Hadron Collider fires up on Wednesday (10/09/08) (1 Viewer)

[andrew markworthy]

EDIT: Apologies, accidental double post - I quite liked the Ocean's Twelve joke, but not that much.

 

[Kevin Hewell]

Cees, double doo-doo on you for showing us poor Yanks those pics of Amsterdam, shifting or not. I would be there in a heartbeat.

Of course I'll pack plenty of salsa and silica.

 

[Francois Caron]

Have all the dolphins disappeared?

Were any government agents found in water reservoirs?

Has anyone seen my biscuits?

We may no longer "live" in the world we once knew, and are not even aware of it!

 

[drobbins]

Well I guess that is typical with alternate endings, the original ending is better.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Physics humor:

"Do my bosons give you a hadron?"

A neutron walks into a bar. He asks the bartender how much a double scotch costs.

The bartender says, "For you? No charge."



Joe

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

Biologists, annoyed that the physicists are getting all the glory, have announced a competing collider of their own.

BBspot - Evolutionary Acceleration Research Institute Ready to Start “Squirrel Smasherâ€

 

[Cees Alons]

Good one for you!
It's extremely close to the area where they shot parts of Ocean 12. Too bad I only learned this after Julia Roberts had gone already. It was perhaps a 5 minutes walk from my home, at most. (This disaster area is 2 minutes away from me).


Cees

 

[Jassen M. West]

The computers have been attacked.

Hackers break into Large Hadron Collider computer | News - Security - CNET News

 

[andrew markworthy]

Not close enough to cause damage, I hope? Incidentally, are those your photos, Cees? My compliments if they are.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

I thought that might wake Andrew up.

Andrew, you need to read the linked article: it's an Onion-style satire. The quote I posted was ficticious.

 

[bobbyg2]

I want a squirrel smasher!

 

[Dave Mack]

Sheesh, billions of dollars and they don't have McAfee....

 

[Clinton McClure]

Gallagher created the first fruit smasher!

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Sorry, but I'm going to have to call you on this one. If these "comprehensive studies of etiology" & "similarly essential pieces of research" haven't been done, it isn't for lack of money. In the USA alone, well over $100 billion dollars annually is spent on mental health treatment, twenty-five times the overall cost of the LHC. If you really think that these comprehensive studies could be conducted for a measly $400 million, you have to admit it's not CERN's soaking up the money that is responsible for their not having been done. The drug companies, the hospitals, the medical associations, the research institutes, or the government health agencies, alone or in combination, could have come up with the funding long ago. Anyway, medical research already receives more funding than the physical sciences, from private and public sources — the LHC, which has cost about as much as the development of Prozac, has been funded in dribs and drabs by universities, government programmes, and private donors not just from all over Europe but from around the world. (It's like the people in the US who say that "the space program ought to be cut to fund education", ignoring the fact that annual expenditures on primary and secondary education in the USA run about 40 times the NASA budget.) Your "disgruntled psychologist colleague" is only perpetuating the stereotype that people go into the "soft sciences" because they are totally incompetent in respect of mathematics, and he ought to learn to think before he speaks.

 

[andrew markworthy]

Curses. The trouble is that the quotation in itself is so like the garbage spouted by some of the more conceited and outspoken physicists [and I must stress, it's a minority of them, and the social sciences have produced idiots of similar or greater levels of irritation] that I took it for real.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

The LHC live webcam is now on line.

Joe

 

[drobbins]

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Sheesh, imagine if that Onion article had specified the quote was from an American physicist? I imagine Andrew would still be writing.

 

[andrew markworthy]