Six more months!

No, this isn't a post about the remaining tenure of George W. Bush (which is actually less than 3 months). Besides, why would you ever want "W" to leave office? That guy is hilarious! I guarantee you that neither McCain nor Obama will be half the comedian that our current president is.

No, this post is actually about a fairly common topic on this blog: The Large Hadron Collider. If you haven't been reading this blog or the news very much, I'll sum up the LHC for you in one brief sentence:

The LHC is a big, scary atom smasher in Europe that's going to kill you.

Now, the LHC should be well on its way to colliding protons, lead ions, babies, kittens, and the like head-on (apply directly to the forehead) at near-light speeds, smashing them to pieces. Unfortunately (or fortunately for those of you who don't want the world to be destroyed), a transformer (robot in disguise) failed and some wires melted. Then some helium leaked out, making the scientists' voices too high for them to understand each other. And now, winter's coming and people don't really feel like fixing the LHC now because it's getting too cold outside and they're going to start showing holiday specials like the claymation version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" on TV soon. As a result of all these problems, the startup of the collider has been delayed until Spring 2009.

So what does this mean for you, Joe Sixpack? Simple - it means you just got six extra months to live. This may pose a dilemma for those of you who have already accepted your fate as a black hole's mid-morning snack and are currently lying on the floor of your parents' living room in the fetal position waiting to meet your doom. That dilemma is: Now that I have six more months to live, what the hell do I do?

As with all other problems you face in your life, "Buffalo This" is here with some suggestions to help you out. Here they are:

1) Take up a charitable cause
There is no more honorable use of your pre-apocalyptic time than working to make life more enjoyable for disadvantaged people between now and the time their very molecules are ripped apart by a black hole.

A few examples of major problems that you can do something about right now are:
-Starving children in Africa
-Obese children in the U.S.
-People failing to clear unused time off the microwave after cooking their food
-Unfortunate investment bankers who have recently had to trade down to smaller yachts
-Human rights violations in the Middle East
-France
-People talking during other people's backswings on the golf course
-Lack of access to education in poor neighborhoods
-Paris Hilton
-People eating all of your favorite type of candy bar out of the variety pack, leaving only the not-as-good ones
-Homes needing rebuilding in areas hit by natural disasters
-The fact that humanity does not know how to stop black holes from expanding

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and start saving the world before there's no world to save!

2) Save yourself

Not exactly the charitable type? Then screw those starving kids in Somalia - just try to save yourself! How exactly do you save yourself from a black hole, you may ask? Easy - you get the hell away from it as fast as possible. Now that you have six more months, you may want to consider building a spaceship that will do just that. Just build a compartment with at least a few years' supply of oxygen, food (Easy Mac or Cup o' Noodles will work), and water, strap a big-ass engine to it, add fuel, then light it, jump in, and let it blast you off into space in whatever direction you think is most likely to have a planet you can live on (try Alpha Centauri). The rest will take care of itself. Hey, it's better than being sucked into a black hole, isn't it?

3) Build ships in a bottle

Do it while you still can! When you learn that a black hole is waiting to spaghettify you, you will be too mentally distraught to have the dexterity you'll need to build that little ship. Why enjoy the last few months or years with family and friends when you can do something really useful with your time? People of course will be amazed at your craftsmanship, saying things like, "No way! How in the world did you ever get that ship into that bottle? That's impossible! Come on, tell me!" You must never reveal your secret, however. That way, people will spend their remaining time wondering how you did it, rather than worrying about their impending fate. Think of it this way: if you were falling into a black hole, would you rather be screaming, "AAAAAH!!! I'm falling into a black hole! Oh no, it's starting to spaghettify me!!! AAAAAAAH!!!" or, "How did that guy get that darned ship into that bottle? If I come out of this alive I absolutely must figure that out."

4) Attempt to do everything listed in Tim McGraw's song "Live Like You Were Dying"
This song is a handy guide to all the things you should do before being spaghettified by a black hole (or dying in any other manner). Some examples are the following:

• Skydiving
• Rocky Mountain climbing (Rocky Mountains, NOT the Alps or the Himalayas)
• 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu (this is the hardest one - you must both verify the bull's name and keep a stopwatch with you to make sure you fall off after exactly 2.7 seconds, then get out of the way before the bull gores you)
  
• Fishing with your dad exactly three times the year before the black hole kills him (and you)
  
• Speak sweeter
• Give forgiveness you've been denying (maybe to Henry Paulson for the bailout or to Ryan Reynolds for marrying Scarlett Johansson before you were able to make your move and for failing to participate in the sequel to "Van Wilder")
  
• Read "the good book" (any good book will do - you may want to try The Great Gatsby as it is relatively short and manageable)
• Watch an eagle as it is flying
  

One thing Tim forgot to include, however, is "two chicks at the same time." That is an essential element that should be on everyone's bucket list (women included).

5) Panic

If crazy shit is going on and you don't know what to do, panicking is always a reliable fallback option. The tricky part here is knowing when to start panicking. If you start panicking too early, people are going to think you're crazy. If you start too late, on the other hand, people are going to criticize you as a bandwagon-jumper.

The best advice I can give you here is to find the coolest, most stylish and with-it person you know, then wait til he or she starts panicking. When this happens, take to the streets and run around maniacally while throwing your arms in the air and screaming like a banshee. Everyone else will most likely follow your lead soon after.

The LHC: Famous last words

All right.  We've established that there's a decent chance that the Large Hadron Collider is going to destroy our planet in these four posts:

• Bummed about the LHC? Try some THC.


• The LHC might not kill us after all!


• Sucker bet


• Particle colliders give me a "large hadron"

So, in the not too unlikely possibility that the human race is about to be permanently obliterated from the universe, are there any last words that we want to say before we go?  There damn well should be.  Before we begin the collisions, I suggest we send a message to the cosmos saying something like:

We're about to conduct a physics experiment that (brief description of what the LHC does).  It might kill us, so if you don't hear from us again, then that's probably what happened.  Peace out, homies - catch you on the flipside!

This message will serve as a warning to alien civilizations that are debating and blogging about whether they should run their own LHCs.  Why should we care whether aliens live or die?  Because we should care about the welfare of all living things, you selfish prick.  We're not so different, us and them.  Sure, they might want to kill us - I mean in pretty much every movie involving aliens, that's what they're trying to do.  We may want revenge for what they tried to do to Will Smith and company in "Independence Day."  But we really can't blame them, because the truth is that we also want to kill us (why else would we build the LHC?).  On top of this, we and the aliens do have common enemies, such as entropy, black holes, and France.  Entropy in particular is a real bitch that is strongly abhorred by all lifeforms.  F@%# YOU, ENTROPY!

Now you may be thinking, "Wait a minute, hotshot.  Sending such a message to aliens might reveal not only that we exist, but also where we are in space and the fact that our technology is pretty unsophisticated.  Aren't we basically inviting them to bring their ships over and blast us to kingdom come?"  Well yes and no.  By that I mean yes, but they might choose not to come and kill us because a) it would be a waste of their time, and b) they appreciate the thoughtful gesture.  Besides, we've already been sending "come and kill us" messages to outer space for a long time.  For example, the Arecibo Message of 1974 (see left) was basically a bunch of dots that translated to something like, "Hey guys.  This is the human race from planet Earth speaking.  Feel free to come over and cornhole us whenever you get a chance.  Here's some other information that will make killing us easier for you, like our size, our chemical makeup, and our location.  See ya!"

Now let's say we smash some stuff in the LHC, and lo and behold, we notice that a black hole has begun eating away at the center of the planet en route to killing every living human being, dog, cat, octopus, praying mantis, bonsai tree, Venus flytrap, mushroom, ale yeast, dinoflagellate, amoeba, virus, you name it.  At this point it is absolutely crucial that we alert anyone who might be listening of our impending fate.  At this point we need to send something that can really catch someone's attention, like a catchy tune.  My recommendation is Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel's "White lines (Don't don't do it)."  This incredibly persuasive little jingle describes in detail the great high you can get from cocaine and then tells you "d-d-d-d-don't d-d-don't do it!"  The moral of this song is fairly tough to figure out, but what I took away from it was that snorting coke will give you a terrible stuttering problem.

So in case you were wondering why I'm not a coke addict, there's your answer.

If that doesn't stop ET from building its own black hole machine, I don't know what will.  Of course, when we send this message out to the cosmos, we must make sure to remember to substitute "Large Hadron Collider" for all cocaine references.  Otherwise, the aliens are seriously going to wonder what kind of weird civilization thought it was that important to broadcast anti-drug messages to everyone in a 500 light year radius.

Particle colliders give me a "large hadron"

So, if you haven't checked your calendar recently, today is September 10, which means that at 7:32 Greenwich Mean Time, they switched on the ol' LHC, which if you haven't religiously followed this blog or read particle physics journals over the last few months (and if you haven't, come on, what's wrong with you?) stands for the Large Hadron Collider. That means this huge atom smasher has now begun firing up for its first attempts to destroy the earth find out what matter is made of.

So, what is it, you may ask?

Well, "it" is a gender-neutral pronoun used in the English language to refer to a previously specified object - but that's not important right now. Let's stay on topic.

The Large Hadron Collider, on the other hand, is a few things:

1) A 17-mile-diameter series of tubes, a lot like the internet, except it's used to smash tiny atoms and subatomic particles together at relativistic (near-light) speeds.

2) The name of a porn video I saw a long time ago, I think.  It "had Ron" Jeremy in it (zing!).  Oh wait...no...that was "Large Hardon Collider."

3) Something that is fairly likely to destroy the world, and even has a small probability of destroying the entire universe. Oh, yeaahh!

Below are a couple of photos of this bad boy.  On the left is an aerial shot of the border between France and Switzerland where the big ring is located.  On the right is the belly of the beast itself: a big ol' tube lined with supercooled superconducting magnets used to accelerate protons, lead ions, and the like to ridiculous speeds.

Eventually, this huge device will be used to cause "large hadrons," which are actually extremely small, to collide at near light speed.  When these collide, the hadrons should break apart, releasing particles, energy, and other things that the LHC will try to detect.  One of the main theories physicists are aiming to prove is string theory: the idea that matter, light, gravity, and everything else is composed of subatomic strings that vibrate in 11 dimensions.  Duh!  Do we really need an experiment to tell us that?  What else could all that stuff be composed of other than 11th dimension vibrating strings, Captain Obvious?

Anyway, when the collisions start happening, the scene at the LHC might look something like this:

What will the LHC find?  Likely candidates include the Higgs boson (which may or may not be the reason matter has mass), supersymmetry (which would give us insight into the validity of many quantum theories), dark matter, micro black holes, new subatomic particles, and other things nobody guessed.  Of course, despite all the theories, nobody really knows exactly what will come out of the LHC.  For all we know, it might even produce some of this crazy stuff.

The ridiculous thing is that a lot of scientists actually believe the LHC could produce micro black holes.  This is no reason to worry however, they say, because these black holes will theoretically evaporate via Hawking radiation before they can grow to any considerable size.  Theoretically.

Otherwise, something like the following might play out...

Scientist 1: "Oh no!  It's a black hole!"
Scientist 2: "Not to worry. It's only a micro black hole. It's not stable and will evaporate in less than a second. Even if it doesn't evaporate, it will escape the earth's gravity. Even if it doesn't escape the earth's gravity, it will take millions of years to accrete enough matter to kill us.  M'kay?"

Scientist 1: "Got it.  Let's keep smashing hadrons."

Scientist 1: "Oh no! The black hole got bigger!  It's going to kill us all!"
Scientist 2: "Whoopsy daisy! Looks like I put a decimal point in the wrong place or something.   I was hopped up on a bunch of Vicodin for my bad back the week I came up with those formulas.  My bad!"
Scientist 1: "I'm going to kill you!"
Scientist 2: "No, the black hole is going to kill me, and it's also going to kill you. Sorry about that, chief!"

Scientist 1: "Stop calling me 'chief,' guy!"

Scientist 2: "Stop calling me 'guy,' chief!"
(black hole consumes the entire planet)

Alien 1: "Awesome! The poor bastards never saw it coming!"
Alien 2: "Come on, dude. That ended exactly the same way as 'Large Hadron Collider 16: Planet Gzyxqiofn of the Crab Nebula.' So unoriginal. This series is really starting to circle the drain."

Alien 1: "Well, so much for Earth.  I say good riddance - that place was a real dump.  I'm going to miss 'Buffalo This' though."

Alien 2: "I'm not. That guy was an idiot. Hey, let's get out of here before that black hole spaghettifies us."

Alien 1: "Oh yeah, good idea."

Now I've already heard people say things today along the lines of, "Phew, we're still here!  Looks like there was no reason to worry about the LHC after all!"  Not so fast, Einstein.  It wasn't simply turning on the machine that was supposed to destroy the earth.  They haven't even started colliding particles yet and won't begin doing so for at least a few weeks.  Even then, they won't be using the full power of the machine; the collisions will get increasingly powerful through the rest of 2008 and into 2009.  Every time the power is ramped up, we enter a new and uncharted realm of particle collisions with uncertain consequences.  In the case of a strangelet disaster or vacuum metastability event, we'll find out that something has gone wrong immediately, and by "find out that something has gone wrong," I really mean "all die."  In the case of a stable micro black hole that gradually eats away at the earth, we may not know about it for months, years, or much longer.  So it could be a long, long time before we conclusively know the answer to the big question: Will the LHC kill us all?  If it's any comfort to you, I've got $500 that says it doesn't.

Welcome to the jungle.

Sucker bet

Being one of the world's foremost celebrities and most brilliant and revolutionary scientific minds, I decided to follow in the footsteps of other great celebrities/thinkers out there (Warren Buffett, Ted Danson, Brian Eno, Freeman Dyson, Ray Kurzweil, etc) and place a bet on longbets.org.

Here is the bet:

As you can see, I win if the Large Hadron Collider does not destroy Earth, and my opponent, Joe Keane, wins if it does. Now of course you're probably thinking, "Wait a minute! You said the LHC probably would destroy this planet!" - and you would be right. However, there is one factor you probably haven't considered: if he wins the bet, it's not going to matter because chances are none of us will be alive anymore! Yes, I am a brilliant master of trickery who makes buffaloing the unbuffaloable look like child's play.

At first I thought this guy was "Joe Keane" (get it - "joking") with this bet, but $500 says he isn't. So I really hope the world doesn't get destroyed, because I could really use that $500 to pay down the loan on my Mazda 3!

Now I should clarify one thing: no matter who wins the bet, both of us have to contribute $500 to the charity of the winner, so neither of us stands to profit from this wager, especially not the other guy, since money won't really matter much after the entire earth has been sucked into a black hole.

So in the unlikely event that the world does still exist in 2018, $1000 will go to Save the Children thanks to my noble, selfless, heroic efforts. Oh, stop it, stop it. Most charitable person in the world? No, no, really, stop it. What? Nobel Peace Prize? No, there's no way I...well, maybe. All right, I admit, I'm basically the reincarnation of Gandhi - except much more humble.

Click here to see the actual bet on the website. No, this is not a publicity stunt. Oh, who am I kidding - everything I do is a publicity stunt.

Taking the red pill

Hey there, chief. Guess who's back again with another revelation that's going to change the way you look at the world...or shall I say "world." I have some interesting news that you might be interested to know: you are not real. Nobody is. This is all just a big computer simulation, just like "The Matrix." Seriously.
In case you were too lazy to click on the link in the first paragraph, let me summarize Dr. Nick Bostrom's fascinating scientific paper for you in three words: you are fake. You're just an artificial brain in an artificial world, a mess of circuits somewhere in some mega-supercomputer controlled by future humans, aliens, or machines that are going take over the world after Arnold Schwarzenegger fails to save John Connor. I am fake too, but the difference between you and me is that I make this look good. Everything you see is fake: your mom, the Tooth Fairy, pro wrestling, that stripper's boobs, the $5 Gucci shades you bought off that bum in D.C., you name it. Fake, fake, fake. To be fair though, it is not totally certain that we are living in a simulation. Here are the three possibilities:

1) We (humans) are about to bite the dust, probably at the hands of the Large Hadron Collider.

2) We are never going to run any simulations of past humans or weird hypothetical worlds, and neither will any aliens or machines in the entire universe or any other universe, ever.

3) Everything we know is a pack of LIES and we're really living in a simulation!

Let me explore these three possibilities, which are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, and examine what the chances of each are:
1) True, the LHC probably will destroy the world. However I feel like the good false vacuum scenario is a little more likely than the rest of them. So let's call it a 40% chance that the LHC destroys the world and also a 5% chance that something else does (probably something related to Al Gore, like global warming or Al eating so much food that there is none left for the rest of us and we all starve). 45% overall.
2) Um...no. Simulations of past worlds or fake worlds are going to be considered way too awesome to pass up by human, alien, or computer nerds of the future. Furthermore, any civilizations that run one simulation will almost definitely choose to run a metric shitload of them, so the vast majority of worlds out there will be simulated ones. So the chances are very high that we are in one. So let's call the chances of the possibility that nobody decides to run any simulations 5%.
3) This is all a simulation and you are not real. 50% chance.

Let me repeat what I just said in layman's terms: there is a 95% chance that we are either not real or we're all about to die. Yes. It's an indisputable fact. Stop crying and get over it, crybaby.

Could people in the future run such a simulation? Yes, obviously. If you don't believe that we will have the technology to do this kind of thing within 100 years from now, then please get back to your Amish community before Brother Jebediah finds out you're surfing the 'net instead of building that barn, Ezekiel.

Why would they run these simulations? Here are my top five reasons (there are many more):
5) To play fantasy fantasy baseball with the fantasy baseball teams of the simulated world.
4) To make a comedy show out of the stupidest things people have ever done (yes, it will include that time you got shroomed up and jumped in the tiger cage).
3) To check out naked chicks in the shower (obviously).
2) To compensate for the fact that they feel inadequate because of the fact that they're not real and just living in a stupid simulation by lording over some other simulation within a simulation.
1) To see if any of the simulated people can come up with any new and exciting additions to the buffalo phenomenon.

I'm really glad the creator of this simulation chose to make me a huge celebrity with millions of adoring fans. I mean, he could have just as easily made me some loser that writes a stupid blog that nobody reads. Whew - glad that didn't happen!

Bummed to find out that you're nothing more than some nerd from the future's Second Life character? Don't be! The good part about the world being fake is that you can do whatever you want with no REAL consequences! Of course certain things might get you thrown into a simulated jail where you'll be simulated cornholed in the simulated shower by a simulated 350 pound tattoo-covered Hell's Angel named Bubba. But at least it's not really happening, right?

So yeah...tough break there, Keanu. I feel for you, champ. The silver lining in all this though is that you still have this awesome simulated blog to read. All right!

Respect for the cheese hogs

It is extremely important in this day and age to always make sure to use the correct term when describing a type of human being. For example, if you see a guy in a wheelchair, the correct term to refer to that person is "alternatively advantaged," not "crippled," "handicapped," or "old gimpy-legged Pete over there." This term refers to the fact that while this guy may not be able to keep up with you in a 100 meter sprint, he would probably whoop your sorry able-bodied ass in a "don't move your legs" contest. Similarly, you should never call a white person "cracker," "honkey," "person of the pasty persuasion," or "melanin-challenged," and you should never, ever, under any circumstances, refer to a French - I mean Freedom - person as a "cheese-eating surrender monkey."

That brings me to our next topic: fat people. There are sure are a lot of them these days - what's the deal with that? Oh sorry, my publicist is telling me "fat person" is politically incorrect. What is the correct term? Lardass? No. No stranger to the biscuit tin? Eh...not quite. Cheese hog? Ok, that sounds about right. Cheese hog it is.

But do cheese hogs really deserve all the negative press they get in this country? Maybe all those people out there that are adding more pounds than a British accountant are onto something.

This is how a typical morbidly obese person looks at the world (from best to worst):

1) The rest of the universe (4 x 10^55 lbs or something like that)

2) Me (524 lbs)

3) That skinny little prick over there (147 lbs)
4) Midgets (pretty damn small and terrible at basketball)

So to these people, bigger is better. Here is where one of the disaster scenarios from the Large Hadron Collider can teach us a valuable lesson. What do black holes do? They accrete matter. Are they successful? Hell yes they are - there are a metric shitload of them in the universe and there is absolutely nothing known to man that can stop the bastards or even slow them down. That's a pretty good track record if you ask me. The fact of the "matter" (notice the clever pun) is that all matter in the universe is broken down into two groups: 1) matter that is a part of you, and 2) matter that is a part of everything else. The main point of life is to commandeer as much of the matter out there as possible and make it a part of yourself. The more of that you can do, the further ahead you are in the game, and of course the best way to do that is to get really, really fat.

Now wait a minute, you say, couldn't you work out like crazy and gain the same amount of weight in muscle? The answer is no, moron, you can't. First of all, there are limits on how much muscle you can pack on, and second of all, the very act of working out to increase your muscle mass burns calories, which is the exact opposite of what you're trying to do!

Instead, your best bet is to sit on the couch watching reruns of shows featuring Rosie O'Donnell (for inspiration) while shoveling Doritos from either the a) the bag or b) your chest, directly into your mouth. But picking up the chips still burns calories, so better yet, you could build a robot that moves the chips to your mouth for you, or even better, you could have someone else build a robot that does that and also brings the bags of chips and bottles of Shiner Bock from the cupboard/fridge to you so you don't have to get up. And while you're at it, get yourself a voice activated remote - pushing those buttons gets tiring!

So from now on I propose we refer to fat people by the honorable title of "extremely adept matter accreters"...or if you must, "cheese hogs" is fine too.

The LHC might not kill us after all!

Good news! After crunching the numbers again, it ends up that the probability of us all being killed by the Large Hadron Collider is less than I originally thought! There are a few more very possible scenarios that you need to be aware of:

1) The It's It Scenario
The LHC creates a wormhole, through which beings from the future send back a new and improved It's It bar. It is found to be extremely delicious.

2) The Buffalet Scenario
Similar to the strangelet (strange matter) scenario, except in this case a particle is produced that has crazy quantum properties that allow for the possibility of a non-run-on sentence consisting of only the word "buffalo" 50 times in a row. This "buffalet" particle starts a chain reaction that converts all particles in the solar system to buffalet particles. The buffalo phenomenon becomes even more awe-inspiring and the world is a better place as a result.

3) The Stranger Scenario
Also similar to the strangelet scenario. Basically what happens is that the LHC produces something amazing that unlocks the secret to the universe. The physicist running the machine at the time is so excited about this finding that he bursts into a nearby office unannounced...and walks in on his colleague giving himself the stranger. This moment is so awkward that it causes a wave of awkwardness that sweeps across the planet. We don't die, but things are extremely awkward for the next 100 years or so until the awkwardness evaporates.

4) The Bad False Vacuum Scenario
Ok, this one sort of blows. Some scientists think that we may be living in a "false vacuum" and that a "true vacuum" with lower potential energy exists. The energy of the collisions produced by this particle collider may be enough to overcome the barrier needed to knock us into the "true vacuum" state. A bubble of this new vacuum state expands through the universe at near-light speed, killing everything in its path, including all of us and all other lifeforms in the universe, except maybe cockroaches. Whoops. Sorry, aliens - our bad.

5) The Good False Vacuum Scenario
A bubble of superior vacuum cleaners (probably the Oreck XL21 Titanium Series) sweeps through the entire universe, replacing all the crappy vacuums in its path. Aliens from far-away galaxies thank us for making their floors cleaner than they ever imagined possible.

So if you're keeping score at home, the odds of us all being killed by this thing are now estimated to be only 6 out of 11, or about 54.5%. Still not great, but the fact remains that doing these experiments is inevitable because it is natural human instinct to want to smash stuff into each other and see what happens (hey, that's how you were born!). My advice to you is to not sweat the small stuff, like whether or not you're about to be painfully spaghettified by a black hole or blown to pieces by an expanding vacuum bubble of doom. There are a lot more important things to worry about, such as the relationship status of these two "celebrities" that nobody has ever heard of. Party on, Wayne.

*Thanks to Jon Frank for the original ideas for scenarios #1 and 3.

Bummed about the LHC? Try some THC.

Now that we've covered the extremely fascinating buffalo phenomenon in some detail, I would now like to move on to a somewhat less important issue that I consider to be a slight bummer: there's a chance that this machine CERN is building in Europe is going to cause the entire planet to get sucked into a black hole, or something like that.

I'm talking of course about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The point of this thing is to determine what shit is made of by slamming together large hadrons, which are one of the main basic components of shit, at near light speed. (Clarification: by "shit" I mean stuff in general, not actual fecal matter, although fecal matter is indeed one of the countless types of shit out there.) Hadrons are sub-atomic particles, protons in this case. As for the "large" part, that beats me because something that's smaller than a hydrogen atom seems pretty damn un-large to me. Maybe the next time a girl expresses dissatisfaction with the dimensions of your junk, you can use the LHC to convince her that the item in question is in fact fairly large ("At least it's not subatomic!"). One of the big ticket items they're looking for is the "elusive" Higgs boson, a goofy-ass sounding particle that many scientists theorize gives mass to certain things, including EVERYTHING IN THE F***ING UNIVERSE. If it really is true that we're all nothing more than big walking piles of Higgs bosons, then getting sucked into a black hole may not be such a terrible fate after all. I could not imagine a more depressing revelation.

So when they fire this thing up and start testing, probably sometime between August and October 2008, one of six things is going to happen:

1) A micro black hole is created and it swallows the planet, killing us all.
2) A stable form of strange matter is created and converts the entire solar system into strange matter, killing all of us in the process.
3) A wormhole is created, which may serve as a portal for beings from the future to send something back through time, possibly to kill us all. The wormhole would be microscopic, so the thing they'd send back through it would probably be more like a self-replicating killer nanorobot and less like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

4) Something else crazy happens, killing us all.

5) Nothing happens, so they build a bigger atom-smasher, which kills us all.

6) We find out what shit is made of and unlock a few more of the great secrets of the universe. We live to fight another day.

So out of six possible outcomes, only one leads to an outcome that doesn't involve us all being killed. It doesn't meet Meatloaf's standards (which would be 4 out of 6 in this case), but apparently the scientists at CERN don't consider an 83.3(repeating)% chance of the planet being destroyed enough of a threat to stop them from firing this bad boy up for the off-chance that they might be lucky enough to see a couple of Higgs bosons, the Boson Red Sox, or Boson the clown. Furthermore, something you might find particularly disturbing is the fact that most experts out there believe that micro black holes WILL be created by this thing, but believe that they pose no threat to us because they'll instantly evaporate via Hawking radiation. This theory comes from this one time at band camp when Stephen Hawking left a cup full of black holes on the table and came back a couple of days later only to find that the black holes had vanished into thin air. That story should put your fears to rest - if the black holes evaporated last time then there is no reason to doubt that they will evaporate again.

So we could be on the brink of the end of humanity, which you have to admit would sort of suck. In fact, I would go so far as to rate its bummification potential somewhere between that of the Steelers failing to make the playoffs and DICKipedia refusing to recognize my brilliant contributions to the science of creating a sentence solely out of the word "buffalo." Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it either, so it seems the best thing to do is accept our fate and blaze up a fat blunt while we're waiting for the black hole or nano-Schwarzenegger from the future to put the ultimate smackdown on all of us.