The LHC

Well the Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running. I'm used to big science facilities, but man, it's huge.

Of course some people got the idea that it was dangerous. My favourite is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt1Yo610lG0, by a guy that reckons that the LHC is solely designed by the masons (scientists are exactly the same as masons) to disrupt the Van Allen belt and allow Satan to come back.

I find it interesting that none of the doom-mongers seem to consider the possibility that CERN scientists aren't likely to be suicidal. Not all of them. I mean, come on! And I think Stephen Hawking knows a bit more about black holes than I do. Although come to think of it, there are any number of politicians and oil barons who know far more about global warming in ten minutes than professional climate scientists who've been at it every working day for twenty years, right?

But for those who are still worried, here's a couple of websites.

Has the LHC destroyed the earth?
http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

And the CERN webcam - so you can see whether it's still there.
http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Alternatively, you could just boogie on with REM.

The End of the World

Isn't it funny how, as soon as you don't have to do something, it becomes appealing again. Like blogging.

El Hierro used to be the end of the world, and so the zero meridian went through the west of the island, before it moved to Greenwich. On Thursday we went to see it. It really does feel like the end of the world. The whole island's rather dry, and this is the drier end of it, so there's no trees or grass, just scrubby little bushes. The B road turns into an unclassified road and then a dirt track. Then we had to park and walk a mile. No houses in sight. The mobile phone had no signal. As we arrived, a couple of people were just leaving in a 4x4, and that was the only other car we saw the whole time.

The monument itself is modest – just a block of concrete with half an iron globe poking out of it. But it was amazing to think that we were the most westerly of the 497,000,000 people in the EU.

The local tourist office will give you a certificate to say you've been, but they'd run out. So they promised to post it to us!