It's the !@#ing Count!!!

It's an oldie but worth it...

Future present

"I have suggested that supernovae are the industrial accidents of advanced civilisations."
--Arthur C. Clarke, October 2007

An element of the Large Hadron Collider (picture source)

Question: What happens when you try to create Higgs boson particle?
Answer: The creation of an observable Higgs boson particle is so abhorrent to the Universe that at some point in the future, when walking monkeys on some minuscule planet in an outer-spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy discover how to do it, the Universe reaches back across time and prevents this happening.

At least that’s what two physicists have claimed in a research paper entitled “Search for Effect for Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider”

The CERN project (of which I had previously written about here) known as the Large Hadron Collider is a machine 27km big that attempts to collide two beams of protons together to observe the resulting explosion and expand our knowledge of the universe or something to that effect. A successful collision would apparently enable physicists to observe the Higgs boson particle.

The Higgs boson particle is a theoretical particle that will ”explain the origin of mass in the universe” (thanks wikipedia). Scientist haven’t seen it (yet), but our current understanding of particle physics predicts it. Particle physics is the research of subatomic particles. Yeah, that explains it.....

The physicist propose an experiment involving a deck of ‘decision cards’ (ie “Run LHC experiment” or “For God’s sake you puny mortals, don’t even attempt this experiment -- yours truly, a future Higgs boson particle”) to model various probabilities whether to run the LHC or not, they suggest that the current difficulties in getting the LHC working, and also what happened to the ill-fated US SSC, may be as a result of future Universe affecting the present.

How can they say this? Well, according to the theory of General Relativity and and the Standard Model of Particles, time travel is theoretically possible:

“Particles and their antiparticles can also be thought of as being the same entity travelling in opposite directions in time.”

In plain english, the physicists are saying that in the future, when a Higgs boson particle is created, the consequence of this is so great that we are feeling the effects of it in the past (ie. now).

Here is a simple diagram I created to show this:

see?!? simple...

Not that I'm suggesting that this experiment could cause a supernova, as the Arthur C. Clarke quote above might imply, although if you happen to be running an experiment that requires so much energy that you have to schedule it around the energy supply of an entire continent, to term a mishap "an industrial accident" may be waaayyy understating it. From the previous article:

"All of this means that when something goes wrong—even something small—there's a very real chance that it will go wrong in a big way."

And a much scarier sentence a little bit further on:

"That's not to say that we have no idea what will happen; rather, there are a range of possibilities, some of which may be out of reach of the energies created by the LHC."

One hopes all the experiments go exactly. to. plan.

Links:

• The New York Times article
• The website of the ill-fated Supercolliding SuperConductor
• Wikipedia page on Supernova

Deep in the Matrix

A Toyota car ad

Making international headlines last week was “Woman Sues Toyota over terrifying Prank” :

In a lawsuit filed Sept. 28 in Los Angeles Superior Court, Amber Duick claims she had difficulty eating, sleeping and going to work during March and April of last year after she received e-mails for five days from a fictitious man called Sebastian Bowler, from England, who said he was on the run from the law, knew her and where she lived, and was coming to her home to hide from the police.

I wanted to know how a marketing campaign could have gone so wrong (or perhaps “so right”)? And although no one has ever become poor by underestimating the stupidity of people, I was curious how a marketing campaign could provoke such a reaction. From a country with a history of people suing advertisers (like this one where a man sued the makers of Bud Light for making ads involving tropical fantasies of beautiful women coming to life, because, and I'm dead serious here, he didn't have that experience when consuming Bud Light), I initially assumed that the woman suing Toyota was, how you say…a couple of beers short of a six-pack?

A Toyota car ad

But researching campaign, I noted that it was not just TV or Radio ads, but fake MySpace profiles, print ads,personalized email spam, text messages, phone calls....

I'll let the Art Director responsible for the campaign describe it to you (short flash video). It's worth checking it out as it is a very involved campaign.

In brief: How it works is that someone would sign up one of their friends selecting one of the 5 "maniacs", and then that friend would be spammed with a variety of personalized communications by said maniac, and in the case above, threaten to come and live at their house and get them to help pay for hotel damage bills.

The campaign was targeting the 35 year old males demographic, with no life commitments and are "sick of advertising". Keeping this in mind, it's no wonder that a clever campaign like this managed to avoid looking like advertising, thereby "terrorizing" unwitting participants, however I'm not quite sure Saatchi & Saatchi are culpable, and I'm not sure it's fair to accuse the women of stupidity. The campaign was designed to be a disturbing prank, and it succeeded. Blending the power of Web 2.0 technologies and slick personalized advertising messages, it blurred the distinction we consumers have come to understand between advertising and 'real-life'. Despite the lawsuit (in fact I would argue because of the lawsuit) expect more clever campaigns like this in the future.

A Toyota car ad

Links

A couple of the "maniacs" MySpace pages:
http://www.myspace.com/racoonie
http://www.myspace.com/sakura_on_fire

A video with another description of the case:
http://www.autonews.com/article/20091002/ANA08/910029986/1221/mobile&template=art4

The breakdown of the “Your other You” campaign is described here:
http://tmspreview.com/yoycampaign/

A further discussion of the campaign:
http://zehnkatzen.blogspot.com/2008/04/addesign-toyota-matrix-campaign-who_06.html

The Art director's website:
http://www.nickluckett.com/matrix-your-other-you/

Picture sources
http://adverlicio.us/toyota_matrix_sebastians_academy_of_pub_fighting_728x90_unbranded
http://blog.signalnoise.com/?p=265

Another clever Toyota Matrix campaign
http://www.marketingmag.ca/english/creative/featuredcampaign/article.jsp?content=20080430_142446_9020

An awesome website dedicated to ridiculous lawsuits:
http://facesoflawsuitabuse.org/

Getting people to...care

From The New York Times:

The money sentence:

"Getting people to care about a climate threat that is decades away is hard enough, they say, without adding in the vagaries of natural climate cycles."

How about that? Imagine colouring this debate with facts of "natural climate cycles"??!?! I don’t know why it hasn’t been tried before….

It has to be noted that the brain trust that came up with the above statement were “social scientists”, clearly THE authorities on climate related problems.

Friggin Space Traffic

Watch it to the end...

BBC Warming up to skeptics

A skeptical Warming article on the BBC? Didn't think I'd see the day.

Entitled "What happened to Global Warming?", the article publishes a fact that the IPCC and it's many Global Warming Hysterics have yet to admit, that the Earth has not warmed in the last 11 years, and the hottest years "on record" is 1998.

"And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise."

Admitting the blatant inaccuracies of climate models AND the inconsistencies of our carbon-dioxide models..in the same sentence?? Please note that the Australian Government is trying to rush through legislation for an Emissions Trading Scheme (E.T.S) which will affect all Australian households and business based on carbon dioxide emissions.

There is of course the mandatory questioning of the evidence:

"Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

And of course the defence of current climate models (ALL of which failed to predict this 11 year cooling phase):

"The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.

In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models."

But don't worry believers, an article daring to venture the skeptical viewpoint would not have got by the Editors if it didn't support 'overall' the Hysteric point of view:

"What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up."

Of course, once you factor in the Medieval Warm Period and take a reasonable sample of historical global temperatures, the spectacularly debunked hockey stick disappears, and that according to Jack's research, shows the long term trend is certainly not going up (at least not by a scary woo-woo 1C...in 100 years....maybe....)

However there is comfort in the last sentence:

"One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up."

Someone please tell Al Gore....

Total rubbish

Hand over your rubbish...or else...

From this story:

concerned neighbours saw mysterious men emptying their bins into black sacks and loading them into an unmarked white van.

When homeowners questioned the official binmen an hour later they learned their council was conducting a survey of what was being thrown away.

Now, try as I might, I can't really link this in to The Warming hysteria, although the current Western obsession about all things environmental probably has something to do with it. The UK does seem to be leading the world in spying on their own citizens to ensure, amongst other things, efficient energy usage. And like every other viewer of CSI, I know that garbage left out on the street can't really be 'stolen', however I don't see the need for unmarked vans, hoodies and all the secrecy.

It's just a little...weird.