Without a Traceroute

So the Amsterdam hackers have proven to be both wily and elusive. In email correspondence, they said that they’d be at their squatted hacklab anytime from 6 pm to midnight tonight. I went on the later end because I figured things would be more active (and because it takes a fairly complicated series of busses, trains and trams to get from where I’m staying in Utrecht to their place in A-dam), so I arrived around 10:15. After much fruitless ringing of bells and knocking of doors, another guy who lives at the squat arrived home and informed me that those I sought had all gone to this digital art gallery/exhibition, and gave me a flyer for the place.
I took another tram ride and tracked down the art gallery…just as they were closing up! A helpful art patron informed me that I’d missed the SLUG hackers by “just maybe 10 minutes,” and that he thought they were going back to their place. So I went back there, again. Right now, I’m sitting on the stoop in front of their building (I already tried the bell again), borrowing an open wireless connection to post this (thank you, essid J.C.). I’m going to give this 10 more minutes and then get out of here.

But after chasing these people all over Amsterdam for an hour and a half, I do have to ask, are they hackers…or ninjas?

UPDATE: I took the train back to Utrecht, but managed to miss the last bus out to my couchsurfing host’s place by 5 minutes (my timing is effing terrible), so I wound up staying in a crappy hostel and paying 21 euro for the privilege. I guess it beats sleeping at the train station. Oh, and all my clothes are at my host’s place. Hooray sleeping in your clothes. Anyway, yesterday sucked.

CERN’s new high-energy particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), went live yesterday. The $10 billion, 17-mile long particle accelerator has been 15 years in the making. Obviously, this is a major achievement for particle physics, and represents a serious commitment to “Big Science” and pure research. However, looking at the media coverage of the Large Hadron Collider, you would think that the only important question to be answered is whether the LHC will cause the end of the world.

There are at least two or three ways that the particle accelerator could maybe bring about the end of all life on earth. It might create a black hole that swallows up the earth, it could create strangelets, that would transform any regular matter into strange matter. It could create vacuum bubbles, or magnetic monopoles, with similar universe-destroying potential.

My last couchsurfing host was a high school physics teacher (his name is Otto Kool, so he’s literally Mr. Kool to his students), and he joked rather darkly that if the LHC wiped out humanity, it would seem “a fitting end to the human endeavor,” to destroy everything in an attempt to understand everything. Others were less sanguine about the prospect of ending all everything everywhere, at least two separate lawsuits were filed in attempt to stop scientists from switching the thing on. Fifty-four percent of respondents to an online AOL survey said that operating the LHC was “not worth the risk,” and of course AOL users are well-known for their expertise in the risks and rewards of high-energy particle physics.

(more…)