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G and I just returned from a week of hurricane dodging in the Caribbean on my first multi-day cruise on the open seas on something other than a warship designed to reign death and destruction on anything/anywhere on Earth. I’d like to say it was all I’d hoped it would be, but more on that later. As I was looking across the miles of deep blue ocean separating the Lido deck from the horizon, I wondered why all the dolphin were leaving. It dawned on my this morning that we are in the final stages of prep for the proverbial power switch at CERN to get flipped this Wednesday on the Large Hadron Collider. For those that don’t know, the LHC is basically “a gizmo” that uses “a th” to make “bits o’junk” hit each other really hard to make “neat stuff happen”. That is, a gizmo that over 60 nations have contributed 10 billion dollars and buckets of brain cells over the last 14 years to design, develop, and very-soon-now activate. It is believed that only 10% or so of all the schtuff that makes up the universe is represented by matter (you know… beer, whiskey, vaginas, etc.) as we know it. The rest of the non-matter must be something, no? There was a dude named Higgs that came up with a theory that the stuff we can’t see or quantify as matter that define mass must be made of other particles. Conveniently, we dub them Higgs bosons, but really that describes just one of presumably many. Assuming those folks that toasted at the pub after defining the standard model of particle physics knew what was going on, each partical we know today that can be defined as “matter” in the elementary school sense, has a partner particle… or supersymmetric particle. Some people think supersymmetric particles may be made of dark matter since dark energy makes up most of space. Whatever. The gist of it all is that we are yearning to recreate energy conditions similar to those found at the “big bang” 15 billion years ago when the universe was born. No flames from pure creationists please. I love God and he is one smart dude. So, the LHC takes protons or lead isotopes and accelerates them using superconducting electromagnets powered by tera-electronvolts along a 27 kilometer track (shaped like a ring) to just under the speed of light (99.99% c) and then smashes them together with such force that we hope to create matter and antimatter from energy… afterall, matter is just ultra-dense energy, no? That’s how Big E rolled. In theory, we can then measure and record this special mojo that previously has eluded human research. There is a tiny itty-bitty chance we could also create a black hole. So long and thanks for all the fish. It is th that even in the unlikely event a black hole is formed in the hadron collider, it will be tiny and soon disapate. However, we’re dealing with some far reaching shit here… so make sure to have your towel with you in October. You see, we are only going to spin protons unidirectionally this Wednesday (the 10th), but the bi-directional collision schedule starts next month. This will either result in some of the coolest, groundbreaking, beam-me-up-Scotty discoveries about our Universe mankind has ever dared to imagine… or… if everything goes utterly wrong that could go wrong, the end of Earth and all life on it. Whee!

So, about the cruise. Momma always said if you can’t say anything nice about someone, then don’t say anything at all. I guess I won’t go into any detail about the majority of the passengers. All I can say is that is was nothing as I expected and I was disappointed. It was nice to be away from work, email, cell phones, etc. and I appreciate that opportunity however, the food motto was quantity, not quality. Everything… and I mean EVERYTHING… costs more than expected and had an automatic gratuity applied (15%). Then on top of that, gratuities are applied to your account per day onboard (in addition to the auto-gratuity for each individual item). Shore fees. Overpriced, poorly coordinated excursions. We were between 3 storms in the Atlantic and Gulf so 2 of the 4 ports were cancelled. The service was mediocre. The ship was old and in many ways it showed. Fuck it, I’ll mention the people… absolutely zero regard for others around them, no spacial awareness, rude… 80-plus percent of the cruisers were obese to the point that moving around the ships passageways was quite difficult and there were entirely too many chain smokers polluting the various common areas. There were pooly coordinated events and venues that were overpacked, undercooled, and generally uncomfortable. All in all, I’m glad that the Murphy’s Law poster child cruise happened on my first one because there is no where to go but up from here.

I’m quite swamped back at work, but it’s good to be home.

pee ess. I meant for that ripping a hole in space-time blackhole stuff to be a little tongue and cheek. If you want to actually watch the first proton beam injection this Wednesday, you can tune in here as it will be broadcast (I think).