PR goes far

What an overload we had with the 10 August switch on at the LHC. My favourite radio station, BBC Radio 4 ,was trailing it ad nauseam in the week beforehand.

So why all that fuss about a test run? I suspect given what has happened in the last week they had some doubts about the machinery working properly and this was the event likeliest to go without major problems.

Does anyone doubt CERN have spin doctors on the case? There was even a rap video on Youtube to get the appreciation of the kidz.

As it is everything is going into mothballs until Spring so we can expect little attention to be paid to the problem by the public and press until next February.

Meanwhile Walter Wagner battles on in court, trying to get the world to just stop and THINK a bit more about this.




www.planetprobable.com

The nearer we get the less I like it

A new paper was published on 10 August regarding LHC safety which proposed a further frightening scenario. Supposing Hawking radiation does exist - will its effects be benevolent? German physicist Rainer Plaga suggests that the collider could start a chain reaction which would resemble an ongoing nuclear explosion in its locale. The results as best I am able to tell would be the reduction of Switzerland and part of France to slag plus the somewhat slower death of the rest of us from irradiation and or nuclear winter.

This insanity is due to start in a few days. Let's hope someone has the good sense to pull the plug.

Plaga's input is mentioned here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_the_Large_Hadron_Collider

For the scientifically able, his actual paper is here

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.1415v1.pdf

Ban the car

A pet opinion of mine - one of many I shall be airing here.

I'd like to totally ban private cars, vans, trucks. Why do we have them? They are patently unnecessary. I don't drive and I get to work by train and bus. Any function of personal transport not fulfilled by train and bus can be fulfilled by taxi.

Take a few years, redeploy the auto workers on rebuilding our railways and we would need no more freight lorries either. Imagine the quiet, the tranquillity, the fresh air. No more traffic jams, no more road rage, no more RTAs. Numerous social evils wiped out at a stroke. Jobs on the railways for hundreds.

Taking the fall

Barry George is free, and we the taxpayers get to give him some compensation for his unearned jail time. I said the day he was convicted that this was a nonsense case and things would end as they have. Someone out there knows who did it - but it's always more expedient to put away some harmless weirdo for a few years and then give him a pay off. So the citizenry is cheated twice over - first we get no justice, then we pay for getting no justice.



Meanwhile in the US, a scientist's suicide is met with an almost audible sigh of relief by the authorities. Killed self - must be guilty - file closed. OK, the first one they tried to pin it on fought back a little too hard but it worked the second time - they found someone weaker who'd crack.

Compensation was paid to the tougher party, who had brought a lawsuit. The US citizenry were duly cheated. First they got no justice, then they paid for getting no justice.

Day one of setting up a blog and website.

This is so easy compared to getting a page on the www. I'm lucky to have a helper with that cos I'm a writer not a techie.

Just to set things straight, I'm unpublished to date. I'm planning to put a few samples of my work on a website for anyone who would like to try it. The site is called www.planetprobable.com . Currently there is no fiction there, but just some thoughts on CERN aimed at people who like me think in pictures or poetry rather than equations. They predate the most recent CERN safety report.

I'm one of the minority objecting to the CERN accelerator on the grounds of safety - stop all high speed particle accelerator experiments until either a) more is discovered by safer means about what will happen in them or b) we can run them in another solar system or even further away than that