The LHC

By now I'm sure that just about everyone has heard about the LHC, or Large Hadron Collector. The particle accelerator was brought on-line a week ago. It is the most awesome observation machine ever constructed by man. More than seven kilometers of tunnel under Switzerland and France. All to detect a particle that scientists aren't positive exists, and is so small, a scanning electron microscope cannot see it.

I was intrigued by the number of doomsday scenarios that surrounded this thing. The directors of CERN, who are operating the LHC have even been threatened. According to some, it was going to create a black hole, and the earth would be devoured by it. Others had the idea that the collisions would result in a fusion reaction, that would cascade, and essentially be a huge nuclear bomb.

In fact, there have been a number of particle accelerators. The only difference with the LHC is that it's so much larger, and the detectors much more sensitive. There is an infinitesimally small possibility of creating a reaction harmful to anyone. The possibility is so remote, it doesn't even bear considering. We are talking extremely tiny reactions that the Universe produces itself by chance.

The goal here is to detect the Higgs particle, or what was created at the moment of the big bang. If the current model is correct, then there is an elemental particle of our universe unaccounted for. As well, physics has yet to explain why there is no antimatter anywhere to be found in the known universe. If it annihilates when it comes into contact with matter, should there not be an equal amount of each, matter and antimatter in the universe?

Science is attempting to explain how you go from nothing, to a whole expanding universe. We are reaching out to God, in essence, and asking, how and why are we here.

I won't even begin to comment on the debates that question brings up.

Happy Birthday, Internet

It's hard to believe the internet is only twenty-five years old. Somehow, it seems like it's been around forever. Even before I ever laid hands on a computer, I'd heard about the web. Of course, in those days, it was knowledge in the abstract. Our community didn't get access to the internet unitl the late nineties.
This all hit home yesterday. I had been wanting to get a new avatar (yet another concept that is relatively new) for my facebook site. You just plug in the generalities of what you want, and up come hundreds of thousands of links. I don't think there is a single topic that hasn't been posted somewhere in cyber space. It's like the collective knowledge of the planet is at your fingertips.
The drawback to this is that a lot of younger kids don't feel the need to learn facts anymore. When they are asked to write an essay on a topic, they will go to the internet, get the information and then paste it together into a paper. They don't bother to read the important stuff and draw conclusions from it anymore, to actually get something out of the assignment. What happens on that fateful day when they find themselves in a place without internet access? (Though the odds of that are getting smaller and smaller each day.)
It is comforting to know that everything, good and bad, that mankind has ever created is out there somewhere though. As long as one server and a couple thousand hard drives are out there, the sum of human knowledge is almost impossible to lose. There might be gaps, but it will be mostly intact. One day, somebody will need that one obscure piece of our time to solve a critical problem, and it will be there with a little digging. It's like how the monks saved so much from being lost in the dark ages by keeping all of those books.
The funny thing is that those books, which formed the basis of the rebirth of civilization, can now be found on the internet!
Remember, when you upload anything, it's going into humanity's collective heritage.

Inexpensive computers

Have you seen the little laptops that one of the major companies in the States has produced? It looks like it was put together by Fisher Price. It is durable, colourful and sized just right for young kids. That was the idea.
Whatt the producers want to happen is for those who can afford it to buy one for their own child, and by doing so, purchase one to be given to a third world or underprivileged child. The plan is that every child in the world should have the same advantages when getting an education.
Let me point out, these little laptops are no toys. They are Internet capable, work wireless, and have pretty good resolution on the screen. On a television news article, they showed one of these things playing streaming video. It's better than the first computer I ever learned to use. If things go the way they are meant to, we will have a very large computing world indeed.
I think they are serious about all of this. The tiny machines are running a simplified but very effective version of linux software as the operating system. They've avoided the whole Windows Vista thing. At least they got around that whole thing.
In case you haven't figured it out, I am an advocate for this program. The more companies we can get on board, the better. We made this a technical world, so we had better get our people on the ball. I'd like to see these machines made for use in Canadian schools, just as much as in the third world. These are computers made for kids the world over. It's a great start for the next generation. With the wireless abilities, each classroom could have a couple of printers, and kids could just print out their homework assignments.
If we insist on kids having computers to do everything, let's do the job right.

Facebook

Since you are reading this post, you obviously have the Internet. In which case, you MUST be familiar with that phenomenon known as Facebook. There has been a lot of hoopla about it in the news lately, from lawsuits over the source code, to the use of it in the workplace.
I have to admit that I am a fan of the site. One of my nieces sent me an invite to join as her "friend", and I did it just for fun. Since then, I have added a number of friends to my list, including cousins that I don't get to check in with that often. Distance can be a bit of a problem in my family. I have also discovered old friends that I went to school with. That is the whole point of a networking site.
Then there are the startling number of applications that you can put on your profile. Between the fun wall and "booze mail", there is no shortage of fun things to get each other's attention.
I see on the news where students are now using facebook as a means of finding roommates for college. Think about it for a moment, we most often find our roomies through friends of friends anyway. Facebook just allows you to expand the search, and saves the time of phoning around. There is also the advantage that a profile tells you a lot about the character of a potential housemate. If there are more than six tattoos visible on his/her photo, you might want to reconsider that person. More than half of the photos in the profile taken in bars? Maybe not somebody you want to live with.
I think the rules that apply to your personal information have to be used on Facebook. Make sure only the people you want to can see your stuff. Don't put up pictures that you don't want coming back to haunt you.
There was a case where students were suspended for posting comments about their teacher on the site. In my opinion, that was a little harsh. As long as the comments were not posted from a school computer, it is not a school issue. The teacher in question should have informed police and the Internet service provider. Let the proper authorities deal with any complaints stemming from the Internet. The fact that the target was a teacher is irrelevant.
As with most things to do with the computer age, Facebook has a lot of advantages and drawbacks. It will probably take a while to sort it all out. Projections are that almost the entire computing world will be on Facebook in a couple of years. Maybe the world is getting smaller after all.

A dangerous place

I was wandering through the blog pages yesterday. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff that came up on the screen. There may be a large market for Internet pornography, but in a blog space? A couple of the blogs automatically sent me to the associated sites.
Being an adult, and relatively mature, I was able to simply shake my head and navigate away from those sites.
What I could not escape was all of the ad ware that was hidden in those sites. I had to run two scans on my computer. A quick scan came up with over thirty items hidden in the bowels of my computer. Later that night, I ran a deep scan. It managed to find forty. I shudder to think of what these little buggers of a hackers dreams are doing to my processing ability. For that matter, what kind of data could be pulled from my computer before I find these things.
The Internet hasn't been a very safe place these days. If you don't have an antivirus program installed, for God's sake don't even think about connecting! There was a piece on the news one night about the consequences of not protecting your computer. If it becomes infected and passes enough viruses along, your ISP will disconnect you. then you will spend well over two hundred dollars getting the crap taken off of your hard drive.
The point though, is that it can be hard knowing which sites to trust. I promise that I will not run ads on this blog. I will not link you to anything that I have not personally used safely. File that away with the other promises that I've made when starting to blog. You have my hand on it.

Shuttle program

The NASA shuttle program is due to be shut down in a little over a decade. There has been a lot of work by several design companies to come up with a replacement. The current idea is to send people and supplies on separate flights. The crew vehicle can be smaller and lighter, eliminating the need for so much fuel, and consequently avoiding the whole foam damage issue.
The hope is that the new system can lay the groundwork for finally getting the International Space Station completed, a new mission to the moon and eventually a manned mission to Mars.
The problem with doing anything in space is the cost of getting anything into a solid orbit. At over twenty thousand dollars per kilo (or ten thousand per pound for those of you who refuse to get with the metric system), transport is the prohibitive factor. Shuttles have brought the cost down considerably, being reusable. If personnel needed a new vehicle for every single trip, it just wouldn't work.
I sometimes wonder what the effect would be if we could ever get the cost of shipping stuff reliably into space below the five thousand dollar per tonne mark. What if putting stuff into orbit or onto the moon were no more expensive than shipping a bunch of cars from Japan to North America? How long would it be before somebody got the idea of moving all of our messiest manufacturing off of the planet? You want steel, Mars is practically made up of iron ore.
The second, and by far the most difficult problem to get past is human nature. Once we can send people off of the planet easily and cheaply, somebody is going to exploit that. Where the Chinese Snakeheads now smuggle people into North America to work in sweat shops and brothels, they would now send them to places so far, that the law would not be able to find them. The factories on Mars that I spoke of would be staffed by slave labour conscripted from the poor and vulnerable.
Still, I like the idea of proper space exploration. Enough experimenting to see how people react to weightlessness. We know that already. One third of us lose our lunch. We can create large enough vessels to generate spin for artificial gravity anyway.
We should concentrate on bringing the cost of getting people and supplies down to that magic number. Then we can rebuild the Space Station as an orbiting construction yard for space probes and vessels for deep space exploration. By the time we finally have the infrastructure ready, maybe we will be ready as a people to get out and see what the universe has to offer.