The Large Hadron Collider (the latest particle accelerator at CERN) will be switched on this Wednesday and might destroy the world (read the full risk assessment here or a summary here). If it doesn’t, I wonder whether we’ll feel the UK’s £500m investment was worth it.

In the 90s particle physicists were racing to detect the top quark so that we could confirm that part of our current best model of small things. They were successful in 1995 and won themselves a Nobel prize but apart from that I can’t name any real benefit to humanity that has come from proving that the top quark does indeed exist. I’m all for trying to understand why our universe is the way it is but I can’t help feeling the money could be better spent.

Then again, the US military’s budget for 2007 was about £220 billion (that’s over £400,000 a minute, by the way) so maybe spending £500m on doing some (possibly) harmless science isn’t so bad.

Also in today’s news: Save the world, eat less cow – UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.

Google Inc will hit its 10th birthday over the weekend.

As Google has climbed to its current dominant position, many have voiced concerns about just how much personal and identifiable information Google is able to collect about each one of us. It’s hard to argue that Google’s mission to organise the world’s information and the efficiency with which their search engine answers our most obscure questions are inherently bad for humanity. The concern is whether one company/entity should own and control so much information and whether that will one day lead to them owning and controlling us.

Two thoughts:

1. Who else should own/look after all this information if not Google? In an opinion poll of “Who do you trust more?” I can imagine Google coming above, for example, the US government (or indeed the UK government with it’s patchy record on keeping data secure).
   At least, as a business, Google’s motives are fairly clear – make more money.
2. If Google have all this information, isn’t it likely that other entities have it too. It’s true that Google have a lot of money but I’m sure the governments of the world have more and aren’t ignoring the goldmine of information that’s out there on the web (particularly the bits that Google won’t show you where the terrorists live).

Of course there are those conspiracy theorists that say Google and the government are one and the same!

“She sued the Department of the Interior for classifying polar bears as an endangered species”

Read more about her environmental non-credentials at New Scientist here…

“Money doesn’t buy you happiness, it just buys you a more expensive set of problems.”

So says Marilyn Monroe.

I’d never seen a whole Marilyn Monroe film before but I watched The Seven Year Itch (famous for the scene pictured) a month or two ago and I was surprised to find that it was an old comedy that was actually still funny. In brief it’s about a guy who’s living and working in New York over the summer while his family are staying in the country when Marilyn moves in to the apartment above his. Temptation ensues!

Much of the film is monologues by the tormented man and it was actually his performance that kept my me watching. IMDB tells me that he performed the part 750 times on Broadway before the film was made and that he won the Tony (Oscars of theatre) award for his performance so I guess that’s why it stood out – he’d had a lot of time to perfect it.

I have a tendency to dismiss any film made before 1970 (not that I’ve seen many good films from the 70s, just that, in my mind, all films before that are war films or song and dance films with no story).

I’m trying out WordPress. So far I like it!