Go play more Half Life. :pac

I don't need to, I was in enough butt-numbing lecture halls but you don't see me yapping my theories about the end of existence.

I mean, Half Life is a great game. Seriously.

I had to watch my ex play it for hours on end, I know.

Your ex sounds like a dick

He is. After the divorce about five different people sent me emails called "your wedding picture" and when I opened it, it was jabba and princess leia.

Jabba the hutt isn't actually male (or female) so they might've been insulting you not him. Did he look like Carrie Fisher at all?:/

If you saw an actual photo of him, you'd see where they were coming from. I won't post it here because the end of the relationship was ugly and involved much litigation and I don't feel like giving my lawyer more money right now.

The only thing I don't hate about the Half Life universe is Episode 2, and that's 5 minutes long.

Portal, too, if that counts, but same problem.

Also, I understand that they're hitting two things together really, really fast so they can see what happens, and there's a chance it'll blow up the entire universe. That's about it.

What will I do with my Recliner Degree then?

I was waiting for a Hawking joke, someone having him in a recliner with wheels,and no one did :(

I read your followup, and know you were speaking somewhat tongue in cheek, but will take the statement seriously for my response. :\

I majored in Physics in College, and one of my favorite subjects was Quantum Theory and subatomic physics. Sadly, I've forgotten much of what I once knew (early onset Alzheimer's) and I don't claim to be able to hold a night-light to Mr. Pace, let alone Professor Hawking. This being said, I will say that I'm enjoying the hysteria surrounding the great "on-turning" of the LHC. Truthfully, anything created within the huge torus will most likely have a maximum lifetime measured in microseconds, if not nanoseconds. This, by the way, is an eternity for a physicist, but is a pretty short timespan for the rest of us.

In any event, the particle physicists and theoreticians running experiments at the LHC will be learning a great deal about things that I used to understand, but now only am dimly aware. :(

Col. Flagg: you're exempt on the grounds of medical professionalism because I've been through the same curriculium, except mine was zoology.

I haven't been following any of the hysteria, am I correct in assuming that the scientific community has no worries about this?

I hold a degree and armchair physics, am a licensed backseat driver, and also play Monday morning quarterback.

Yep.

:lol

:notfunny

A man goes to the doctor and says, "Doc, I feel depressed. Life seems harsh and cruel." The doctor replies, "The treatment is simple. The great clown, Pagliacci, is in town tonight. You should go see him. It will pick you up." The man bursts into tears and tells the doctor, "But doctor, I am Pagliacci..."

If Pagliacci had been properly medicated, much savagery could have been avoided.

So a doctor tells his patient, "I have good news and bad news for you. I will give you the bad news first: you're going to die very slowly over the next two months before you meet a miserable and painful end." Totally aghast, the patient weakly mumbles out in a flicker of hope, "what GOOD news could there possibly be?" To that, the doctor pointed you a voluptuous young woman and said, "see that intern over there? We fuck twice a week."

Anyways, I've been talking A LOT about this subject with people in recent months because the LHC is something I've been excited about (in non-eschatalogical lights, honestly) since 2001 or so. I used to read Brian Greene-type lay introductions to HIGH PHYSICS, but I readily admit that I don't have the requisite PhD(s) to have a legitimate voice except in certain areas where I can take an aesthetic preference to something. For instance, I concede that most people with a better understanding of the material opt for the Copenhagen or Many-Worlds interpretations, but I still prefer to go more along the lines of any of the hidden variable theories.

To be honest, coming to a CLASSROOM understanding of Relativity Theory and brief academic forays into particle physics gives me a way to easily imagine a black hole being formed in a particle accelerator... but it's not really the same way that I tend to hear others talk about it. In short, I take the subject to reduce to the fact that any object accelerated to ultra-high speeds would eventually acquire such a density that its gravitational escape velocity would equal c, and technically from there it could be manipulated to act as a conventional black hole. What i see in the news talks more about black holes being formed from anomaly events resulting from specific collisions between separate particles.

In any case, the physics community at large is of the opinion that Hawking Radiation would thoroughly absolve any man-made black hole from the possibility of destroying the earth. I've honestly never liked the actual approach with which Hawking Radiation takes its foundation, but people more educated than I am are very convinced that it happens. Hence, the hilarious thing is that this puts the physics community in the awkward position of telling the world, "According to these equations, the odds of a black hole created in an accelerator destroying the Earth are on the scale of one in a billion trillion. Right now we're fairly sure that these equations are accurate."

In my junior year of college, I attended a lecture given by Velojia Tokarevsky (sp?), who later went on to become the head of Nuclear Power Oversight in the (then) Soviet Union. This lecture, incidentally, occurred about 6 months after the accident at Three Mile Island. In it, he presented some factual data and some questionable assumptions (estimating the chance of a catastrophic nuclear accident to be equivalent to the earth being struck by a meteorite causing similar catastrophic damage), culminating in his final pronouncement that nuclear power was safe.

Of course, on his watch in the USSR, a little thing called Chernobyl happened.

The problem in making ridiculous estimates like "one in a billion trillion" is that no one thinks about what happens if that "one" actually hits - Poof. The gun goes off, and the cat is dead. Or in this case, the earth.

Admittedly HL2 EP2 and portal needed to be longer, but EP2 was easily my favorite. Except those damn hunters always made me their bitches. If you didn't kill them fast enough, about five MORE always showed up for me. :P

:gaming perhaps?