The Ash Twins Blog

Cracked.com has a hilarious article up today called “The 5 Scientific Experiments Most Likely to End the World.” It discusses five real-world scientific inquiries that have a real-world chance of annihilating mankind. The whole thing is very much worth reading, but I’ll post some choice excerpts from the first 3 technological menaces:

Scientists are kind of pissed that they weren’t around when the Big Bang happened. Here we had an event that holds all of the secrets to reality, and we missed it because we were lazy enough not to evolve for another 13 billion years.The solution, science says, is to make it happen again… Meet the Large Hadron Collider. This is not only the largest particle accelerator ever built, it’s the largest anything ever built. Originally set to come online in 2005, then delayed until September 2008, the LHC will fire very small objects around its 17-mile circumference at close to the speed of light, before smashing the shit out of them and watching what comes out… Experts assure us that based on everything we know about science, the chances of doom are fairly slim.

For years, scientists have been scouring the cosmos for some kind of bizarre hypothetical anti-gravity bullshit they’re calling “dark energy”. And they’ve had some success with it … perhaps at the expense of our mortal souls. To grossly simplify it, on a scale smaller than atoms, the quantum level, everything suddenly turns into a goddamn circus. Quantum physics is to regular everyday physics as a David Lynch film is to a mainstream blockbuster. We’re talking particles popping in and out of existence, being in two places at the same time, and generally acting like assholes. No doubt the strangest part is the Quantum Zeno effect, which points out that simply observing and measuring particles changes them (specifically, changing the rate at which they decay). How? No one knows. It appears to be the closest science has ever come to proving black magic exists. One prominent scientist theorized that the changes caused by simply observing dark energy could cause it to collapse, taking the universe with it… It’s like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, apparently.

As you’ve probably worked out by now, there’s some weird shit out there in the world of science. That’s because a whole lot of the fundamental theories about reality are based on mathematical equations rather than actual observation. So there are all sorts of things out there that seem to exist in theory, but we’ve never seen them… Anyway, Strange matter is one of these things. It’s a hypothetical material made up of quarks, which are one of the building blocks of reality, things so small that you can’t even possibly imagine. Seriously, don’t even try to think about it… There are two hypotheses about strange matter. One is that the stuff will simply disappear a fraction of a second after it appears. The other is that it will stabilize and convert every atom it comes in contact with into more strange matter… Now imagine, just theoretically, if some of this strange matter should appear on Earth. And, just theoretically, it should be stable enough to start a reaction with regular matter. Theoretically, we’d all be fucking dead… Imagine you’re like the fabled King Midas, and you have the power to convert matter with a single touch. Except that instead of gold, everything you touch turns into shit. And everything it touches turns to shit. Before you know it, the whole world is shit, and it’s all your fault…Luckily for us, strange matter can only be created in high-energy particle collisions, and nothing like that ever happens here, right? Oh, wait. Meet the Large Hadron Collider. Again. That’s right, our friends at the LHC project expect a lot of weird things to pop up when they start smashing atoms together, and strange matter is one such possibility. That’s why scientists have written papers with boring titles such as Will Relativistic Heavy-ion Colliders Destroy Our Planet?, the rebuttals to which were basically, “Let’s turn them on and find out!”

It gets even better! Check it out.

From ScienceDaily:

By tracking the amount of light emitted by Baghdad neighborhoods at night, a team of UCLA geographers has uncovered fresh evidence that last year’s U.S. troop surge in Iraq may not have been as effective at improving security as some U.S. officials have maintained.

Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery. . .

“If the surge had truly ‘worked,’ we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods,” said co-author Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor of geography at UCLA. “Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing.” . . .

Previous research has used satellite imagery of night-light saturation to measure changes in the distribution of populations in a given area, but the UCLA project is believed to be the first to study population losses and migration due to sectarian violence.

Federal Judge Richard Posner reserves harsh words for Scalia’s majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, which held unconstitutional Washington D.C.’s handgun ban:

The majority (and the dissent as well) was engaged in what is derisively referred to–the derision is richly deserved–as “law office history.” Lawyers are advocates for their clients, and judges are advocates for whichever side of the case they have decided to vote for. The judge sends his law clerks scurrying to the library and to the Web for bits and pieces of historical documentation. When the clerks are the numerous and able clerks of Supreme Court justices, enjoying the assistance of the capable staffs of the Supreme Court library and the Library of Congress, and when dozens and sometimes hundreds of amicus curiae briefs have been filed, many bulked out with the fruits of their authors’ own law-office historiography, it is a simple matter, especially for a skillful rhetorician such as Scalia, to write a plausible historical defense of his position.

But it was not so simple in Heller, and Scalia and his staff labored mightily to produce a long opinion (the majority opinion is almost 25,000 words long) that would convince, or perhaps just overwhelm, the doubters. The range of historical references in the majority opinion is breathtaking, but it is not evidence of disinterested historical inquiry. It is evidence of the ability of well-staffed courts to produce snow jobs.