It Makes Me Feel So Fine I Can't Control My Brain

Congratulations to Mr. Andrew Tuegel for correctly naming "Read My Mind" by The Killers as the Friday Song of the Day. Sam's Town may have been a sophomore slump for the Las Vegas-quartet, but "Read My Mind" is everything that I love about the Killers rolled into one tune.

Perhaps some of you out there scoffed at the legal system when the D.C.-based administrative law judge sued the Mom and Pop* Korean dry cleaners for tens of millions after they allegedly lost his pants. Some of you also scratched your heads when a federal inmate sued his fellow federal inmate, the infamous Michael Vick, for allegedly aiding and abetting the subversive activities of Al Qaeda, but a suit filed recently in the U.S. District Court in Honolulu may take the proverbial cake in the realm of legal oddities.

"Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More" by Dennis Overbye in today's New York Times.

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure. The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

This quarter in Natural Resources Protection and Water Law, we've frequently discussed that the National Environmental Policy Act is an effective tool for environmental protection groups that want to counteract forestry operations in southeast Texas, increased cruise ship traffic in Glacier Bay, Alaska, or mining in Montana, but using it as a tool to put the brakes on a super-collider (operated by a European research institute in Geneva no less) that will allegedly create earth consuming black holes?

Me thinks someone has been watching a bit too much Lost.

Current Reading

The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty

*Not to be confused with the Mom and Pop shoe-repair shop that Kramer ruins on Seinfeld after noticing that their wiring is faulty.