Hooray! The Earth is Still Here!

Phew! It was very nice to wake up this morning and find that the Earth was still here.

Seems that a group of nerds in Switzerland have been erecting a $9 billion mechanism with the intent of garnering a better understanding about how our universe was formed. For most of us, all we really need is six or eight beers, and we can come up with all sorts of good theories on this subject, but these guys went an extra step and built the "Large Hadron Collider" in an effort to simulate the moments after the Big Bang.

The project took something like 25 years to complete, and apparently there was only one teensy potential problem with the whole experiment. Some more nerds worried that the LHC could spawn a black hole capable of sucking the entire world into oblivion -- all in the span of 1/20th of a second -- followed by even larger celestial bodies, like the solar system, the galaxy, Rush Limbaugh, etc.

I'll admit that there have been mornings where that scenario would probably be the best way to start a day, but that's not what happened this morning. In the wee hours of this morning, they fired the sucker up, and little particles of matter went whizzing around in a big circle or some such thing, and the nerds were wetting their polyester pants with joy. Hooray for them!