Bottle Shops
I shall write when I’m not busy being on holiday, but here’s a picture for you: How irresponsible. What that is, ladies and gentlemen, is the pinnacle of civilised society, namely the drive-through off-licence(bottleshop/bottle-o).  These

Explosives Update
I’m still in those upside-down parts, and my very unreasonable wife rarely lets me spend the $25(!) required to use the hotel wifi connection, so am utterly out of the loop and of no use to man nor beast.  But, I have now managed to grab some scraps of internets and was catching up on some emails when I saw this one from a friend:   So, a chap here left his coat on the train. He rang up and reported it and was told that they had indeed found his coat. However, it is now in a bomb-proof container, located in Bristol. They cannot remove it from said container and return it to him, lest it explodes, unless he goes to pick it up in person. Bombers of

I'm off
Right, I'm sat in the Virgin clubhouse lounge-thing at Heathrow and I'm markedly less than entirely sober.  I'm off the Oz for the rest of the month, so posting will very likely be intermitant and holiday-based.   Do try to get along without me. 

The LHC Part 2 - Technical Stuff
I’m off to Oz tomorrow, and as they’re likely to fire it up whilst I’m away, I thought it best to fire out another LHC- post. Last time I gave a run-through of the concepts and science involved with that there hadron smasher, but now I’m going to talk about some of the engineering involved (which is much more in my comfort zone) and the issues encountered which have postponed doomsday until a few weeks’ time.  I’ve purloined some material from work to illustrate.  Special thanks to Dr Bruce Kennedy -who works on CMS here at RAL

Bribing away poverty
Guess I spoke too soon on the interesting news front: You might remember Michael Laws, the Kiwi mayor I’ve previously mentioned when he –rather refreshingly- insulted some some school kids.  Well he’s being contentious again: