We are all Going to Die

Being at work an hour early makes me want to kick puppies, blog, and generally make others suffer with me. Good thing the end of the world is near.

The Large Hardon Collider (insert graphic joke set up here) has officially been turned on (punchline).

According to the BBC, everyone is very optimistic and things seem to be going on well enough so far. So what does this doomsday contraption do? send particles at each other so freaking fast that they...well...nobody knows exactly what happens when particles smash into each other at that speed.

"We will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang. That is amazing, that really is fantastic."

The LHC should answer one very simple question: What is mass?

"We know the answer will be found at the LHC," said Jim Virdee, a particle physicist at Imperial College London.

The currently favoured model involves a particle called the Higgs boson - dubbed the "God Particle". According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs.

We're looking for "the answer" and "God." And we're looking for them on the French-Swiss border.
Ok. So this is pretty much my idea of what is happening right now:

Curtain Rises
Enter stage right: Julie Andrews and Trapp family fresh faced and rosy cheeked out of the alps, singing about figs.

Enter stage left: Patrick "Professor Xavier" Stewart on his floating handicap steed of steel, singing about Cerebro.

The two run/float quickly up the hill, unabashedly prancing about in such a careless manner that they collide! OH NO.

Enter stage somewhere: A mouse and the number 42.

Curtain Falls
The end. (quite literally- the end of everything)
+ =

NERDING: keeping climate change super cool

The origin of the common idiom, "The sky's the limit," is thought to come from Don Quixote. But I don't even think that OG D.Quix would be able to fathom the absurdly cool applicability of his statement to one of today's most high profile advancements in green architecture.



Looking at the current rate of expansion and population increase of us human-beans, it is estimated that by the year 2050, 80 percent of people, of which there will be 3 billion more, will live in urban centers. To match this demand for food while the land to grow it on becomes more scarce, it has been proposed that we mimic our urban progress by building farms up. Not only will this high-density solution provide sufficient space to supply a growing need, it will also allow for crops to be produced in a controlled environment at the source of demand, maximizing production while renewing and reusing resources, minimizing the cost of transport, and allowing for our natural spaces previously used for agriculture to recuperate.


The Vertical Farm was conceived by Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia in 1999, and has grown from an imaginative but inconceivable solution, to a distinct developmental possibility. It's all over the webernets. Check it out.