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WWW; or The Modern Prometheus

You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.
-- Victor Frankenstein

Not news: some guy was taken by an internet scam. News: his name is Sir Tim Berners-Lee:

"The worst thing that has happened to me was when I tried to buy a Christmas present from a company that looked like a bona fide company on the internet and then actually they were a completely fake company. I think I am yet to get the money back, but it wasn't a lot.

Who is Sir Tim Berners-Lee?


"Man, how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!"

In 1990, he invented the World Wide Web.

The God Particle

The Straight Dope: What is the "God particle"?, an analogy for our time:

Now for the woolly part. If it exists, the Higgs [God] particle is a part of the Higgs field, which fills the universe but is invisible to our eyes and, so far, to all scientific instruments. Subatomic particles — everything that makes up matter — are thought to acquire mass by how they interact with the Higgs field. To explain how this works, I'll paraphrase an explanation floated in 1993 by David Miller, then at the department of physics and astronomy, University College, London. Imagine a convention hall filled with political groupies, a scary thought all by itself. The hall represents the universe; the groupies represent the Higgs field. Now suppose Barack Obama enters the room. (In Miller's telling the political heavyweight was Margaret Thatcher, but that was then.) Obama represents a subatomic particle. The political groupies cluster around the president, seeking to bask in his cool and possibly get a job at the State Department. As Obama tries to make his way through the room, he gathers new hangers-on, while others drop off due to embarrassing questions about unpaid taxes. The cluster of groupies hovering around Obama represents the mass the president gains while he's in the Higgs field.