Ian On The Red Dot

Image from The Big Picture.

I’m going to grab tons of beer tonight and drink them while I pawn noobs in DOTA. Why? Because the end of the world is near. Maybe.

From the New York Times:

In the lawsuit, filed in March in Honolulu district court, Walter Wagner, a retired radiation safety expert who lives in Hawaii, and Luis Sancho, a Spanish science writer, contended that the Large Hadron Collider could create microscopic black holes that could wind up eating the Earth, or other dangerous particles known as strangelets — a sort of contagious dead matter — or so-called magnetic monopoles, which could catalyze the destruction of ordinary matter.

Pictures of the Large Hadron Collider here.

More links here and here.

Wikipedia entry here.

An interesting question that has been asked – how much power should we give scientists to do the things they want to do if they themselves may not fully understand the consequences even though their theoretical calculations seem to indicate everything is safe.

Think the shit that happened in Spiderman 2. I also vaguely remember there was a similar storyline in the Marvel universe where a scientist tried to build a window into the beginning of time and actually caused the destruction of the universe.

Oh well … Only in the movies, comics and books. Right?

Right?

Awesome twitter message announcing the discovery of water in the form of ice on Mars. The Phoenix Mars Mission site is here and the the press release about the discovery is here.

It seems strange that our generation doesn’t seem as excited (I’m guilty too of the lack of interest, but no MORE) about what our fellow human beings are trying to discover and learn from Mars as compared to the generation that witnessed the space race and man going to the moon (yes, i do believe it happened).

Mars … here we come!!!!

The cynic in me says – Mars … here we come!!!! to rape you just like we did with Earth…. Hope the last inhabitants left us some goodies….

Interesting article about work being done to create bugs that eat waste and excrete oil over at TimesOnline.

To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

The interesting thing is that they aren’t trying to change the whole system, just what’s distributed though the system.

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

Now, they only need to figure out how to mass produce this stuff.