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The 2007 Webby Award winners were announced today. The Webby’s are the premier awards for web sites. They’ve added so many categories in recent years that you wonder if some award inflation has occurred; it’s less special to win something these days with 69 categories than with the old six categories (and yet they still neglected to add a “Best in Show” award). Many of the new categories have more to do with industry categories than tracking best practices or new web technologies. With new categories such as “Pharmaceuticals”, “Beauty and Cosmetics” and “Insurance”, it seems these were created to allow potential sponsors a chance to win awards since they couldn’t possibly compete in genuine categories like “Best Home Page” or “Best Copy/Writing”. After all, KFC and Geico were winners this year, not exactly institutions you’d think of to be the Best Of anything on the Web.

Notable winners include Al Gore’s channel, Current TV, which won the Television category. Will he personally accept the award at the ceremony in June? The Webby’s are known for limiting recipient’s acceptance speeches to five words — tough for any politician.

Also, savetheinternet.net won the People’s Voice Activism award for their campaign to keep the Internet free. This means that Verizon, the major sponsor of this year’s Webby Awards and fierce opponent of Net Neutrality, will have to present the award to their adversary.

Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy! guy, maintains a one-post-a-day blog over at ken-jennings.com. His posts are almost always good for an ironic chuckle. Occasionally they are downright cute (as a parent with kids the same age I share that guilty pleasure).

In today's post, "Mormon guy to Internet: shut up and think a minute," Mr. Jennings takes a serious turn to protest the treatment of his religion in the media: in particular, the liberty pundits feel they have to treat Mormonism with less respect than other religions and to use it as the butt of jokes. I think his points are well made. Especially his advice to substitute other religions (including one's own) into one's jokes to test whether they are still funny.

Mr. Jennings seems to assume, however, that the maligners of Mormonism are religious (perhaps rightly, see studies quoted below). But we here at MeLo are mostly avowed atheists, so we reserve the right to make fun of all religions. We'll try to do it equitably.

Current MeLo contributors all live in a very liberal city, so we are not exposed daily to "average" Americans. We are shocked disgusted dismayed whenever a survey of U.S. religious beliefs is released indicating that we are in a small minority. For example the American Religious Identification Survey (most recent available: ARIS 2001 - age of the survey doesn't matter much as these things change very slowly) indicated that we atheists represent approximately 13% of the adult population. Given that we live in a country that still manages to lead the world in most scientific domains, how can we also be one of the most religious industrialized countries? Despite the right's mantra regarding the Christian foundations of the U.S., the country was actually founded on the assumption that reason should always trump religion in civic affairs. How can Americans purportedly be committed to governing our public lives by secular principles and still gather weekly in animist temples?

Our dismay is tempered by our certainty that eventually rational though will win out. It seems inevitable to us that humanity will eventually shed its remaining superstitions. In the meantime, we'll feel free to use ridicule to try to speed things along.

It's "Bike to Work Month" in our fair city. Here are some ideas for decorating your steed to celebrate (blatantly stolen, quips and all, from a coworker - does that count as attribution?):

You can go with bling….

Or you can go all artsy crafty….

You can do some dumpster diving outside Solstice Parade headquarters for your bling…

Or you can get REALLY obsessive with your RonCo Bead-O-Matic….

You can be SO Capitol Hill and ride Cinderella style….

Have any old bikes lying around? I have a torch!

Like flowers?

Words escape me.

Ride the Horsigator! (or is it the Alliorse?)

Saint Sheldon says; "Pimp your helmet too!"

BTW, here's Chris on his first bike! As you can see, he isn't very happy with this one. He likes his new Carbon/Unobtainium bike he has now better; the wheels are rounder (and fewer!).

I would SO ride this

On the evening of May 1, 2007 a bellwether event in the saga of Digital Rights Management (DRM) took place. Users of digg.com revolted against the site's administrators and overruled their decision to remove an important DRM "secret" from the site.

Time will tell if this story bubbles up to the mainstream press. It should, because it represents the first time that such secrets have been revealed in such a public (and uncontrollable) way.

The secret that was revealed is an encryption key for HD-DVD discs, specifically the "processing key". The two new high definition DVD formats, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, both use much more sophisticated DRM strategies than the old DVD format. They both use the Advanced Access Content System (AACS). AACS uses a combination of keys to encrypt content. One key is associated with the player, another with the disc and the "processing key" is the master key. Crackers had already published ways to discover the player keys and the title keys. On February 11, "arnezami" published his discovery of the processing key on the Doom9 forum. The processing key is "the one key to rule them all." Thus, this is a Very Big Deal.

The AACS system is designed so that the controlling "authority" (AACS-LA) can disable old keys (they can invalidate keys in your player) and issue a new key to be used during the manufacture of all subsequent discs. That's what they announced they would do on April 16.

But the cat is out of the bag. arnezami's technique can be used again to obtain the new processing key. His technique exploited weak security in an unnamed software HD-DVD player, so it may be a little more difficult to repeat the feat. But it will certainly be accomplished.

I should point out that I believe in copyright. Artists and other content creators should have the right to control the distribution of their creations and earn compensation for their labor. I have a 40GB iTunes library, and every single song in it was ripped from a CD that I own. But I detest DRM and have never purchased content that was "managed" by it (at least not effective DRM - my DVDs are obviously encrypted with CSS but these days CSS might as well not exist). I am perfectly willing to respect copyright, but I strongly feel that I should able to make any personal use I desire of content that I've legally purchased. But personal use ends at the boundary of my personal device collection. It does not include giving copies to my friends or reproducing the content in a public domain like the Internet.

As many have commented, we are witnessing the end of the DRM "experiment". With regards to AACS in particular, we will reach a point where new keys are being cracked as fast as the AACS-LA can issue them. It will still take some time, but eventually content distributors will have no choice but to give up. It will not be economical to try to keep up with the crackers. Technology is not the answer. Education is. Perhaps it's unlikely, but the only solution is educating people that stealing content is wrong and convincing them to respect copyright on moral grounds.

Microsoft released Silverlight 1.0 this week. Upon hearing the name Silverlight, did anyone else wonder: 1. Why Microsoft departed from its drab literal naming system? (such as, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition or Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Vista), and 2. Couldn't they have come up with something better than Silverlight? Considering that, internally, Silverlight was referred to as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere I guess they did make large strides towards improvement.

gapingvoid highlighted Microsoft's need for name changes:

Apple calls their new OS "Tiger". Micorsoft calls their new OS "Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005".

Man, already it's beginning to bore me, and I don't even know what it does yet.

Apple has the "Newton". MS has "Microsoft Windows Tablet PC Edition."

There ya go, boring me again.

More on why the Silverlight name is a good thing.

The death of AACS, the DRM scheme used by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, is arriving at an accelerated pace (see "DRM End Times"). arnezami has been joined by "Geremia" over at the Doom9 forums and together they have made significant progress toward permanently breaking AACS. The current hack still requires technical skills (desoldering chips in drives, flashing ROM), but they are making discoveries that should lead to easy tools that anyone could use.

arsTechnica has a pretty good summary, concluding:

Although AACS has proven much more difficult to fully crack than the copy protection on regular DVDs, it is unlikely to remain only partially cracked for very long. The real problem with trying to create an "uncrackable" copy protection is that the media must come with the keys used to decrypt it somewhere on the device and the media itself. Hiding these keys in different places—security by obscurity—merely delays the inevitable. Of course, for the content providers, any delay is still better than no delay at all, so expect the battles between copy protection and hackers to continue.

AACS is probably the most sophisticated DRM scheme that is being used in publicly distributed media. The death of AACS could be the knock on the head that media companies need in order for them to realize DRM is a dead end.

We MeLoids all keep track of the Peak Oil meme. If you're not familiar with the Peak Oil phenomenon, please take a minute to go read about it on Wikipedia. Different people make different predictions about how our lives will be different in a post Peak Oil (PPO) world, ranging from "we're totally fucked, society as we know it will end" to "no big deal, we'll adjust". Personally, I think it'll be somewhere in between.

The one thing we know about a PPO world is that oil will be much more expensive, and we use oil profligately for everything: the obvious energy uses but also fertilizer, plastics, most non-natural fabrics and food (yes, you eat petroleum). And complex manufactured objects like iPods use barrels of oil per unit. The raw materials for each component have to be extracted and processed and then transported several times through stages of distribution to reach assembly. Then the components have to be transported to the place of their final assembly into the device, which is then packaged and transported again through multiple links to the point of sale. Food is another issue. The commonly cited estimate is that the average food item eaten by a US consumer has been transported 1,000-1,500 miles.

I find myself trying to imagine the PPO world several times a day. Pretty much any time I purchase something or unwrap something or throw something away, I wonder whether I'll have access to that item PPO or if I do, how it will be produced, packaged and distributed. For example, last night I used some plastic cling wrap. When oil is $200 per barrel will it still be economical to manufacture and sell cling wrap? The wide variety of produce we have available year round will almost certainly go away, but what will be available? Will local farmers figure out ways to use greenhouses or other solar heating to grow lettuce in northern climes in the winter?

It's possible we could maintain some of our "food on wheels" lifestyle if we did as James Howard Kunstler is always harping: rebuild our rail systems. But since we won't start doing that until it's way beyond obvious that we need to, there are going to be many years without Tropicana fresh squeezed OJ in the interim. We certainly won't be able to manufacture and distribute 116,000 iPods a day [Apple sold 10.5 million iPods in the first quarter of 2007].

What kinds of things will be economical to distribute on a national scale? Laundry soap? Bicycles? M&Ms? And which will fall away or be produced regionally or locally?

Vacations will certainly change dramatically. Fuel costs are already a major component of airline fares, so big increases in oil costs will immediately make air travel unaffordable to all but the rich. And you won't be driving your 8 mpg RV to Yellowstone, either. If you're lucky, maybe you can take a train to many places. Will greyhound experience a huge revival?

By the way, if you're new to this topic the first thing you should do is disabuse yourself of the notion that biofuels or hydrogen are going to save us. Corn prices are already skyrocketing due to diversion of corn to biofuel production, and so far those biofuels are making an almost unmeasurably small contribution to overall energy needs. It is just simply not possible to grow enough biomass to replace a significant amount of petroleum and still have land to grow any food. And hydrogen is not an energy source. It takes large amounts of energy to produce the hydrogen (for example, by extracting it from seawater); by some estimates more energy than the hydrogen stores. So hydrogen is merely a new way to transport energy, not to produce it.

What do you think? How fucked will we be? What products that you use every day will no longer be available? And for those you think will be available, how and where will they be produced?

I attended a fascinating talk today by biologist Shari Kaiser. She was presenting results of work she did that generated an interesting hypothesis about why humans are susceptible to HIV when other primate species are not. You can see an abstract of her paper on the subject here. Apparently this work is novel and interesting enough that it will soon be published in Science. I'll paraphrase the abstract and try to fill in some of the background science.

HIV is a retrovirus. Retroviruses work by making parts of the cellular genetic machinery work "backwards". Normally genes (sections of DNA) are transcribed into mRNA, which is then translated into proteins. But a retrovirus is a strand of RNA (plus a protein sheath called a capsid) that tricks the cell into reverse transcribing the virus RNA into DNA. That DNA can then sometimes insert itself into the genome of the host cell. Subsequently when that "gene" is expressed the resulting RNA is another copy of the virus.

One other piece of the story: there are two kinds of retroviruses: exogenous and endogenous. An exogenous virus is one that infects an organism from the outside, e.g. when a virus is passed from one person to another via transmission. But remember that successful retroviruses become incorporated in the genome of the host. Therefore, if the retrovirus infects a germ cell (sperm or egg) and becomes incorporated in that cell's DNA, the virus is then passed to offspring produced by the germ cell via normal DNA replication. Now it is a potentially permanent part of the genome of that family tree. Whether it becomes permanent, of "fixed", depends on whether and how it affects the selection outcome for the infected organism: for example if it kills the host before reproduction it cannot become fixed in the population. Once it becomes fixed in the genome it is an endogenous retrovirus. It is estimated that 8% of the human genome consists of (inactive) endogenous viruses. Compare that to the 1.2% of the human genome that comprises our genes.

Once can look for endogenous viruses in various species' genomes. It turns out that many primates, including our closest relative the chimpanzee, have multiple copies of an endogenous virus called PtERV, which appears to have become extinct as an exogenous virus approximately 4 million years ago. Humans do not carry PtERV, which may mean that early humans had resistance to the virus.

Cells have various defenses against viruses. One form is an antiviral protein that binds to the virus capsid and affects the virus in some adverse way. For example, it may disassemble the virus. Only two antiviral proteins have been discovered in humans so far, both were discovered coincidentally as part of HIV-related research. Kaiser's work focused on an antiviral protein named Trim5α. She was curious whether Trim5α may have protected early humans from PtERV. Trim5α is one of the set of genes that undergo the most dynamic mutation, presumably because it is responding to rapidly evolving viruses.
How do you test restriction of a virus that has apparently been extinct for 4 million years? You resurrect it. Remember, we have many copies of the DNA template for the virus sitting in all those primate genomes. So Kaiser identified the pertinent portions of the virus genome and used genetic engineering to make cat kidney cells produce them. She did this in three pieces so as not to actually recreate the whole virus - she really only needed the capsid for her work.
It turns out that the human Trim5α protein is quite good at restricting the resurrected PtERV virus. A whole bunch more work with Trim5α from various primate species essentially showed that Trim5α can either be good at restricting PtERV or it can be good at restricting HIV-1 but generally not both. Rhesus macaque monkeys, for example, are essentially immune to HIV-1 because their form of Trim5α is good at restricting the HIV-1 virus.

So her hypothesis after all of this: humans suck at fighting off HIV-1 because we were good at fighting off PtERV 4 million years ago.

Along the way, she made a lot of discoveries that could be helpful in fighting HIV-1. For example, could we enhance human resistance to HIV-1 by modifying the human Trim5α gene? Time will tell.

My good friend B is an executive at a television network. As such, he gets free annual physical exams at the company clinic. Yesterday he went for this year's exam. Usually the doctor doing the exam is a hot 30-something female, so B kind of looks forward to it.

B had the usual blood tests and other prodding, and then it was time for his prostate exam. Suddenly, B realized that his bowels were not quite as vacant as one would hope at a time like this. Too late now, he thought.

The doctor who arrived for the prostate exam was not in fact the hottie, but a 60-year-old male. As he probed B's least receptive orifice, he said to B:

Doctor: So, did you give a blood sample?

B: Yes.

Doctor: Yeah, well I have a stool sample here too.

With that the doctor ripped off his glove, threw it into the trashcan and stormed out the door, leaving B with a lube-covered and lube-filled ass. B reports that he did the "toddler walk" down the hall, trying to get to the bathroom to clean himself up without leaking santorum all over his pants.

The National Day of Prayer was apparently yesterday, although it's pretty fucking hard to figure out the actual date from their web site (this was about the 10th page I navigated to).

We missed it, God damn it!

The Journal of Improbable Research today brings attention to a seminal event in the world of science: the Institute for Creation Science Graduate School ("Advanced Degrees in SCIENCE"!) is calling for papers for the initial publication of the International Journal of Creation Research.

I propose that everyone submit at least one paper! Since the entire enterprise is based on nonsense, one can't require any particular expertise in order to form a hypothesis and write a paper describing one's attempts to investigate that hypothesis. Unfortunately, peanut butter is already taken. I think maybe I'll base my theory on extruded ovo-triticum admixtures as a basis for life.

I'm also going to encourage my daughter to submit a paper. Her logic skills should be more than sufficient for the task. After all, she's three years old!

Now we turn to some real science. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas recently described observations of a very large supernova. The New York Times has a good article about it. It is apparently the largest supernova ever observed and was a star about 150 times the mass of our Sun.

A press release from UC Berkeley points out:

Unlike typical supernovas that reach a peak brightness in days to a few weeks and then dim into obscurity a few months later, SN2006gy took 70 days to reach full brightness and stayed brighter than any previously observed supernova for more than three months. Nearly eight months later, it still is as bright as a typical supernova at its peak, outshining its host galaxy 240 million light years away.

The NY Times article describes what we might experience if a very similar star in our own galaxy, Eta Carinae, were to die in a similar fashion:

Eta Carinae could blow up sooner than we thought, Dr. Smith said, noting that it could be tomorrow, it could be thousands of years from now. Astronomers have no way of telling.

Even if it did blow as the new supernova did last fall, at a distance of around 7,500 light years, Eta Carinae would be unlikely to cause any serious harm to Earth, astronomers said. The explosion would be visible in the daylight and at night you would be able to read a book by its light.

A collection of fake IDs from a bartender in New York.

I had a fake ID when I was 20, because I was the youngest in my group of friends at the time. Mainly I used it at O’Rourke’s Tavern, our hang-out in Lincoln, Nebraska. Actually it wasn’t a fake ID, it was a real ID that I got at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Council Bluffs, Iowa with a friend’s birth certificate and social security card. I have a feeling that you can’t do this today, with their computers and whatnot.

On my 21st birthday, I went to O’Rourke’s with a group of people. They’d long stopped checking my ID there, but after ID-ing everyone else in our group the bouncer said, “might as well check yours, too,” and I gave him my real ID. He just shook his head and let me in.

This week a couple of studies came out concerning young children and television. The first is a study led by Dr. Frederick J. Zimmerman of the University of Washington that will be published in JAMA. Zimmerman surveyed parents regarding how much and what type of programming children watched from birth through 24 months. The second study was authored by Elizabeth Vandewater of the University of Texas in Austin and surveyed parents of children up through age 6.

I'm a parent of a 3-year-old and an 18-month-old. We are strong believers in the maxim "all things in moderation." We are not rabidly anti-TV, but we also are not laissez-faire about letting our kids watch anything that's on. Our kids only watch Noggin and PBS Kids on TV; and classic Disney films, Sesame Street and Electric Company on DVD. That's pretty much it. Once in a while I'll watch a sports program on a weekend afternoon with them in the room, but they never see adult programming like CSI or Law & Order or even the news.

Becoming a no-TV household seems vaguely attractive, but think how much TV programming is a part of our body of cultural knowledge. References to TV shows old and new come up in my conversations many times a day. It seems like isolating one's children from that body of "knowledge" would handicap them when it comes to relating to other kids. Personally, I learn an immense amount from watching TV. Not everything I watch, obviously, but definitely from Nova, Frontline and many programs on the Discovery and History channels, for example.

Having said that, however, I have to admit that the zombie state our kids get in while watching TV is disturbing. My 3-year-old gets so entranced that I literally have to stand between her and screen to get her attention, and even then it takes a few seconds for the trance to be broken.

It turns out we're pretty damn average according to the results of the Zimmerman study as reported in Science Daily:

The average amount of viewing time for the children was 40.2 minutes per day. At 3 months of age children watched less than an hour per day and by 24 months they watched more than 1.5 hours per day. "Approximately half of the viewing was of shows that parents reported to be in the children's educational category," the authors note. "The remaining half was approximately equally split among children's non-educational content, baby DVDs/videos and grown-up television."

The Vandewater study, however, (as reported in the Washington Post) is far more disturbing:

...as many as one in five youngsters under 2 even have a television placed in their bedrooms. More than half (54 percent) of these tiny tots could turn on the TV themselves...

...Most often, parents interviewed in the study said they put a TV set in their kid's room because it freed up other TVs in the house for parental use...

The percentage of older children with TVs in their bedrooms is even higher. To me, putting TV in a child's bedroom is obviously a bad thing. Children are very clever. It won't take them long to learn how to turn the volume down so they can get away with watching TV at any hour of the night, forfeiting the sleep developing brains clearly require. I can guarantee that our children will not have a TV (or a computer, for that matter) in their room until they are out of high school.

When I was young, I always woke up very early - long before anyone else in the house. I would try to watch TV, but in that era most stations were off the air until 6:00 or 7:00 am, and even when they came on the air their programming was about as unattractive to a kid as could be. The local farm report is what I remember most. But today, who knows what one's child might tune into in the middle of the night. I doubt many of the parents who put a TV in their child's room take the time to program the channels to which the TV can be tuned.

Parenting is a whole other topic, but I think TVs in young children's bedrooms are part of a larger "parenting of convenience" trend. Many parents today don't want to have conflict with their children, so they acquiesce to pretty much whatever the child wants. As many have commented, these parents are raising a generation of narcissists who learn very few lessons about personal boundaries or responsibility. As the Love and Logic folks say, you can pay your dues (i.e. learn to set limits for your kids and deal with the temporary conflict that causes) early in your children's lives, or you can pay much higher dues when they are teenagers. To us the choice is obvious.

When playing The End of Suburbia DVD last night, we were presented with the following choice:

This question seems to be asking "Do you want us to swear at you, or not?" A better choice might have been "Original, Unedited Version" and "Edited for Language".

We chose the version with bad words. As it turns out, there were only two bad words in the whole documentary, both uttered by James Howard Kunstler; one being a word from the title of his blog.

A side note: if you're try to take a screen grab in Mac OS X from within the DVD player, it won't let you; Apple assumes (correctly in this case) that the material is copyrighted, but of course doesn't make exceptions for fair use of that copyrighted material. Instead I used the VLC player to make the screen grab above.

Unlike the other melo contributors I am not gainfully employed, but instead am nearing the end of the first year of a master's program. I enjoy life as a 40 year old student, although there have been moments when I've felt very old. This is my second time through graduate school, the first time ending with a PhD in chemistry. When I began my program last September I had been out of school for 13 years, and it had been 22 years since I began my undergraduate studies. Keeping in mind that memories are not nearly as accurate as we'd like to believe, my melo advent will consist of my thoughts on what has changed on campus since the late 80's.

It goes without saying that the younger generation is wired. Wow, are they wired. Wireless, actually. I'm hardly a luddite but I was stunned to observe the nearly-constant texting, IM-ing, chatting, facebook-browsing and general universal connectivity. In fact, the most consistent complaint that I hear from my classmates is that there are insufficient numbers of outlets in the classrooms, and the lighting is bad for viewing a laptop monitor. One class was held in a decrepit old university building that lacked Wi-Fi. The horror! Frankly, if I were a professor my classroom would be a laptop-free zone. While access to google or wikipedia is occasionally useful, the amount of note-taking that gets done on laptops is minimal. Even more shocking to me is just how blatant students are about using chat during lectures. There's no effort to be discreet and professors are much more tolerant than I would expect.

A positive side to all of this new information technology and a clear difference from my first time through college is the ease of research that is facilitated by the incredible availability of information. I believe that this is the single most significant difference; I never go to library. Instead I'm able to do my research from home, at any crazy hour of the day or night. And then I send my completed assignment to the professor via email. For someone who formerly took notes and made photocopies from bound collections of journals that were stored in the bowels of the library, and then typed a paper (remember typewriters?) this is a remarkable and wonderful change. My background as a scientist exposed me to many specialized databases, and for me the amazing range of information sources provided by the university is a great big wonderful information playground. This brings up another generational difference; many of my classmates believe that searching = google. It drives me crazy when I work with them on group projects. They're ignoring an unbelievable resource, one that is far better than they'll ever have in the corporate world. In fact I had a long discussion with one of my professors about this topic. She felt that in spite of the availability of information that the average quality of academic work has declined as a result of indiscriminate use of google.

And then there's the issue of grade inflation. It does appear to be real, although after experiencing it I don't think that it matters much. In my program it is nearly impossible to get a grade lower than 3.0. However, in order to maintain good standing with the graduate school, all grades must be 3.0 or higher, so a 2.9 is effectively a failing grade. In spite of the fact that the grade range is compressed between 3.0 and 4.0 the ranking of students remains legitimate. Additionally, if anything I've found it more difficult to get a 4.0 than it was back in the 80's. As far as I've observed, 4.0's have been reserved for truly exceptional work. A related issue is that of workload and expectations. There's no question that my current program feels easier than my work as a chemistry PhD student. However, the disciplines are quite different so I'm not sure that a comparison is completely valid. All of my, ahem, life experience does seem to be good for something, too, as I clearly am able to work more efficiently than most of my younger classmates. On the other hand, on several occasions I have been surprised at how accommodating professors are when students have come forward with (at least in my opinion) quite lame reasons for needing extensions or regrading of an assignment.

Ubiquitous information technology has dramatically changed academic life and I believe that this is the single most significant difference between my university experiences. Professors also appear to be generally more accommodating of student's desires than they were in the past and perhaps the expectations are lower. However, something that never changes is that as a student you get out of your studies what you put into it. Some of my classmates appreciate this fact, and some of them don't. As one who didn't appreciate it back in 1988 I can't judge them too harshly.

The Improbable Research blog (from the folks who hand out the Ig Noble Prizes), today brought my attention to a New Yorker article about the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is being built at CERN on the French/Swiss border near Geneva, and when it comes online will be the largest particle accelerator ever built.

Out of curiosity, I asked Wikipedia how the LHC compared to the Superconducting Super Collider, which was partially built in Texas before being canceled by Congress in 1993. The answer: the LHC will achieve energies of 7 TeV (trillion electron volts). The SSC was designed to achieve 20 TeV.

The New Yorker piece is the most recent in a string of articles that ponder the question of whether the LHC will accidentally create a mini-black hole that will swallow up the Earth and presumably our neighborhood of space.

The subject is fascinating, but in my opinion completely pointless. Humorously:

'...CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the L.H.C.’s world-destroying potential, “not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero.”'

Regardless of the PR, there is still a small chance that this could happen. But if it did, we wouldn't be around to care. So why care now? Humanity, from a big enough context, consists of a hair on a wart on a frog on a bump on a log on the bottom of the multiverse. We wouldn't even merit a paragraph in the obits of the Universe Gazette.

Remember when I described how the AACS LA can issue replacement encryption keys that are designed to restore DRM protection for subsequently released Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs? Well, the AACS LA did that for the first time about a month ago. Guess what? Engadget reports that the new keys are already cracked and packaged into a DVD-ripping application, even before the first discs that use the new keys have been released! As the kids say these days, that's the awesome.