A little more than a year after its ill-fated debut, the Large Hadron Collider is getting ready to roll again. The controversial device, including an 18-mile circular tunnel—bigger than the London Underground’s Circle Line—is housed in the gigantic CERN laboratory in the Jura mountains just outside of Geneva, on the border of France and Switzerland. Using the particle collider, the largest ever built, would allow scientists to re-create conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang, as well as prove the existence of the spooky “Higgs boson” entity, also called the “God Particle” which give “things” (including living things like you and me) their mass. It is further anticipated to solve the mystery of “dark matter” and shed light on many other quirky physics conundrums.

On Sept. 19, 2008, just days after the Hadron’s launch, a small piece of electrical cable providing power to the magnets broke loose, sending a shower of sparks across the wiring. This caused temperatures within one of the tunnels to rise quickly, followed by the release of helium cooled to -271 degrees. The results weren’t pretty, causing nearly $60 million in damage to the $9-billion project. Now, with hope, everything is back on track. Within the next few weeks, bunches of protons should be loaded into the device, and it’s expected to be operational near the Christmas holiday. Fully up to speed, the particles should move just a hair slower than the speed of light.

Not everyone is happy about the Hadron’s snappy comeback. Some scientists fear the experiment could cause several tiny black holes to form, which would grow and devour the entire Earth. Still others, like Dr. Holger Bech Neilson of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen believe that the manufacture of Higgs bosons may be so “abhorrent” to nature,” as Dennis Overbye wrote in the New York Times, that their creation would cause ripples backward through time to stop the collider before it could produce one, much like the paradox of a time traveler going back in time to halt his own birth by killing his grandfather. Neilson calls the collider’s problems an “anti-miracle” and adds, tongue-not-entirely-in-cheek, that the collider’s epic failure in 2008 might actually have proved the existence of God. Got your head around that one?

What is even scarier about the Large Hadron Collider, however, is that one of the CERN physicists working on the project (his name has not been released) was arrested Oct. 12 on suspicion of having Al Qaeda connections. Gulp!

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
No word yet if, as was the case with his prior successes, producer Barrie Osborne (The Matrix, The Lord Of The Rings) plans to build a trilogy around the Prophet Mohammed.  I’m guessing, though, that even a stand-alone film will attract its share of uproar:

Qatari media company Al Noor Holdings used Sunday’s closing of the Doha Tribeca Film Festival to announce its launch into the movie biz with a $150 million feature about the Prophet Mohammed, to be produced by Barrie Osborne.  Osborne and Al Noor execs are in discussions with a number of studios, distributors and ten-percenteries about boarding the English-language project.

Al Noor thus becomes the latest link between Hollywood and the Mideast, where companies are anxious to provide work for local filmmakers and to offer a more positive portrayal of Islam around the world.  Muslim cleric and TV personality Sheik Yousef al-Qaradawi will serve as a technical consultant.  “He was a profound genius who founded a religion whose name in Islam signifies peace and reconciliation,” Osborne said. “This is what our film will aspire to do.”

And while the film will cover the years from his birth to his death, a Mohammed biopic will prove especially tricky considering the Prophet himself cannot be in it.  In accordance with Islamic law, neither Mohammed nor direct members of his family can be visually depicted.

In Variety: Al Noor Sets Mohammed Feature

 
As mentioned earlier on Dangerous Minds, OR Books will soon be releasing as a possible antidote to Palin’s own Going Rogue, “Going Rouge: An American Nightmare.”

Sarah Palin has many faces: hockey mom, fundamentalist Christian, sex symbol, Republican ideologue, fashion icon, ?

 
“I went there with a friend to do an interview, and suddenly we were the ones being interviewed by Ondine.”  So says Cathy Naso of her initial visit to Warhol‘s Factory as a high school senior.  Naso went there hoping to research an article for her French class, but wound up—as these things happen—leaving as a receptionist, where she worked for the next two years.  Her duties during that heady period included eating lots of yogurt, transcribing Warhol’s James Joyce-inspired a: A Novel, and hanging out with The Velvet Underground.

As a reward for her efforts, Warhol gifted Naso with a self-portrait (above), which hung on her wall briefly before she stashed it in a closet for safe-keeping.  Now, after 40-plus years, Naso’s selling it off through Sotheby’s, where experts think it can fetch an estimated $1-1.5 million (Umm…estimated value of hanging out at The Factory for 2 years?  Priceless!). 

Before Warhol gave his self-portrait to Naso, he signed it: “To Cathy ?

The Sweet Smell of Success is one of the great screenplays, and films, of all time. It’s an absolutely vicious piece of work about a powerful New York gossip columnist (Burt Lancaster) and a sleazy impresario who spends the film trying to scrape his way into his good graces (Tony Curtis, in a rare villainous turn). The level of 50s slime out-does anything in “Mad Men” and the dialogue cuts with every nasty, New-York-Overdrive quip. Plot summary follows:

A classic of the late 1950s, this film looks at the string-pulling behind-the-scenes action between desperate press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) and the ultimate power broker in that long-ago show-biz Manhattan: gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). Written by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets (who based the Hunsecker character on the similarly brutal and power-mad Walter Winchell), the film follows Falco’s attempts to promote a client through Hunsecker’s column—until he is forced to make a deal with the devil and help Hunsecker ruin a jazz musician who has the nerve to date Hunsecker’s sister. Director Alexander MacKendrick and cinematographer James Wong Howe, shooting on location mostly at night, capture this New York demimonde in silky black and white, in which neon and shadows share a scarily symbiotic relationship—a near-match for the poisonous give-and-take between the edgy Curtis and the dismissive Lancaster.

The screenplay by Odets and Lehman is one of the most incredible pieces of writing I’ve ever read/viewed, surpassing, perhaps, even classics of nasty dialogue (and I’ll go out on a limb here) like The Lion in Winter and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There’s just no comparison to any other film and I think this is the ultimate flick for ANYBODY who works in the media. Check out the trailer below to see what I mean.

(Amazon: The Sweet Smell of Success)

 
Chinese HAARP-ists meteorologists say let it snow!  Yesterday, using high-powered artillery, the ominous-sounding Weather Modification Office seeded rain clouds with 186 doses of silver iodide, triggering Beijing’s earliest snowfall in a decade.  And while this effort was primarily initiated as “drought relief,” the resulting blizzard disrupted road, rail and air travel.  For some BBC footage of post-snowfall shoveling, click here.

And while their footage may be unembeddable, the BBC’s graphics are not.  For those days when sunshine “inexplicably” turns to snowfall, here’s a handy cloud seeding chart:

 
1. Silver iodide is fired into cloud using flares on planes or from the ground
2. Water droplets then attach to these particles
3. They fall as snow if surface temperatures are below or near freezing, or as raindrops at warmer temperatures
4. Heat released as the droplets freeze boosts updrafts, which pull more moist air into the cloud
5. Despite the use of the cloud seeding technique, many scientists remain skeptical of its effectiveness (my bold)

Scientists “Cause” Beijing Snow

Bonus: Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting

Discoverd via the 4Chan /x/ forum (Oh God please make this horrible addiction stop!), the Path is a horror video game for PC and Mac that looks like a very interesting take on the genre. I do think that (despite all screams to the contrary from traditionalists… traditionalists like myself), video games will be the most dominant art form of the next several decades. (Tim Martin of the Daily Telegraph, for instance, called The Path “an Angela Carter novel, as siphoned through The Sims.”) I’m hoping to see much braver experimentation with the form and I don’t think that I’ll be disappointed in the coming years. The Wiki says:

The Path is a 2009 horror personal computer game developed by Tale of Tales for the Microsoft Windows operating system and later made available for Mac OS X by TransGaming Technologies. It is inspired by several versions of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, and by folklore tropes and conventions in general, but set in contemporary times. The original Windows version was released on March 18, 2009 in English and Dutch. The player can choose to control one of six different sisters, who are sent one-by-one on errands by their mother to see their sick grandmother. The player can choose whether to stay on the path or to wander, where wolves are lying in wait.

Check out the game’s site, where you can download a demo (PC and Mac) and purchase the game as well.

 
Before you order that 1400-calorie Hardee’s Monster Burger, consider this: a research team at London-based University College has found (surprise?) a link between depression and a diet rich in processed foods.  They also (bigger surprise?) found a link between a lack of depression and a diet rich in fish, fruits and vegetables. 

The team split the study participants into two groups.  After accounting for such factors as age, gender, and education, it was determined that the whole food-eating group would have a 26% lower risk for future depression.  The group eating a diet rich in sweets, fried food, processed meat, refined grains and high-fat dairy products had a risk of depression 58% higher than their whole food-eating counterparts.

Study author Dr. Archana Singh-Manoux added, “It is not yet clear why some foods may protect against or increase the risk of depression, but scientists think there may be a link with inflammation as with conditions such as heart disease.”

BBC News: Depression Link To Processed Food

Dangerous Minds friends Century Guild announce the release of “The Fracture of the Universal Boy,” a new graphic novel by Michael Zulli, years in the making. Zulli was a regular artist on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic and is well-known to the 4-color literati. Century Guild proprieter Thomas Negovan blogs about the new book here:

Speaking of focus, the kind of focus that makes electrons shudder, imagine being at the top of your game for decades.  Say, being one of the go-to artists on something as seminal and powerful as Neil Gaiman?

 
From Monterey Bay Aquarium:

Brilliant and seemingly glowing, the bloodybelly comb jelly comes in different shades of red but always has a blood-red stomach. The sparkling display on the outside comes from light diffracting from tiny transparent, hair-like cilia. These beat continuously, propelling the jelly through the water.

This species has only recently come to the attention of scientists, thanks to images like this, supplied by the