Media Monday: Shut your pie..er, Black hole

Seems the media loves a good catastrophe-in-waiting. Instead of the usual Armageddon stories of asteroids, super volcanoes and pandemics, they’ve gone a bit more sci-fi. From CNN:

The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August.

But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists’ wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth?

Or spit out particles that could turn the planet into a hot dead clump?

Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN — some of whom have been working for a generation on the $5.8 billion collider, or LHC.

“Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on,” said project leader Lyn Evans.

David Francis, a physicist on the collider’s huge ATLAS particle detector, smiled when asked whether he worried about black holes and hypothetical killer particles known as strangelets.

“If I thought that this was going to happen, I would be well away from here,” he said. Not that it would matter if it could destroy the entire planet.

The collider basically consists of a ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors. The ring, which straddles the French and Swiss border, is buried 330 feet underground.

The machine, which has been called the largest scientific experiment in history, isn’t expected to begin test runs until August, and ramping up to full power could take months. But once it is working, it is expected to produce some startling findings.

Scientists plan to hunt for signs of the invisible “dark matter” and “dark energy” that make up more than 96 percent of the universe, and hope to glimpse the elusive Higgs boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass.

The collider could find evidence of extra dimensions, a boon for superstring theory, which holds that quarks, the particles that make up atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating strings.

The theory could resolve many of physics’ unanswered questions, but requires about 10 dimensions — far more than the three spatial dimensions our senses experience.

The safety of the collider, which will generate energies seven times higher than its most powerful rival, at Fermilab near Chicago, has been debated for years. The physicist Martin Rees has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at one in 50 million — long odds, to be sure, but about the same as winning some lotteries.

By contrast, a CERN team this month issued a report concluding that there is “no conceivable danger” of a cataclysmic event. The report essentially confirmed the findings of a 2003 CERN safety report, and a panel of five prominent scientists not affiliated with CERN, including one Nobel laureate, endorsed its conclusions.

Critics of the LHC filed a lawsuit in a Hawaiian court in March seeking to block its startup, alleging that there was “a significant risk that … operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet.”

One of the plaintiffs, Walter L. Wagner, a physicist and lawyer, said Wednesday CERN’s safety report, released June 20, “has several major flaws,” and his views on the risks of using the particle accelerator had not changed.

On Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department lawyers representing the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation filed a motion to dismiss the case.

The two agencies have contributed $531 million to building the collider, and the NSF has agreed to pay $87 million of its annual operating costs. Hundreds of American scientists will participate in the research.

The lawyers called the plaintiffs’ allegations “extraordinarily speculative,” and said “there is no basis for any conceivable threat” from black holes or other objects the LHC might produce. A hearing on the motion is expected in late July or August.

In rebutting doomsday scenarios, CERN scientists point out that cosmic rays have been bombarding the earth, and triggering collisions similar to those planned for the collider, since the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

And so far, Earth has survived. (I love how they need to add this fact, just to make sure we are aware that “Yes Virginia, the Earth still exists!”)

“The LHC is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, what it has been doing for billions of years,” said John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at CERN.

Critics like Wagner have said the collisions caused by accelerators could be more hazardous than those of cosmic rays.

Both may produce micro black holes, subatomic versions of cosmic black holes — collapsed stars whose gravity fields are so powerful that they can suck in planets and other stars.

We could use them as landfills! Cool!

But micro black holes produced by cosmic ray collisions would likely be traveling so fast they would pass harmlessly through the earth.

Micro black holes produced by a collider, the skeptics theorize, would move more slowly and might be trapped inside the earth’s gravitational field — and eventually threaten the planet.

Ellis said doomsayers assume that the collider will create micro black holes in the first place, which he called unlikely. And even if they appeared, he said, they would instantly evaporate, as predicted by the British physicist Stephen Hawking.

As for strangelets, CERN scientists point out that they have never been proven to exist. They said that even if these particles formed inside the Collider they would quickly break down.

When the LHC is finally at full power, two beams of protons will race around the huge ring 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. They will travel in two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space.

Their trajectory will be curved by supercooled magnets — to guide the beams around the rings and prevent the packets of protons from cutting through the surrounding magnets like a blowtorch.

The paths of these beams will cross, and a few of the protons in them will collide, at a series of cylindrical detectors along the ring. The two largest detectors are essentially huge digital cameras, each weighing thousands of tons, capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of CDs 12 miles tall. The data will require a high speed global network of computers for analysis.

Wagner and others filed a lawsuit to halt operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state in 1999. The courts dismissed the suit.

The leafy campus of CERN, a short drive from the shores of Lake Geneva, hardly seems like ground zero for doomsday. And locals don’t seem overly concerned. Thousands attended an open house here this spring.

“There is a huge army of scientists who know what they are talking about and are sleeping quite soundly as far as concerns the LHC,” said project leader Evans.

It’s now official: Duke legally sucks

Everyone likes to think of themselves in good terms. We try to put our best face forward, tell the world our strengths while trying to hide our weaknesses. But sometimes, you need to put ego aside, just suck it up and admit your not great at something. Or in this case, you’re the worst. It saved Duke University at least $450,000 to do so. From ESPN:

A Kentucky judge has confirmed what Duke fans have known for years: their football team is as bad as it gets.

Bad enough that Louisville should have to find another football team to replace the Blue Devils without penalty after Duke pulled out of the final three games of a four-game contract last season.

In a lawsuit filed late last year, Louisville asked for $450,000 in damages and any additional damages the court saw fit.

But Duke’s lawyers argued that the Blue Devils’ performance on the field was so poor that any Division I team would suffice as a replacement. Duke is 6-45 over the past five years, 13-90 since 1999.

Judge Phillip J. Shepherd of the Franklin County (Ky.) Circuit Court agreed, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

“At oral argument, Duke [with a candor perhaps more attributable to good legal strategy than to institutional modesty] persuasively asserted that this is a threshold that could not be any lower,” Shepherd wrote in a summary judgment issued Thursday, according to the paper. “Duke’s argument on this point cannot be reasonably disputed by Louisville.”

Duke, according to the suit, asked the Cardinals to find a replacement opponent and promised to pay Louisville only if the school could not find one after a “good faith” effort. A $150,000 penalty for each game was included in the contract if a “team of similar stature” could not be found to fill the date.

The two schools were to meet four times between 2002 and 2009. Louisville beat the Blue Devils 40-3 in September 2002, but Duke opted out of the final three games, to be played last season and in 2008 and 2009.

Louisville claimed it struggled to find another team and received “little, if any, help from either Duke or the [Atlantic Coast Conference]” in finding a replacement.

“We’re disappointed with the ruling,” Louisville spokesman Kenny Klein said, according to the Courier-Journal. “We will take our time to review the decision and explore our future options.”

George Carlin 1937-2008

Pending Lawsuit Alert…I’m Talking to You Kellogg’s

Saw this at Network World and had to speak up.

For anyone who thinks negative thinking is not necessary, I give you Kellogg’s LEGO Fruit Flavored Snacks. Whoever came up with this legal booby-trap should be fired for being too positive. I can see them pitching the idea:

Positive Pitchman:

Kids love LEGOs right?

Kids love fruit flavored snacks.

Lets combine the two and make a fortune!

We’ll make the snacks look exactly like real LEGOs and let the rug rats go to town on them! It can’t lose!

Negative Thinker:

Uh…if they look just like real LEGOs, might kids start putting real LEGOs in their mouth? They could choke.

PP:

Get this jerk out of here! We’re trying to make money. Kids aren’t stupid enough to think that a LEGO snack is anything like a regular LEGO. They taste completely different!

So I wish Kellogg’s good luck with their new snack. They’ll need it.

Some ideas will always sound bad. No matter how tasty they may be.

Responding to Search Terms: Negative words and Language

Time to look at the friendly search terms that bring people here and see if I can help some people who might not know why they landed on my blog.

dog motivation – I don’t actually talk about this, but I will offer this tip I learned from the PetSmart trainers that worked with our dogs. Dogs are motivated by one of two things – Food and toys. If they love food, you can train them with treats. If they prefer a special toy, then you can use the toy as a reward. Other than that…I have no idea what motivates dogs. You know what motivates my dogs? Naps. And plenty of them.

“craig price” steroids – I would like to squash the rumors right now. I have not now nor have I ever in my past, used steroids. My abnormally size head is due to ego, not drugs. Which explains why Barry Bonds head is the size of a Rhino’s butt!

relationships too excited to talk – I’m not sure if your too excited to talk to get into a relationship or you are too excited about your relationship to talk. If it’s the first problem, calm down. Breath and be yourself. Unless yourself means acting like a crack addicted ferret. Then DO NOT act anything like yourself. If you’re in a relationship and you’re too excited to even talk, we need to take a look at this “relationship”. First, does the other person know they are part of the relationship? This amount of excitement usually suggests stalker. They may be surprised to know they’re in a “relationship” with you and may call the police. If they don’t call the cops and they admit to being in a relationship, good for you! You’ve just jumped the biggest hurdle in dating today. Second, find common interest. Ironically, stalkers would know more about their “partners” and this would work to their advantage. I, myself, never understood stalking. It’s always about their schedule, where they’re going, what they like. I just don’t have that kind of time to invest. But common interests allow you to have some sort of dialogue and then let it naturally progress from there.

recommendations for bad employee – I would recommend they find work elsewhere. Simple, but effective.

training programme with negative set – We have just the thing for you: Managing Negativity in the Workplace. I even train internationally. Your programme spelling gave you away!

what kind of monkeys are there – Good question. There are a variety of monkeys and apes in the world. Punkeys has more information on monkeys. Mostly about how evil they are.

Finally we have these two searches that pop up again and again. power of negative language and power of negative words

People respond to negative language more than positive language. We like and hope for positive things but science has shown our negativity bias will remember the negative much more than the positive. So we need to watch our words when we talk to co-workers, employees, spouses…anybody. An example I use is an employee review.

I’ve got Jeff in for an employee review. I sit him down and say, “Jeff, you are the best employee we’ve got. You work hard, everything is done perfectly, I wish you would show up on time more, but I can trust you with anything! I wish I had 100 more like you!”

Despite all the glory, Jeff’s going to remember “Oh my god. They think I’m a slacker for being late all the time.” And that certainly wasn’t the point of the review. But people react and remember negative statements.

And let’s be honest. There are times we want them to remember the negative. I’m all for letting people know where they stand. Honest constructive criticism can work wonders. But when you’re trying to make a positive statement, adding any bit on negative language or words can sabotage your point.

Oh…and congrats to the Celtics. I haven’t watched them since Larry Bird retired but it’s good when the hometown team wins.