Yes, I think any Star Wars jokes instantly qualify for the “nerd alert!” tag.

1:12 am (PDT), JoAnne: The beam is at Point 8, which is 3/4 of the way around! Thanks to SkyNews for the feed!

1:18 am (PDT), JoAnne: Now the beam is at ATLAS, 7/8 of the way through. They are giving ATLAS some events (not collisions, but beam halo and beam gas). Lyn Evans, LHC project manager, was heard to say that he’s going to win his bet, whatever that is.

1:23 am (PDT), JoAnne: BEAM! We have BEAM! All the way round! Now they’re doing it again.

I love the internet!

From symmetry breaking:

The Large Hadron Collider saw its first protons today, around 6:30 p.m. at CERN (12:30 p.m. US EDT), as scientists conducted the first beam injection test in one section of the collider. The protons traveled just a few meters into the LHC in a clockwise direction. The tests will continue through the weekend to transfer the beam from one section of the accelerator complex to another. A second beam injection test is scheduled for later in August. Protons will circulate around the entire collider for the first time on September 10.

Yay!

CERN has a press release going over the ramp up to September 10th a bit more, as well as a link for a live webcast to be streaming as soon as the LHC is. After that, the collider is set to be officially unveiled on October 21st.

August 8, 2008: The start of the South Ossetia War, Summer Olympics, and, now, the Large Hadron Collider.

1. Graham’s number – Author David Wells wrote “”If all the material in the universe was turned into pen and ink it would not be enough to write the number down.” So, yeah, using some unconventional notation, Graham’s number can be written, but in anything approximating normal notation: there are not enough atoms in the universe to denote it.
2. Fifth and sixth derivatives – The first and second derivatives (velocity and acceleration, respectively) are easy enough to grasp, but the third and fourth take a bit more thought. Change in position through time? Velocity. Change in velocity through time? Acceleration. Change in acceleration through time? Jerk. But, uh, the fifth and sixth derivatives? Crackle and pop, respectively.

That is all. I am going to see about having my mind vomited back up.

L-methamphetamine…is found in Vicks Vapor Inhalers. … This is the mirror image of D-methamphetamine – the street drug.

The thing is, L-methamphetamine isn’t really anything like the D-methamphetamine isomer that is found in street drugs. D-methamphetamine is psychoactive, while L-methamphetamine isn’t very psychoactive at all. In certain receptor and enzyme pockets where D-methamphetamine fits, L-methamphetamine fits like a left foot in a right shoe.

This is a post from 2006! That is to say: fromthearchives. Get used to it, the internet is being boring.

The setup is that a couple of Green Lanterns get summoned to a crime scene, some superbeing’s corpse that turned up in a dumpster. Morrison plays it noir — the Lanterns jaw at each other like beat cops. The crime is a 1011: deicide. The victim: Orion, the soldier god of New Genesis. “A-number one, cosmic hard-ass.”

The guy from the head office back on Oa weighs in: “Seal the crime scene out to the planet’s Lagrange point. No one must enter or leave the gravity well.”

Sure, I’ll keep reading that.

Lagrange point??? Gravity well? What are these awesome bits of astrophysics jargon? I bet the Lanterns have to seal off, like, a basjisoegjillion miles of space, from here to the next frikkin galaxy.

Oh, wait, the jargon is useless? Yeahbuhwhat?

The Lagrangian point(s) “are the five positions in an orbital configuration where a small object affected only by gravity can theoretically be stationary relative to two larger objects.” So what’s that mean for Final Crisis? Short story: absolutely nothing. Without saying what the two larger objects are, Morrison is just spewing bullshit.

And Earth’s gravity well? That is more-or-less the gravity field around Earth, which is not very big. The corps is effectively sealing off Earth and a little bit of empty space around it.

Astounding!

Phoenix will enter the top of the Martian atmosphere at almost 21,000 kilometers per hour (almost 13,000 mph). In seven minutes, the spacecraft must complete a challenging sequence of events to slow to about 8 kilometers per hour (5 mph) before its three legs reach the ground.

And this all must be done entirely autonomously. While the descent itself takes seven minutes, any information traveling to or from Mars will take ten minutes. So by the time NASA hears about the descent beginning, it will already be over.

Cynics may scoff at the difficulty, noting it’s been done, but you should also note that only half of international attempts to land on Mars have been successful. Here’s hoping this $325 million mission is in the “success” half.

The Phoenix website has an completely over-the-top video of the EDL (entry, descent, landing) process. Visit http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix for more information, including when and how to watch live coverage of the descent.

UPDATE: Catch up-to-the-minute updates on the MarsPhoenix Twitter page.

First mentioned on TEDBlog, the WorldWide Telescope builds a “seamless” view of the universe with images taken from telescopes and satellites all over the world and sky. The software is pretty amazing, but the WWT website is unfortunately a cesspool of terrible promotional videos, so I recommend just heading over to the download page.

In many ways, the WWT is simply a desktop version of Google Sky. It’s just…a lot more robust, detailed, and inspiring to behold.

Once we figured out the beginning, it wasn’t hard to guess the end. Inflation was done with, so it was all up to gravity. Basically, if the universe is dense enough (a lot of stuff in not too much space), then it should eventually collapse in a reversal of the Big Bang. Otherwise, space would continue expanding slowly into infinity and beyond. Or, if you’re an obsessive Albert Einstein, magical new quantities pop into existence and the universe, in turn, neither expands nor collapses.

(Un)fortunately(?), reality seems to be a little different. Instead of business as usual, or the universe heading toward the Big Crunch, expansion is accelerating. And eventually far-enough objects will be moving away from us faster than the speed of light. Ultimately, stars and galaxies will be moving away from us so quickly that light from them will never reach our eyes, as if they were never there to begin with.

Sad.

This places current scientists in a very interesting position:

Scientists in the far future, on some other planet without the benefit of our current knowledge, will see no evidence from their observations that the universe is expanding. After all, the only way that we know about it is by looking out at distant galaxies and tracing their motion. If they are out of sight, there will be no such tracers.

In other words, right now is the only time when both the expansion of the universe and its cause (dark energy) can be inferred. As the New Scientist article states, dark energy could not have been measured in the past, and the expansion will not be measurable in the future. And if we can predict that the sky will be a lot less informative for future scientists, what about today’s cosmologists?

We may never know if other fascinating and important aspects of our universe are hidden from us today, yet would have been visible had we been smart enough to evolve 5 billion years earlier.

Time travel never seemed more urgent.