Saw this over at Lifehacker this morning from xkcd. I read this as “this is why geeks are more dangerous than terrorists.”
Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya from the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto are both in agreement that one possible explanation for the constant failings of the large hadron collider (LHC) is that it is being intentionally sabotaged by people from the future. Sound weird? Well it is, but at the same time, they’re basing their theories on current science fact about quantum physics and time travel. And the reason this is OK (unlike travelling back in time to kill your grandfather) and wouldn’t result in a paradox is apparently accepted.
However they also suggest maybe God (yes, scientics are saying God) may be preventing it as he does not want us to discover the Higg’s Boson particle either.
One reader on io9 made a comment that if you read the below quotes as though you’re the voice over from the movie Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, they take on a much more amusing tone – and he’s right, they suddenly sound “right.”
It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.
…
While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.
Volkswagen have decided to give the world of viral video a go and have pretty much nailed it. These two video’s are spreading over the internet like wildfire. The first is a “deep bin,” a trash can that when you throw rubbish in, sounds like it’s dropping for a long distance. The second is about musical stairs.
The best bit about these two videos though is the fact the only time you know it was Volkswagen is at the very end for about 2 seconds when they show their logo – that’s it. Now people are discussing Volkswagen like crazy and all they had to do was avoid any real advertising.
Friday afternoon, the working week is almost over, so here’s some random crap courtesy of engrish.com.
Dan sent me a link to this last night (only saw it this morning), it’s the ultimate in geek baby couture, the infant creeper.
Now I’m nore sure whether to laugh or cry, it’s funny, I can’t deny that, but at the same time, it’s seriously geeky!
//Humans Support
//Multiple Inheritance
class baby: mom, dad
Once again, the Japanese have excelled themselves in weirdness by creating a human looking robot that can sing so adorably called the Yamaha HRP-4C. By human looking I mean kind of like the puppets in Lazy Town human, obviously cartoony in a very manga style, but at the same time, human enough to make you think “that looks/sounds weird.” Obviously you need sound to watch this video clip of the Yamaha HRP-4C robot.
Another version is below, because of the close-ups, this one is a little more creepy.
This is a very impressive video of a robotic hand that is capable of performing tasks with great accuracy at insane speeds – think hollywood robots that perform human tasks in milliseconds. The video covers single handed knot tying, bouncing a ball, catching a cell phone and throwing a ball among others. It really does remind you of the movies that show robotic humans in the future and shows they were pretty spot on as to what we can expect in the next few decades.
Watch the video of the high speed robot hand at college humour.
Another Derren Brown clip today, this time he’s using NLP (neuro linguistic programming) to make people forget the stop they want to get off at.
For all you people wishing you were at Hogwarts, here’s the first step in the right direction (no actual magic, but I guarantee for people who don’t know about this product, they’ll stare at you in amazement, or maybe fear). It’s called the Kymera Magic Wand.
The Kymera magic wand is actually a universal remote control that can learn IR signals to control pretty much any IR controlled device (TV, Sky, DVD player, BR player etc.)
Motions such as flicking the wand up can change the channel, rotating the wand can increase the volume and so on.
The website is just as cheesy as the wand, a flash movie that looks like a spell book, but that is the target market they’re aiming for.
Coming in at £50 it’s not too badly priced considering the geek factor involved, but maybe it’s too high a price to pay when your mates come over and promptly leave when you whip out your wand?
This thing is great for random crap, euphemisms to brighten your day from the random euphemism generator.
Great lines such as:
I couldn’t believe my best friend was actually
