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 […]
Entries from September 11th, 2008
So long and thanks for all the fish
September 11th, 2008 · No Comments · Netherlands, Science, Travel
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Hackers…or ninjas?
September 11th, 2008 · 2 Comments · Hacker culture, Netherlands
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, […]
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An Observation
September 12th, 2008 · 2 Comments · Technology
I’ve noticed that for most people in my age and socioeconomic cohort (basically, upper-middle-class college kids and early-20-somethings) their laptop is easily their most treasured possession. I imagine it occupies the place held by the stereo for kids coming of age in earlier generations. When I was in college, the first thing everyone did when […]
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The top 10 reasons lists on websites suck
September 12th, 2008 · 3 Comments · Shameless link-bait
They’re lazy. Formatting a blog post as a list is a really cheap way organize it. It spares the author from having to actually put their thoughts together in a logical, coherent manner because the list automatically imposes an organizational structure on the post. You don’t have to worry about making one idea flow smoothly […]
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I need to get out of here
September 13th, 2008 · No Comments · Netherlands, Travel
Don’t get me wrong, the Netherlands is awesome, but it’s cold, grey, rainy and depressing here. I’m really looking forward to going someplace with sun. Furthermore, I feel like I’ve been here too long. I’ve gotten to know Utrecht well enough that I can find my way around without a map (at least in the […]
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