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Avast, ye matey! Just remember, to err is human, but to arrr is pirate.

(#42)

1. A black hole is a region of space where the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape its “event horizon.” This ability to trap even light gave the phenomenon its name. I’m guessing the pull of a black hole is stronger than my desire for chocolate. Just a little.

2. An event horizon is a boundary in space and time surrounding a black hole or wormhole past which events cannot affect an outside observer. According to Wikipedia, “[L]ight emitted from inside the horizon can never reach the observer, and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer’s side disappears.” In other words, calories consumed in a black hole don’t count.

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While McCain has been airing 30-second attack ads with all sorts of lies in them, Obama comes out with his two-minute “responsible adult” ad with substance that actually encourages Americans to do something shocking — READ. Actually read his plan, don’t get all of your information from TV ads. With the video below is a transcript of the ad. Then go to nonpartisan FactCheck.org and read some more.

“In the past few weeks, Wall Street’s been rocked as banks closed and markets tumbled, but for many of you — the people I’ve met in town halls, backyards and diners across America — our troubled economy isn’t news. 600,000 Americans have lost their jobs since January. Paychecks are flat and home values are falling. It’s hard to pay for gas and groceries and if you put it on a credit card they’ve probably raised your rates. You’re paying more than ever for health insurance that covers less and less. This isn’t just a string of bad luck. The truth is that while you’ve been living up to your responsibilities Washington has not. That’s why we need change. Real change.

“This is no ordinary time and it shouldn’t be an ordinary election. But much of this campaign has been consumed by petty attacks and distractions that have nothing to do with you or how we get America back on track. Here’s what I believe we need to do. Reform our tax system to give a $1,000 tax break to the middle class instead of showering more on oil companies and corporations that outsource our jobs. End the “anything goes” culture on Wall Street with real regulation that protects your investments and pensions. Fast track a plan for energy ‘made-in-America’ that will free us from our dependence on mid-east oil in 10 years and put millions of Americans to work. Crack down on lobbyists — once and for all — so their back-room deal-making no longer drowns out the voices of the middle class and undermines our common interests as Americans. And yes, bring a responsible end to this war in Iraq so we stop spending billions each month rebuilding their country when we should be rebuilding ours.

“Doing these things won’t be easy. But we’re Americans. We’ve met tough challenges before. And we can again. I’m Barack Obama. I hope you’ll read my economic plan. I approved this message because bitter, partisan fights and outworn ideas of the left and the right won’t solve the problems we face today. But a new spirit of unity and shared responsibility will.”

John Ottinger over at Grasping for the Wind has asked me to take part in his Ask the Bloggers feature. This most recent installment analyzes book covers– what we love and hate about them and how they influence what we buy. Check out the responses, including my own, here.

What kind of book cover attracts your attention? What attributes of the cover make you more or less likely to take it off the shelf? Does the spine of the book have any effect on your choices?

I don’t usually post about politics on this blog, but once in a while I feel the need to get on a soapbox. Now is one of those times. One reader letter to Andrew Sullivan particularly struck me today and I’ll quote a few excerpts from it here:

It also occurs to me that in a way McCain and Rove have actually simply taken over the liberal blogosphere in some way. They [liberal bloggers] are being played.

Just a few examples—yesterday Obama gave a fantastic interview at the Service Forum. Did the liberal blogs even cover this? No.

He gave a great speech on the trail. Are his town halls even posted or excerpted? No.

The liberal bloggers have become McCain central. . . McCain and crew realized early this cycle that they did not have a visible internet presence. So what did they do? They took over the liberal presence, they are manipulating the leading liberal blogs, just as they manipulate the MSM. All to their own advantage. And the blogs have all fallen for this hook, line and sinker. Does no one realize this?

Here’s Obama’s Twitter page. Two hours ago he was in Concord, NH at the “Change We Need” event.

(#41)

1. The Large Hardron Collider (LHC) is the “world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex,” and its purpose is to test the current standard theory of particle physics. Shiny.

2. The LHC collides beams of protons with the hopes of finding the elusive Higgs Boson. This finding would confirm some suppositions about particle physics, such as how elementary particles (i.e., quarks and leptons etc.) acquire mass. It would bring us closer to formulating a Grand Unified Theory, which unifies three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. The theory leaves out only gravity, which always gets me down.

3. Firing up the LHC might destroy life as we know it. By recreating the Big Bang environment scientists could potentially create a new black hole every second. Stephen Hawking has countered this and stated that these tiny black holes should lose more mass than they absorb and evaporate within a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. So, we all trust Steve, right?

4. The first beams were circulated through the collider on September 10, 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned for October 21, 2008.

5. The collider tunnel contains two adjacent pipes each holding a proton beam, a type of hadron. The two beams travel in opposite directions around the ring. Almost two thousand magnets keep the beams on their circular path and maximize the chances of the beams crossing. Is anyone else having a Ghostbusters flashback? Don’t cross the beams and don’t feed it after midnight.

6. Stephen Hawking hopes we actually do not find the Higgs Boson particle: “I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of $100 that we won’t find the Higgs.” In this scenario Hawking hopes to discover superpartners, particles that would be supersymmetric partners to particles already known. “Their existence would be a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together. Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe,” he said.

7. The LHC experiments might also uncover why there seem to be symmetry violations between matter and anti-matter. We might also learn more about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Sorry, captain, I can’t push the anti-matter drive any faster without more dilithium crystals!

8. The LHC experiments might prove or disprove the extra dimensions postulated by string physics. I hope it uncovers a Chocolate Dimension and a Calories-Don’t-Count-Here dimension — and preferably a worm hole connecting the two.

9. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) built the Large Hadron Collider and may upgrade the facility’s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), a particle accelerator, in ten years. Does anyone else think that the Super Proton Synchrotron could kick Megatron’s a$$?

10. Tevatron is a circular particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and was the highest energy particle collider in the world until the the Large Hadron Collider was built. I hope they enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame.

11. According to Wikipedia, “[T]he Very Large Hadron Collider (VLHC) is a name for a hypothetical future hadron collider with performance significantly beyond the Large Hadron Collider.” The Very Very Very Very Gigantic Hadron Collider, slated to be built in 2025, goes up to 11.

12. A hadron is composed of quarks bound up together by a strong nuclear force, similar to how atoms are held together by electromagnetic force. Protons and neutrons are hadrons. The LHC may uncover the existence of other elementary particles called “sparticles.” Theoretically, when particles such as leptons, photons, and quarks were produced in the Big Bang, each was accompanied by a matching sparticle: sleptons, photinos and squarks. How funny would it be to get Gerry Butler to yell out “THIS IS A SPARTICLE!”?

13. The Higgs boson, called the “God Particle” in pop culture, is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. The Higgs Boson is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed and was named after Peter Higgs, British theoretical physicist and an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Read more about the Large Hadron Collider:

30 stunning images of the Large Hadron Collider

Despite Rumors, Black Hole Factory Will Not Destroy Earth

Stephen Hawking: Large Hadron Collider vital for humanity

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!
View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Pyr editor Lou Anders has hinted that the latest episode of Stargate: Atlantis “Whispers” offers some kind of Pyr plug. So, I’m live-blogging the episode until I figure out what it is. I’m about 40 minutes behind the live broadcast on TiVo. Hey, I had pages to write!

(First rule of live-blogging: make sure you don’t accidentally delete half your post. Second rule of live-blogging: there is no live-blogging if you delete your frakking post and have to rewrite part of it. Read the rest of this post from the bottom up.)

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