DB's post riffing a bit on the Large Hadron Collider spurred some random thoughts on my part.

The earth is still here today, but despite premature media fearmongering, it's because the collider hasn't started colliding things yet - they only sent the particles in one direction. So things are OK - for now. That lets everyone get up to speed on the science, which is good.

I'm not surprised by the play that the LHC Rap has received on YouTube, and one of the key investigators at LHC is former rocker Brian Cox. It used to be that rockers wanted to destroy their hotel rooms, but now they're aiming higher. And while I'm at the random connections, how many ex-rocker physicists named Brian do we need?

After the East Bay Earthquake last week - the biggest earthquake in the East Bay all week - I checked Twitter to see how many status updates would follow and, sure enough, there they were.

But what's going to happen after the LHC really does start colliding things? In the spirit of the site to check to see if Abe Vigoda is still alive, there is one that now checks on the status of planet earth. Though that seems a little old school - we've been checking on Abe since Web 1.0 days.

However, checking status may not be feasible if everyone is gone, so the day before the collisions start, I think I'll load up Leon's Gratis Status facebook app with half "the earth is gone", and half "the earth has survived", and roll the dice. If nobody is left to observe, maybe they'll both come true!

Next up: what is the sound of two hadrons colliding?

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I love it when my anecdotal observations get a dose of validation. In April of 2006 I blogged about how cell-phone-driving-safety studies dealt only with the distraction they cause drivers, and not the effects of drivers slowing down the whole flow of traffic while on the phone.

A University of Utah study released this week confirms just that:

"At the end of the day, the average person's commute is longer because of that person who is on the cell phone right in front of them," says University of Utah psychology Professor Dave Strayer, leader of the research team. "That SOB on the cell phone is slowing you down and making you late."

As a bonus, my observation that every cable in my house ultimately gets tangled beyond recognition with every other cable has been validated by researchers at the University of California at San Diego who have proposed a simplified model for knot formation. I don't think I could tangle my cables so badly if I deliberately tried to; fortunately I don't have to.