DB's post riffing a bit on the Large Hadron Collider spurred some random thoughts on my part.

The earth is still here today, but despite premature media fearmongering, it's because the collider hasn't started colliding things yet - they only sent the particles in one direction. So things are OK - for now. That lets everyone get up to speed on the science, which is good.

I'm not surprised by the play that the LHC Rap has received on YouTube, and one of the key investigators at LHC is former rocker Brian Cox. It used to be that rockers wanted to destroy their hotel rooms, but now they're aiming higher. And while I'm at the random connections, how many ex-rocker physicists named Brian do we need?

After the East Bay Earthquake last week - the biggest earthquake in the East Bay all week - I checked Twitter to see how many status updates would follow and, sure enough, there they were.

But what's going to happen after the LHC really does start colliding things? In the spirit of the site to check to see if Abe Vigoda is still alive, there is one that now checks on the status of planet earth. Though that seems a little old school - we've been checking on Abe since Web 1.0 days.

However, checking status may not be feasible if everyone is gone, so the day before the collisions start, I think I'll load up Leon's Gratis Status facebook app with half "the earth is gone", and half "the earth has survived", and roll the dice. If nobody is left to observe, maybe they'll both come true!

Next up: what is the sound of two hadrons colliding?

It won’t be long before you can do things like draw the telephone of your dreams and have it work, and I was schooled on the concept of going from hand drawn design to working model with a minimum of cleanup (and apparently it’s still going on).

It’s one thing to hang out in 3D and play with toy physics, but the 2D Crayon Physics Deluxe is the coolest thing I’ve seen all week.

(I’m sure this one has already been dugg, but I just saw it thanks to David Sibbet.)