The Large Hadron Collider started working again at CERN this morning for the first time in eighteen months. You can follow the full coverage here, live from CERN. The Guardian is putting out an edited version, here. Not all live events are interesting, certainly not the same ones for everyone; I prefer this to live sports coverage. Is there a Small Hadron Collider? Trond and Canahan report, below.
A Bad Guide 
Depends on the sport you favour. The Australian Grand Prix was a cracking race (though I watched it on re-run, the real 7 a.m. start UK time did not inspire me – it would have, once).
Is that Holly, having moved at last ?
No, that’s Misty! Am I right? :-)
“I prefer this to live sports coverage.” I predict that there will be less spitting.
I saw alcohol being consumed, though.
Yes, quite right, it’s Misty.
I could only watch sports live in person (no box involved), and then only ones to do with cars or horses.
For those who’s been wondering: The relevance of the image to the text is the Large Haedine Collider. We all know how AJP has been raising a herd of goats but we’ve not known why. I can reveal that he’s made two large circular paths in his garden, one inside the other and tangentially connected in one point. His daughter and her horse are trained to drive the goats around the circles at higher and higher speed, and when finally two goats running in opposite directions collide at the tangent point he’ll photograph the impact, hopefully catching a glimpse of the mythical Higg’s bison that’s supposed to come out of the collision. But this is an uncertain project. For a single picture of the bison he’ll need hundreds or thousands of goats – depending on the operating speed of the collider.
“Small Hadron Collider is a teeny-tiny web-design company based in Sheffield. In fact, it’s just one person.”
http://www.smallhadron collider.com
Y0u’ll like this SHC, AJP
I used to know Peter Higgs. He’s more of a pussy cat than a bisonherd, I’d say.
Was he keen on sailing?
Yes I do like it. how many billion euros did it cost to develop?
“Thousands of goats” is being pessimistic. We’re predicting results using somewhere between two and four goats. At times they will be moving – literally – at speeds close to ten miles-an-hour. Very, very fast, but only a fraction of the speed of light, in other words.
Obviously, the bison is named after some igg.
I think somebody has been confusing light speed and lightspeed in Crashtesting for dummies. I knew that the ambiguity of English compounding would lead to disaster.
AJP, what your goats may lack in speed they more than make up for in mass. By my calculation two goat colliding at even one mile per hour are going to have a combined energy millions of times greater than anything these other guys have dreamed of.
And, Trond, I don’t think you quite understand the project and its significance. The Higgs bison has been photographed before. It just hasn’t been photographed with a caged parrot in a window suffused with the light of the setting sun.
Thanks, Ø. I don’t know why nobody’s thought of this before. There may well be Nobel Prizes to be won here…
the Large Haedine Collider
In looking this up (and how does someone whose first language is not English think up these words?)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/haedine
The example given is
Capture of Chicago’s goat? Only the snippet view is available for perusal in googlebooks, but I imagine it refers to the Cubs, and the curse placed on the team when William Sianis, owner of Billy Goat Tavern, and his goat Murphy were kicked out of Wrigley Field by owner P.K. Wrigley in 1945 during Game 4 of the World Series “because the goat stinks”. As Sianis left the ballpark he was heard to mutter, “The Cubs ain’t gonna win no more,” which was widely interpreted, especially by the immortal columnist Mike Royko, to be a curse on the Cubs. When the Cubs lost the game, Sianis sent Wrigley a telegram saying, “Who stinks now?”
On second thought, the quotation is from 1914, so apparently Chicago is even more steeped in haedine lore than I imagined.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IQwUAAAAIAAJ&q=%22haedine%22&dq=%22haedine%22&ei=UCgMS8-sBZfIM4a25I4B
Thank you, Nij. I ought to have looked that up myself. A beastly man, I’ll never chew his gum again.
Does “darkey”, incidentally, have an “ey” and not an “ie”? Maybe it’s an old-fashioned spelling that didn’t need updating.
An archaic spelling, the current spelling is “African-American.
how does someone whose first language is not English think up these words?
By etymology, confusion and cheating. I remembered the haed-word because it looks related to the goat-word. I went to the dictionary hoping for something like haedron, a Latin-Greek confusion, but t came up with something close enough. (I could also have used Large Capron Collider. Better sound but wrong initials)
Good dictionary (and lucky cheating). Merriam-Webster doesn’t have it, neither does OneLook, with its index of 1049 dictionaries. Only dictionary.com says haed is a form of Scots auxiliary verb hae “to have”.
BTW, if you don’t recognize the Billy Goat, it’s the restaurant in SNL’s “cheezborger, cheezborger, cheezborger” routine.
http://www.billygoattavern.com/history.html
I couldn’t find a clip of the original routine, but if you don’t know Royko–he’s better known for his tongue-in-cheek writing–here he is at the Billy Goat.
Oops. Royko: