Juxtaposting #2

Um, could you take some Beano?

So, my blog still isn't showing up on the blog roll? Hmmm, I smell censorship. Sorry, but I don't garden, or take pictures of kittens, or swap apple pie recipes. I am an ascerbic carmudgen aged to zesty perfection by years of serving the public. After a while, you start to develop indigestion. There is gurgling, there is discomfort, there is unwanted byproduct. I am walking irritable bowel syndrome. Where do you dispose of this? Why the internet, of course!
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But to bolster my chances of touching a wider audience, I offer the following:

Gap for Fetuses

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Is your expected child ready to enter the ranks of upper-middle class America?

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That's the question the Gap is ready to answer. This fall, the popular mid-scale outfitters will introduce a new line of clothing, looking to surpass the ultra preparedness of the ready for post-Yuppi-Amercian-chic they brought to the table with Baby Gap.

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"There's an urgency that American parents feel when bringing a child into today's world," says Gap for Fetuses clothing designer. "They're not satisfied with hand-me downs and family heirlooms. They want new, they want hot, and most importantly, they want everyone to know that they're better than everyone else. Now, we can give them that feeling of superiority sooner than had ever been thought possible."

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Teaming up with material science engineers from the University of Connecticut, Gap designer "Frederique" has developed tiny replicas of popular adult Gap pieces designed to fit the peanut sized body of a four-month-old fetus. The clothes are made from carbon nanotubes, which are incredibly strong and elastic structures measuring approximately 1/50,000th of the width of a human hair.

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Gap for Fetuses has yet to debut their new line in public, but claim that responses from test groups have been positive.

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"Right now, the solid color polo with the flipped-up collar seems to be the favorite."

Trust Us, We're Scientists!

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN appears to be off to a rocky start. While scientists are confident that hurling atomic particles at each other at close to the speed of light is perfectly safe, they seem to have forgotten one very important law: Murphy's.

Here's a hodgepodge of troubles that have plagued the massive research tool, which opponents claim could potentially destroy life, the universe, and everything:

On 25 October 2005, a technician was killed in the LHC tunnel when a crane load was accidentally dropped.

On 27 March 2007 a cryogenic magnet support broke during a pressure test involving one of the LHC's inner triplet (focusing quadrupole) magnet assemblies, provided by Fermilab and KEK. No one was injured. Fermilab director Pier Oddone stated "In this case we are dumbfounded that we missed some very simple balance of forces". This fault had been present in the original design, and remained during four engineering reviews over the following years. Analysis revealed that its design, made as thin as possible for better insulation, was not strong enough to withstand the forces generated during pressure testing. Details are available in a statement from Fermilab, with which CERN is in agreement. Repairing the broken magnet and reinforcing the eight identical assemblies used by LHC delayed the startup date, then planned for November 2007.

Problems occurred on 19 September 2008 during powering tests of the main dipole circuit, when an electrical fault in the bus between magnets caused a rupture and a leak of six tonnes of liquid helium. The operation was delayed for several months.The LHC is expected to be restarted at the end September 2009 with first collisions happening in October. It is currently believed that a faulty electrical connection between two magnets caused an arc, which compromised the liquid-helium containment. Once the cooling layer was broken, the helium flooded the surrounding vacuum layer with sufficient force to break 10-ton magnets from their mountings. The explosion also contaminated the proton tubes with soot.

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Nevermind that the last scenario was touched upon by Dr. Richard J. Wagner in his affidavit opposing the rushed construction of the collider. Dr. Wagner warned of the possibility of helium feeding a strangelet, allowing it to grow until it became powerful enough to destroy all matter in the universe.

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"A negatively charged strangelet condenses out of the quark-gluon plasma with a half-life more than a nano-second (10-9 second). That's enough time for the strangelet to traverse the vacuum in the RHIC, penetrate the iron wall (being slowed to thermal velocity in the process) and mingle with the helium atoms in the super-conducting magnet cooling jacket. Spontaneous fusion would take place and the strangelet would grow as it consumed helium nuclei, giving off large amounts of radiation. At some point it would grow so large that it would fall through the helium containment-wall (consuming every atom it encounters on the way), fall out of the device, and penetrate the concrete floor, tunneling down to the center of the Earth. The result will be the eventual (a period of days or months) conversion of every atom in the Earth to become part of one massive hot strange-matter nucleus. The Moon and a set of artificial satellites will orbit a white-hot strange Earth only about 100 meters in diameter but with approximately the original mass of the Earth (some mass will be lost to radiated heat). Once the strangelet is created, no power on Earth can stop it. Let me repeat: the above disaster scenario is well-described in the BNL Review."

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In related news, experts say that Chernobyl, site of 1986 nuclear reactor accident which triggered a nuclear meltdown and marred the surrounding area with deadly radiation, may once again be suitable for human habitation as early as 2700 A.D.

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1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_particle_collisions_at_the_Large_Hadron_Collider

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2.http://chess.captain.at/strangelets-matter.html

Juxtaposting #1

Acrid thoughts expelled into the vastness of the web

Like an SBD in a crowded auditorium, so does the sarcastic blog post waft into cyberspace. Masked like a silent assassin by the anonymity afforded to it by the Internet, it stirs the olfactory senses of the jaded. Some laugh. Some take no notice. The ephemerality of its relevance to the world is matched only by the effeteness of its content. It disperses into the winds of time, leaving behind a faint residual of pertinence to a quickly changing world that has already rendered it obsolete.

Where has your library card been?

After eighteen years of serving the public, this ranks in the top three most disgusting customer encounters I've had to endure:

A male child digs diligently with his hands down the front of his pants. His mother, upon noticing him, yells-

"Get your hand out of your pants!"

The child obeys. The mother hands him his library card.

"Here, do you want to give the man your card? Here, give it to him."

The child takes the card and hands it to me. I take it, scan it, bid them adieu and retreat to the back to scrub my hands under scalding hot water.