There was a HOLE here. It's GONE now.

[davidn]

There was a HOLE here. It's GONE now.



You have no idea how long I've been waiting to finally use that phrase - as much for the reference as for finally getting our bathroom into a state when it isn't falling apart again. Additionally, I realized fairly shortly after last posting about Silent Hill 4 that I'd completely missed the opportunity to refer to it as Henry's Flat.

I've actually been quite surprised that among my friends list there's been almost a complete lack of mention of the Large Hadron Collider that's being used to smash things together at high speeds and find out if there are any more bugs in the universe today, and I'm taking that as a good sign that the people I know aren't liable to panic hysterically like a bunch of Daily Mail readers. I only remembered about it a couple of days ago, when most media had been engaged in a sort of game of continually overblown Chinese Whispers for a long time, starting with one paper saying there was some lunatic thinking it would produce dangerous black holes, then escalating to "This newspaper says that someone mentioned it might produce black holes", and ballooning up rapidly from there because everyone thinks of black holes as giant cosmic vacuum cleaners that would instantly destroy everything. CNET's article on it was perhaps the most unawarely ironic one I saw, assuring everyone that there was no need to panic about voracious black holes being created that would rapidly swallow the Earth.

Even though I outwardly dismissed people who were being all Bostonian about it, I can't say that I wasn't at least a little worried about the situation, because if it did end the world then it would severely delay the release of the 1.3.3 version of our webapp tomorrow. But consider this - we've all (I think we all have, anyway) now lived through five projected apocalypses and none of us are any the worse. And Stephen Hawking says that it's perfectly safe, and that's good enough for me.

Comments

[jenny0.livejournal.com]

Speaking of animated cats on children's tv shows, my flatmate my last year in St Andrews insisted there was a St. Bagpuss. Naturally she could never find again the website where she'd seen this.

Also, Jason is convinced this atom-smasher-thing will destroy the world. So I'm glad it hasn't yet. But honestly, what is it for?

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

The funniest thing I've heard about the Large Hadron Collider is that someone actually bothered sending death threats to the scientists involved with its construction, saying that if it ends up destroying the world, he'll come round and kill them. Part of me thinks it'd be amusing to watch him try, just to see the look on his by-then non-existant face when he realises there's no-one left to kill... (also, what's he gonna do to them that's worse than being sucked into a black hole, anyway?) :P

Also, apologies on the extreme lateness of my response email, by the way. To my shame, I haven't actually started writing it properly yet; holidays and madness and getting everything sorted upon coming back, don'tcha know. :P I'll sit down and put fingers to keyboard this weekend, yeah?

D.F.

We're all still alive

[(Anonymous)]

Hi it's Clare Young.
Pupils in my class came into school VERY CONCERNED that the world was going to end. I had not seen any breakfast TV - where this was obviousley being talked about so I was a little clueless at first. But I had to explain to one child that it was not good to start spreading rumours around the class that the world was going to end. He responded by telling me that his dad believed it. . .what could I say?! All day I was dealing with 8 year old children asking "Is the world really going to end Miss Young?"