very good one:

Link from Valleywag.

Usenet Still Funny After All These Years

> i went to the bathroom and when i came back, my computer was gone. I called
> > verizon service guys but they were of no help. Should i switch to cable?
> >
> >

OMG! You actually *can* string words together to make a complete sentence!

Are you sure it's gone? Could you have taken it with you to the bathroom and flushed it down the terlet?

Here's what you do: locate your modem or router. (I'm going out on a limb here, and assuming you have DSL.)
Locate the ethernet cable that comes off the modem/router.
Follow the ethernet cable to the end farthest from the modem/router.

Is there a computer there?

If not, check the sewer.

But what if you have wireless?

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet

Why in the world anyone would want to post their personal stories on the Internet I don't know. But people do, and some times these stories seem so tragic and real that you just want to reach out a helping hand how could I resist?...

My own little soap opera(s) of this nature happened in the late 70s early 80s and often enough that I think of my own emotional makeup as being more scar tissue than anything else, but I allowed myself to be too self absorbed (don't we all?) and got what I probably deserved in the grand scheme of things. Suffice it to say that I've retired from romantic entanglements, more by choice than by necessity (even though two CAN live more cheaply than one, managing ones finances as a single person is MUCH easier).

So here, semi solicited, is my very jaded view of the subject:

What is there that is more important about a (with emphasis) *modern* *human* relationship than ego?

Now let that last thought sink in for a bit while I say that we (mostly) have been conditioned by Ozzie and Harriet/Bradie Bunch (substitute your own TV adolescent societal programming) to think that the only NORMAL mode of human existence is to get married and raise as many children as your income allows you to support. Not only does (did) this formula seem to work on TV, but it clearly worked in real life for long enough for us as countries world-wide to develop schemes such as Social Security that actually DEPEND upon it. Ponzi schemes collapse without an ever broadening base. But even before Social Security schemes, this system actually worked very well. One kid could support two parents into their old age, two could do so better, three better still. There was a "natural selection" advantage to larger families, but not so extreme that smaller families were wiped out. If you are a Darwinian, you probably imagine that some process sets an optimum number of kids for things to just work nicely, with variations on either side being preserved in the gene pool for, uh, lets say, GLOBAL WARMING! (Al Gore is proud when you work this into conversations on ANY other topic.)

Now back to: What is there that is more important about a (with emphasis) *modern* *human* relationship than ego? Well, if you are really paying attention, there's sex for one. Part of that involves ego too though in ways that are really hard to tease apart. Let's simplify though and factor sex out of it on the assumption that, in this modern pr0n driven Internet world you can always become a do-it-yourselfer.

Oh yes, and one more thing, (at the risk of devolving into a Monty Python sketch) a fanatical devotion to spreading our DNA all over the place.

Our world has changed much faster than any natural selection process can keep up with. If we could just keep things steady for a few thousand years, with no major new technologies, industries, disruptive housing breakthroughs and so on, I'm sure the hand of Darwin would make adjustments to our psyches, gonads and so forth (in addition to having enormous heads and longer fingers as all the sci-fi authors predict) to make everything come out just right again. Of course this is complicated by the fact that so many of us have opted out of the gene pool in one way or another. Many of us may have ideal traits, but we certainly aren't passing them on, forcing nature to constantly re-invent the wheel so to speak.

Where was I? Oh, anyway, (human) society has placed a whole new layer of pressures on us beyond the formerly natural kill-or-be-killed simplicity that various animal species have to deal with. Take birds: watching one of those nature films, when the male birds parade around, wing and tail feathers spread wide, trying to gain the "affections" of the female birds, one male bird gets selected to fertilize those eggs. What does the rejected male bird feel? I've often wondered. Is it just sexual frustrations? Are their "egos" crushed? Do they become suicidal? If birds had Civ IV to resort to would they? (I'm serious!)

I've read where many, maybe even most, animal species mate for life. Others only long enough to get one generation of offspring going followed by each partner seeking another mate for the next time around. Maybe natural selection hasn't been able to settle on a "best" formula in this area which is why there seem to still be so many people who do it successfully one way and so many other people who do it successfully another way. We've all seen, known or even been a part of a family unit with one husband and one wife, mated for life, raising children (or sometimes not) little or no infidelities, friends for life, teammates, if you will. God bless them, and by the way, in my experience these are mostly religious people, who have succeeded in this lifestyle IN SPITE of egos, IN SPITE of sexual urges and IN SPITE of Darwinian propulsions to spread the seed a little further. They got where they were by human rationality of the type that has to be intentionally exercised (whether you agree with the results or not, they got the results THEY wanted).

The other successful model that comes to mind is Hollywood. Here copulation is king. Slam, bam, thank-you mam. Why do they even bother getting married? Oh, yeah, so that they can get their pictures in Variety. Not a lot of forward thinking goes on here. Or thinking at all as far as I can tell. But it makes kids in large numbers, and these people are rich, so the kids are well provided for, at least financially. And do these "stars" get too upset during the breakups? Not so you can tell in most cases. If you lower your expectations enough you can live with almost any circumstances I suppose.

I don't know about you, but as free-thinking as I once was, I couldn't picture myself in multiple casual relationships over my lifetime. Oh I did get around for a while, but for me it was always a search for what I hoped would be an ultimate permanence. I too was more often mentor than mentee, more often financial provider, more often the emotional support rather than the one supported and certainly gave as good as I got in the sex department (or at least that's the way it seemed to me at the time).

But at some point (and it took far too long as I had been given the advice many times) I realized I had never gotten comfortable with the notion of being alone. From high school onward I was always "on the make" holding off any thoughts of marriage until after college by an extreme exercise of will (and the knowledge that parents would probably cut off funding). And then in the AM (after marriage) it was one relationship after another, all ending as soon as the sex wasn't so good any more (for one of us). Without wanting to, I was leading the Hollywood lifestyle, when what I really wanted (or thought I wanted) was the Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle.

So I went solo. It was rough. Particularly since I am not the macho type of guy who likes to do manly things like fishing, hunting, or home repair for that matter. I went to restaurants alone, even nice ones where I'd never been without a date. Quite an exercise of self confidence to go to a fancy French restaurant alone, and sit there and read a book. This will flush out any secret desire you have to be the center of attention. Yes, people will think "what's WRONG with him, why isn't he WITH someone?" and whats more you will know that is what they are thinking. But after about two years (I think that's what it took for me) you won't care. And after another two or three years you might actually start to dread the thought of another relationship. Or you may decide to dip your toe in the waters again, find a woman on an Internet dating service who "loves" you for who you are, only to find that she's married with kids.(and not all that unhappily married as it turns out). And lest you think I'm making that up, it happened to me. (TWICE!)

But enough about me, lets get to what YOU think about me? No, that's from another comedy bit. In the final years of my career, I was hit on by many women, a few of which I actually found attractive and after they asked around and found out I wasn't turning them down because I was gay or anything their efforts only increased. I've been the intended victim/subject of several matchmakers. I keep telling them they are wasting their time. They invite me and the woman over for dinner at the same time (not telling me in advance) hoping for nature to take its course. I'm polite, but I know better than to let nature take its course, because that course is for us all to breed like rabbits, and whether we call it sex, or ego, or self esteem, or even layer some societal ponzie scheme requirement, or the need to spread the faith by out producing the other faiths, you know, deep down inside you know, that human happiness of a lasting kind is not what it is all about. Lookout Jim it's a trap! (Star Trek) that is, unless you get religion or some other "ion" and make that relationship you seek secondary to some other goal (and I'm not saying there is anything wrong with this approach).

In closing, if you are not discouraged enough, consider that:

(1) All the good ones are taken. Really, there is no getting around this. Of the happy old couples that I've known that live together until they die, they either got together when they were young, or they got together when they were so old that neither of them had enough time to jump ship first. If you want someone who is not a chronic ship-jumper during middle age, your going to have to find someone who's mate has tragically taken from us in the prime of life. You will never be loved as much, if at all. Your reason for being chosen as the replacement might be a subject best never explored.

(2) No matter how objective you try and be, all is probably not as you've presented it. Maybe you snore really loudly (I do) or your farts really stink (as do mine) and those are two things she has never been able to stand, but she has never been able to confront you with them because, since those things are so important to her, she thinks they might be really devastating to you as well. One of my gals had a big nose. But I never told her I really LIKED big noses. Come to think of it, most of my gals had big noses. Darn I wish I had thought about that sooner.

Anyway. Glad I could help you out with this. I look forward to updates.