The Large Hadron Collider might be out of action for up to two months after a cooling failure caused a quench. Scientists are still fine tuning and testing everything before the collision experiments were due to start next month. It was out of action for a week already when a transformer failed, but the damage from a magnet quench is potentially more serious and takes longer to fix. The magnets used to guide the beams are superconducting electromagnets which are cooled by liquid helium to only a few degrees above absolute zero. A quench happens when part of the magnet gets a little too warm and suddenly starts behaving like an ordinary conductor instead of a superconductor. The enormous current it carries heats it up quickly and spreads to the rest of the magnet which very rapidly can heat up by several hundred degrees, boiling off the liquid helium in the process.

Galveston, Texas was where Hurricane Ike made landfall on the US this weekend. Galveston is just south of Houston, and was one of the places Stephen and I visited when we did a tour of Texas last year. The fact that I've actually been to the places that you see on the news makes this natural disaster much more real to me than previous ones. It's probably just my fondness for island and coastlines, but I really enjoyed visiting that part of Texas. We stayed in Seabrook, just north of Clear Lake and northwest of Kemah. We stayed there a couple of days, and spent just a day in Galveston itself.

Can you imagine a web based user interface that you use without clicking? How long do you last without clicking? I managed to navigate the entire site without clicking, but it was a struggle. The site definitely highlights how completely pervasive the idea of clicking things has become. There are probably a lot of places where interfaces could be designed to recognise mouse gestures and not need clicks.

Some people are apparently taking this LHC thing destroying the world thing quite seriously. I've personally spoken to some quite intelligent people who say that of course, they don't really think the world is going to end when the LHC is switched on, but they are worried anyway. They can't really explain why they are worried either, just that they have somehow been imbued with the sense that this thing is risky and dangerous. Who needs Osama bin Laden when the media is that good at generating fear over nothing? Nothing bad happened when they switched on the 400GeV Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN from 1981. Nor did the world implode when they flipped the switch on the 1TeV Tevatron in 1983. Even the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) didn't create a black hole to swallow the earth when it went live in 2000. Interestingly, the same people protesting that LHC might make black holes or strangelets made exactly the same claims about the RHIC 10 years ago. You'd have thought they'd have found a new fruit loop theory to get excited about since then.

Corrections Minister Phil Goff announced today that he'd keep an eye on the South Australian trial of banning gang membership. He said that if it works, "then I'm 100 per cent in favour of it".

Scott Adams is the guy who writes the Dilbert cartoons. He also has a very entertaining (and sometimes thought-provoking) blog and has written some very funny and interesting books (which I'll write about some other time). This is just a random collection of some of his soundbites that I enjoy the most:

Tonight the Large Hadron Collider had a beam all the way around for the first time. Some nutjobs are apparently afraid that this might destroy the world. But someone has conveniently put up a web site to let you check: http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/ The LHC is the world's largest particle accelerator. Buried under the Franco-Swiss border, at 27km long, it is the largest machine in the world. The plan is to have beams of protons (a type of hadron) or lead nuclei splat into each other at very high speeds (99.999999% of the speed of light) and with very high energies. This allows physicists to test various aspects of the Standard Model of particle physics, including hopefully observing the predicted Higgs boson for the first time. Stephen Hawking has apparently bet $100 that we won't see a Higgs boson using the LHC.

Yeah, it was my birthday a while ago. More than a month ago now. Wasn't a big deal, although some people kinda got excited over the fact that my age is now divisible by 10. Anyway, I had an absolutely lovely birthday weekend with my gorgeous friends Amal and Raina. They treated me to Mamma Mia (which was so good I ended up seeing it 3 times).

It's my blog, and I'll post my favourite youtube videos if I want to :p At least, I will when I'm too busy to actually write anything more interesting.

Thus spake wikipedia. It means fear of the number 666. Obviously that particular fear originates from the Bible, where the book of Revelations clearly reveals to us the danger: