Will Collider Startup Turn Earth Into a Black Hole?

Will particle physics research lead to humankind's destruction? "That question has been raised by the impending startup of the Large Hadron Collider. It starts smashing protons together this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, in hopes of grabbing a piece of the primordial fire, forces and particles that may have existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic. To most physicists, this fear is more science fiction than science fact. At a recent open house weekend, 73,000 visitors, without pitchforks or torches, toured the collider without incident." Dennis Overbye's essay appears in the New York Times April 15, 2008.

 

GOD has given society the conscience to "create and destroy" all the things of this earth … what we do with that will be the determination of our judgment. 
 
It is always easier to destroy than create... 

When was your vote counted.

The Dumbing Down Of America

The Chronicle Of Higher Education has a commentary on the sorry state of ignorance that exists in American Universities, noting "Today's college students have tuned out the world, and it's partly our fault". One more example of what Hunter S Thompson called "The Dumbing Down Of America" - So Much for the Information Age. In recent years I have administered a dumbed-down quiz on current events and history early in each semester to get a sense of what my students know and don't know. Initially I worried that its simplicity would insult them, but my fears were unfounded. The results have been, well, horrifying.

Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn't pretty. Read more here by By Big Gav peakenergy

Techno Crutches make you dumber than a POTHEAD

. . . A study carried out at the British Institute of Psychiatry . . found that excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence and that those distracted by incoming e-mail and phone calls saw a ten-point fall in their IQ, over twice the impact of smoking or marijuana use. . .

Programmers [for example ] know that task switches take a long time. It is easier to keep going once you're at full steam . . . than to stop work and finish later. That last hour might take three hours, since you have to retrieve all of the background info from long-term memory and bring it back to the front of your mind.

Studies report that the American worker wastes 2.1 hours per day due to multitasking. When distracted while performing a task, it takes a certain amount of time to begin the new task, complete the new task and get back on track with the original task. Microsoft employees had their computers log their work for a period and found that simply dealing with an e-mail message took an average of 15 minutes and often lead to subsequent distractions, which lead to the employee taking up to an hour to get back to their original task.

The bottom line is that multitasking has been proven to make us less effective, not more. Although our digital assistants can be time savers, they can also be time wasters, if we allow them to break our focus. So for all of you who trouble getting things done . . . turn off your chat, RSS feeds, Google Desktop, Outlook alerts and whatever else keeps distracting you, and see what it would it would be like to simply focus on [ the task at hand ].