I’m going to go out on a limb on this one. I’m not worried about a black hole being created by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), now referred to as “The Doomsday Machine”. Nope. Not at all. Some people and major “news” organizations are worried. Either that or they are just trying to hype it up for story and ratings fodder. Would news people do that? Noooooo. Not them. They have integrity. Ish.
Link to source article.
There have been hundreds if not thousands of really smart people working on this for a long time. At last count, there are 4 scientists that I have heard of that are worried about this thing “spawning black holes that eat the planet.” Maybe they are smart too, and they are welcome to their opinion and perspective. They might even have some new data that needs to be reviewed. They could also be just trying to argue about something. Being contrarian. Academics and scientists are trained to do that. News media is trained to sensationalize. Everyone has their strong point.
Besides, if the LHC does eat the world and I am wrong, it will happen so fast that nobody will be able to say “I told you so.” I really can’t lose by taking a stance on this one. If you are concerned about it, I totally understand, and offer up this website for you to keep track of the situation. LHC status.
What about you? Have you build a black hole bunker to duck into? What would you stock it with if you did?
I’m more worried about things like toxic waste in my city, air and water pollution, homeless people freezing to death. You know, local stuff.
This week was interesting for sure. First item of business is a beta browser for my Q9m phone. IE is a slow and annoying beast on the phone. Pierce pointed me to SkyFire, which like most things is still in beta. It has worked great for me. Renders a page like the full size page and lets you zoom and focus on the area you want to see. Very smooth and very effective. As a quick, completely irrelevant test, I streamed from the Adele/James Morrison concert we were at using Qik (streams available), and he was able to view the stream on his phone. Worked great. IE couldn’t do it when I tried before.
Next day after the concert and without much sleep, Iwent to a writing workshop at work to guide us on writing for the web. Lots of great tips and strategies for making our writing more effective. We have lots of different goals for the content we create, so it’s a fairly challenging to make everyone happy. You probably know how that goes.
On Friday night and Saturday, I went to PodCamp Boulder hosted by Jeremy Tanner at the spanking new skinnycorp/Threadless offices in Boulder. If you’ve never been to an un-conference, get to one as soon as you can. I’m sure there’s huge possibilities for them to crash like a chandelier, but they can also fire up a lot of great discussion and thought. And Jeremy and the Boulder crew are firestarters. Any of the tech events they put on are well worth the time. Thanks to Naomi for driving up and the awesome Thriller lessons. Thanks to everyone who came to the event, contributing their great perspectives, and making it worth much more than the admission price. (Which was free.) Hey Denver crew, pay attention. Boulder is kicking our asses in getting the word out and getting people together to actually do stuff. (If you know of Denver connections and events, let me know.)
If you are a Twitter fan, search for this hash #pcb09 to catch the feeds of people who were there.
After that, we progressed on to the incredible #goremet event where good food, great people, and horror movies mix for a good time. Again, thank you to all involved for making it an incredible evening and I look forward to the next one. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake was as scary as ever. The Hills Have Eyes would have given me nightmares.
In summary, it was a crazy week and I need some rest. Based on the feedback and info from PodCamp, there will be a lot of progress on projects over at RedGhost Labs, (and bgxLabs), so be sure to check over there for updates. myLinkChop, News Storm/News Mentor, and the Conference Assassin game all sparked interest, so we’ll keep moving on all of them and get the word out when they are ready for alpha and beta tests.
See you on the highway!