A headline like Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More is a pretty sure bet for a click-through from me. CERN thought Large Hadron Collider was worth $8 billion to study the energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and then try to work out what happened.
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.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
About all I can say about this is that I’m not happy with humanity’s ethical and impulse controls as we move deeper into the Age of Mad Science. If you’d like a double helping of science and geek humor with your Doomsday Scenario, I suggest this post on Slashdot. And you have to click this link to xkcd. I command it.
About the photo: Black Hole by Director X was taken at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. If I hadn’t already used my compulsory click, I’d be tempted to add one for the museum.
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This blog is called farlane.blog, but it relies a lot on shadowy figures, especially the one who passed me a link to VBS.tv, specifically their series on North Korea. You can start at Episode 1: The South’s DMZ. The link to #2 sent me to a video of Manila’s mega-dump and the people who live there , so click around if you go to the wrong one of their many shows. They say:
VBS is an online broadcast network. We stream original content, free of charge and 24 hours a day. We carry a mix of domestic and international news, pop and underground culture coverage, and the best music in the world. People have used words like eclectic, smart, funny, shocking, and revolutionary to describe VBS, but we kind of just snapped our fingers in their faces and went, “Whatever. Tell us something we don’t know.”
With Academy Award-nominated director Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) as our creative director, original content from a veritable United Nations of contributors, and bureaus in 20 countries, VBS has hit the planet in a manner not unlike a massive global plague. Streaming on VBS’s signature “in-room” widescreen and remote, content will be available all the time, on-demand.
Basically, VBS will exploit every utopian vision the internet has thus far failed to live up to.
For more of an an idea of who they are and where they plan to go, watch their video mission statement. (the web designer in me is also wowed by their interface)
About the Photo: It’s titled Laughing North Korean soldiers and it’s part of a very cool photo set A glimpse of North Korea (slideshow) by photojournalist Natalie Behring. Natalie is based in China and has photos from all over that you should check out through chinapix at Flickr or www.nataliebehring.com.
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Today’s New York Times relates the happy little tale of Bear Stearns, a company that you and I saved from going belly up last week. It’s an interesting article that I encourage you to read to understand more about the financial woods we appear to be headed into.
“For the government to print money at the expense of taxpayers as opposed to requiring or going about a receivership and wind-down of any insolvent institutions should be troubling to taxpayers and regulators alike,” said Josh Rosner, an analyst at Graham Fisher & Company and an expert on mortgage securities. “The Fed has now crossed the line in a very clear way on ‘moral hazard,’ because they have opened the door to the view that they are required to save almost any institution through non-recourse loans — except the government doesn’t have the money and it destroys the U.S.’s reputation as the broadest, deepest, most transparent and properly regulated capital market in the world.”
Like the story, the picture doesn’t make much sense either. It’s titled It’s wrong and danger and was taken by Wm Jas, who seems to have a knack for finding incomprehensible signage.
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