Joe Biden is an idiot Part 1

If you didn’t already know it, Joe Biden reminds us all how dumb he is in this video at a campaign event in Columbia, Missouri. Irregular Joe commend state senator Chuck Graham for showing up to listen to his boring speach by saying “Uh, uh, Chuck Graham, state senator, is here.  Stand up, Chuck, let ‘em see you. “. Problem is Senator Graham is wheelchair bound.

LHC to go online tomorrow.

The Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to go online tomorrow morning. Probably the most ambitious, expensive, and dangerous physics experiment of all time. The collider will speed protons to 99.9999991% the speed of light through a 27km tunnel under Switzerland and France before colliding them in the ATLAS detector at CERN in hopes of detecting theorized particles like the Higgs boson. A particle that is theorized to be everywhere but so small in its effect that it has yet to be detected. The accelerator is theorized to enhance its effect by up to 4 times to a level where it can be detected, if it exists at all. Stephen Hawking has bet that not only will the researchers at CERN not detect the particle but instead it will clear the slate on everything science has previosly believed about quantum physics. SInce modern quantum theory hinges on the existience of undetected phantom particles like the Higgs boson, strangelets, and all sorts of other crazy tiny things to try to make their theories hold up.

Large Hadrn Collider @ CERN

As always with any ridiculously extravagant and expensive scientific endeavor the question of practical application always comes up and as always when the geeks should defer to the PR people instead they open up and let us all know just how crazy and out of touch they actually are. So what is the big idea, practical application of something like the LHC? We’ll have a better understanding of gravity manipulation and pave the way for Star Trek style tractor beams. Gee, can’t count how many times I needed one of those.

Lastly, there seems to be a growing concern that the whole experiment might accidentally swallow up the planet by creating micro sized black holes. Rest easy, the researchers have said,

“It most certainly is “capable” of producing mini black holes. But we aren’t talking about anything even visible. These would be microns across, and the Hawking radiation output would indeed cause them to evaporate long before they could absorb anything. But, at that size, they wouldn’t absorb anything anyways. Their event horizon is just too small. This won’t be creating a tear in our space-time, or some massive black hole that will swallow us. It will simply smash apart protons into their baser particles and hopefully expose a glimpse into why matter has mass.”

So they are certain that even though its highly likely to generate black holes, they won’t be large enough to grow, but they have absolutely no idea what types of particles it will create. I guess its easy for them to say that because if they are wrong no one will ever know. Well, if they are wrong, it figures that the French were behind the most useless, extravagant, expensive , and Boring way bring about the end of the world.

Juliana wanted to go for a ride

Juliana wanted to go along when I took the truck back to the shop. She fell asleep right away

Google Chrome? Great so why is it blue/white?

So I downloaded and installed google chrome as soon as it was released, since you don’t need to know somebody cool to get Chrome like when Gmail was released. Why, well its not because I’m unhappy with my current browser, Firefox 3; any time a new browser comes down the pipe, I always get it right away to make sure it doesnt break any of my web software out in the wild. I was pretty certain it wouldn’t considering Google pretty much rebranded the Apple webkit rendering engine for Safari. Of course, everythign loaded just fine and worked as expected and ran pretty fine in tests, again because Chrome is essentially Apple webkit but I quickly noticed all of the flaws in this new celebrity browser.

First, there is no distinction between the address bar and the search box and the address bar is enabled with dns preloading and Google suggest. This alone is enough for me to not use Chrome. I’m not a privacy nut by any means but even I have major reservations about every character I type into my address bar being filtered through a Google farm somewhere. So my first inclination was to go into the options and disable this ‘feature’ which leads me to my second complaint.

There are very few options to enable/disable within Chrome. I expected that when I clicked the Under the Hood tab I would have a plethera of options to enable, disable features within the browser. I was wrong. You can send crash info to google, disable dns prefetching, configure a proxy, use SSL 2.0, and enable a phishing filter. Not too much under the hood I guess.

My third issue is more of design, I thought this was Google Chrome, so why is the color scheme blue and white. Sure it keeps consistent with GMail and Google Docs but why call it Chrome when its blue. I guess Google Blue wasnt flashy enough for the marketing geeks over at Google. I’m also kindof bothered by all the slanty tabs and angles but thats not too big of a deal to get over.

So other than being comparably fast, the only thing I like about this browser is the private browsing (incognito) feature but Firefox and even IE have this now so there isn’t much draw for me to use Google Chrome as a daily browser. Luckily, I can be assured that by testing in Safari, I won’t have to waste my time opening Chrome for any testing. That is until they tear up webkit, it is after all open sourced.