The Large Canine Collider

You may have noticed the news that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has broken it’s own record for particle energy – with a massive 3.5 TeV. Now that sounds impressive – that’ll be 3 500 000 000 000 electron-volts. However, you may not be aware that an electron volt is not an especially large unit of energy – about 0.000 000 000 000 000 00016 Joules. And any good physicist will tell you that a Joule is about the amount of energy needed to lift a litre of orange juice by 10 cm. That makes energy of a proton in the LHC about 0.000 052 Joules. Doesn’t sound a lot, but to a proton it’s enough to make it move pretty close to the speed of light.

Here at S & N & NC headquarters, we have our own accelerator - the Large Canine Collider (LCC). This basically consists of 2 Rottweilers and the dining room table. When their play fighting gets a bit too much for us, we release them into the collider and round and round they go.

Now a Rottweiler has a mass of about 35 kg. Running at, say, 3 m/s, that gives it kinetic energy of about 162 Joules - I make that about 3 million times more than in the LHC. Impressed? You should be. Even when the LHC is fully up to speed, it's energy will be twice what it is now, not a patch on the LCC.

This means that we should consider other differences between the LHC and the LCC.

The Location

The LHC can only be found in one place - on the Swiss/French border. However, a LCC can be constructed anywhere there are 2 large canines and a table or similar.

The Name

The LHC is so named on account of it's size - a circular tunnel 17 miles long. The hadrons themselves are not large (and the protons and anti-protons that they use are light as hadrons go) .

However, the LCC comes with much more flexible naming. The name can apply to large canines in a large room, large canines in a small room or small canines in a large room. Only if one were to use small dogs in a small room would we have to rename it the Small Canine Collider.

The Purpose

Great claims have been made for the LHC -that we will see back to the Big Bang, that we will discover the God Particle (Higgs Boson) and learn much more about Life, The Universe and Everything than we already know from the number 42.

The truth is a bit simpler. It will produce a bit more information about the behaviour of matter in similar high temperature conditions as existed shortly after the Big Bang. Future, bigger colliders will see an even earlier state of the universe, but we'll consume all the resources on our planet before we come even vaguely close to the Big Bang. Similarly, discovery of the Higgs Boson will confirm theories of physics, following a long tradition of predicting the existence of particles then saving up a very long time to do the experiments that will produce them. However, such an outcome cannot be guaranteed.

The LCC is designed to leave your canines happy and tired, which it achieves pretty much every time.

Cost

The LHC cost billions to build. If you already have 2 canines and a table, the budget for the LCC is nothing.

Good times to collide

The LHC is not use much in the winter as the electricity in Switzerland is required for more prosaic tasks, like cooking and heating. The LCC can be turned on whenever your dogs have the energy.

Bad times to collide

The LHC is so expensive that it is not really a good idea to turn it on during a global economic downturn, in a world worried about global warming or when Switzerland might be about to win the World Cup in extra time (an overload at the LHC will probably blow Switzerland's fuse).

The LCC can be used at any time, unless you have neighbours who might object to the noise at 4 in the morning.

Conclusion

It seems to me that the LCC is more energetic, flexible and reliable than the LHC. I urge the science ministers of the world to investigate it further.

SESPIT - dealing with problem data.

Does your data look like this?

But you'd like it to look like this?


Are your results significant at the 80% confidence level, ensuring no grants, papers or glory? But you'd like them to be significant at the 95% confidence level, ensuring adoration, conferences and employment?

Yes, you need SESPIT - the Silk Ear Sows's Purse Interpolation Technique. This statistical software takes the data you're stuck with and turns it into the results you can normally only dream about.

Remember, if your data is a load of crap, put it in the SESPIT.

Allegedly similar to techniques used by every Big Pharma study identified in Ben Goldacre's Bad Science Column, SESPIT would have been corrupting data since since 1989, if I'd ever got round to actually writing it.

(Dedicated to the CAMSCAT group, in the Physiological Ecology group at the Botany Deptartment, Cambridge and SPRI, 1988-1993).

Bruce Springsteen wins 'Least Romantic Chat-up' award, again

Yes, Bruce has won the contest a record 35 years in a row since these lines appeared during Thunder Road on his legendary Born to Run album in 1975:

So you're scared and you're thinking
That maybe we ain't that young anymore
Show a little faith, there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright
Oh and that's alright with me

Bookie's favorite Get your coat love, you've pulled was beaten to second place again. A spokesman for the tired and emotional line reported we couldn't believe it - for sheer crassness, the line should have been ours year after year. It seems the 'Boss' really doesn't know the way to a girl's heart.

The BNP - laughing stock or genuinely scary

Despite their origins in the Nazi National Front, I had the idea that the way to fight the BNP was to take the mick. Take the following, which is based on something I wrote on Yahoo answers.

It's the mid 21st century and the country's yo-yo diet of boom and bust has led to an economic crisis so severe that the 20% of the population who still cared enough to vote have successfully managed to elect the BNP.

King William has reluctantly invited the ageing Nick Griffin to form a new Parliament. Let's jump to the first cabinet meeting. The Prime Minister is surrounded by a gang of identikit bowling-ball skinheads. The first item on the agenda is the deepening economic crisis. Prime Minister Nick wants some opinions so he asks - what are we going to do about it?

The question is a tricky one because it can't be easily framed in the language of immigration. As the PM looks round the room, his new ministers avoid his gaze.

Fortunately he has devised a brainstorming techniques for such an occasion. A young perfect aryan-style blonde personal assistant places play on a CD and it's time for pass the parcel with political hot potatoes. Griffin's favourite English fold, long disavowed by it's creators, blares out whilst then ministers pass a dud grenade from one to another. The PA presses pause and the holder has to keep the grenade. All eyes are upon him. How would he save the country?

Eventually an answer forms on his lips and he ventures forth.

'Can't we just print some more money?'

The problem comes when you hear what the BNP do plan when they might come close to power. The following material is drawn from the March 2010 edition of The Teacher, the monthly magazine of the National Union of Teachers.

Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate described some of the plans made by the BNP opposition group in Barking Council in their alternative budget. Lowlights include

* Cancel all multi-cultural activities, and (illegally) not plan for redundancy payments

* Teach students with English as a second language in separate schools

* House vulnerable families in caravan sites

* Send children in care to boarding schools

* End all foster placements of children in the borough

It just gets scarier as the list goes on, doesn't it?

BNP - no laughing matter

Sugar, marketing and non-comedogenesis

I took a few faltering steps into the world of consumerism yesterday. What did I see?

Well, the sign in Sainsbury assured me that some new product from Pears (for the cleansing on one’s body) is non-comedogenic. New word to me –what’s that mean? No comedy will grow here? No comedy genes? Cannot be mocked on Mock the Week? I assumed it was this week’s latest attempt to sell beauty products with made up science. However, I did turn up this definition from www.skincareguide.com

Non-comedogenic cosmetics are products which have been tested on the oily skins of human volunteers or inside rabbit ears. These products are less likely to cause blackheads (open comedones) or whiteheads (closed comedones) in patients. However, no single product is non-comedogenic for everyone.

So there you go. Zit-free. Probably. Why didn’t they say?

I had a look at the ingredients of some lemonade (the stuff for secret lemonade drinkers everywhere). 3 artificial sweeteners and sugar. Why 3 – does each one taste so awful that it needs to be masked by the equally awful taste of 2 others to form some vaguely satisfying sweet taste. I had a can of tango orange a few months ago – the 1st one I’d ever had with artificial sweeteners (it’s been a while) – the once reliable intense orangy taste replaced by generic, cheap and nasty sweetener cocktail.

In fact on the subject of sugar, our bottle of still lemonade had this ingredient list

Water, Freshly Squeezed Lemon Juice (16%), Sugar, Lemon Pulp (5%).

No artificial stuff here, but note that they don’t draw your eye to the percentage of water in case you feel conned, or to the percentage of sugar (clearly somewhere between 5% and 16%). In fact the presence of water and sugar is understated by the shorter phrases. Fortunately there is a big red bar over the amount of sugar in the Nutrition information table to remind you that you will instantly die of diabetes if you buy this product.

On the subject of sugar, wouldn’t it be much easier to lose weight on a low calorie diet if they actually took the sugar out of Special K cereals.

Anyway enough food bashing. Cool sign in Pets at Home. It’s an advert that tells me to look out for their TV adverts. And the sign is up at the checkout. So they look to the people who have become customers to do some of the hard work of marketing the shop to themselves.

All that and a trip to Trago. Readers in Devon and Cornwall will understand the Trago mantra – if you want these low prices you won’t mind us treating you like criminals. Yes, they still check your bags and receipts when you leave. In fact, compared to everything else today, that strikes me as the most honest.

On disaster movies

Warning - plot spoilers

Seems to have been a few on our telly or DVD recently, or as I type:

Volcano -LA in peril due to spurious geology, Tommy Lee Jones in uniform to save the day without the hassle of pursuing anyone over any badlands.

Last night - Day after Tomorrow - Ice age over the Northern hemisphere due to very spurious meteorology - Dennis Quaid unable to save the day but does save his son.

The Knowing - all life on earth destroyed by spurious solar science, Nick Cage and Aliens able to save the day for some members of the gifted and talented academy.

The Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy - whole earth destroyed, except Arthur Dent, Trillian, mice and dolphins, due to spurious bureaucracy. Class