About a month ago I mentioned that I had been reading up about the Large Hadron Collider. Well, I just read a great article over at National Geographic that was written… well about a month ago. I guess I just missed it. The article went ahead and blew my mind all over the place. Physics is crazy and hard enough to understand at the theoretical level sometimes – I can’t even imagine understanding it at the mathematical level.

On what we’ll hopefully learn from the LHC (from the article)…

New puzzles seem a sure bet. After all, the universe doesn’t seem to be constructed for our investigative convenience. We’re big, sloppy meat-creatures who haven’t even taken a good census of the species of bacteria that live in our bodies.

Also of interest, a new cluster of stable elements has been found. Pretty cool.

So Mr. Stein has a new documentary coming out called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The fundamental argument of the movie is that those who speak out against evolution and in favor of Intelligent Design (ID) are “persecuted.” If you’re a scientist and you subscribe to the idea of ID you’re looked down on, if you’re a teacher who attempts to teach ID in school you may be fired.

There are already quite a few responses the the film that point out its many flaws, including one from the infamous Richard Dawkins (author of “The God Delusion”), so I wont spend too much time on it, but I did want to throw in my two cents.

If you’re a science teacher and you get fired for teaching ID in your classroom it has nothing to do with scientists being a bunch of heathen God haters. It has to do with the fact that you’re teaching unfounded, unscientific beliefs in a science class. If evolution turns out to be an incorrect theory (I don’t think it will) and a better theory is presented with more, founded, convincing facts than the theory of evolution (unlikely – due to the vast amount of evidence supporting evolution), science as a whole must, by definition, embrace that theory. Darwin was the first to say that if a better explanation comes along evolution should be thrown out. The problem is the more the subject is studied the more evolution starts to look like fact and the more ID looks like silliness.

If you want to preach that the earth is a few thousand years old and that we were all zapped out of God’s finger because the Bible says so, go for it. No skin off my nose. But keep it in church and don’t pretend like those claims have any real basis in science.

This is a pretty great blog that drags up articles in old science and mechanics magazines and republishes them for all the world to laugh at. This article in particular is rather amusing, as it predicts what life will be like forty years from now in the distant year of 2008.

Some correct predictions from the article

• TVs will be flat
• Computers are important in everyday life
• Much of commerce is done with credit cards
• Electronic shopping is a common reality

Some incorrect predictions from the article

• What’s an air-cushion car?
• 200 passenger rocket ships don’t fly around to other continents
• There are no hypersonic passenger planes that fly at 4,000 mph
• Houses aren’t pre built and easily added onto via “modules” and “modules” aren’t given out as common wedding gifts
• Everything isn’t made out of plastic. Seriously whoever wrote this article really thought plastic was the ultimate wave of the future.
• The average work day is not four hours
• The “pace of technological advance” is not so intense that two hours a day are used to study it by every common jobholder
• TV screens do not cover an entire wall in most homes
• A typical vacation is not a stay at an undersea resort or on a hotel satellite
• There is no “intelligence pill” that makes everyone smart
• Heart disease has not been “virtually eliminated”

All in all the article is pretty hilarious, but I think this is my favorite part.

Other conveniences ease kitchenwork. The housewife simply determines in advance her menus for the week, then slips prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest. At preset times, each meal slides into the microwave oven and is cooked or thawed. The meal then is served on disposable plastic plates.

With all these amazing technological advances one thing is sure to stay the same – the kitchen is still the woman’s proper place in the home!

This is of course all conceptual, but nanotechnology is on the horizon and I don’t think there’s any denying that this is a wacky ass time to be alive.

By ROBERT BURNS – 1 hour ago

WASHINGTON (AP) – A missile launched from a Navy ship struck a dying U.S. spy satellite passing 130 miles over the Pacific on Wednesday, the Pentagon said. It was not clear whether the operation succeeded in its main goal of destroying a tank aboard the satellite that carried a toxic fuel that U.S. officials said could pose a hazard to humans if it landed in a populated area.

(plenty more at source)

RAHHH AMERICA POWER