The DomPost today inexcusably publishes a Tom Scott cartoon that shows neither the once brilliant Scott nor the paper’s editorial management read what is in their own paper.
Scott has drawn a cartoon celebrating two weeks of “smashing particles” at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva:
The huge error here is, that not only have no particles yet been collided at the LHC (beams have only been sent one way round it), but the collider suffered a major fault on Saturday NZ time (which I reported on Sunday) and will be out of action for at least two months.
The DomPost reported this breakdown yesterday in its World section.
There is no excuse whatsoever to publish a cartoon in complete ignorance of news reported in the same newspaper the very day before.
8 Comments
September 23, 2008 at 10:19 am
Perhaps Tom Scott’s middle name is Murphy.
Like most other prototypes in their early life being prone to unwanted plagues of technical setbacks, the unrealistic comic strip like expectation for the Large Hadron Collider traversing a smooth development path from drawing board to full speed particle collision is not unlike the expectation of an emission-trading scheme achieving a reduction in the world average temperature to avoid frying the world as we know it. Unlike any emissions trading scheme, the workings of LHC soundly grounded in proven scientific theory can only progress ultimately, after these initial teething set backs, to a life of ongoing experimentation and research.
It appears that the latest set back to the LHC during a test is that one of the bus bar connections which linked cables between the magnets failed and melted causing roughly a ton of liquid helium to leak into one of the tunnel sections. Without the cooling effects of liquid helium at very close to absolute zero producing superconductivity to the large dipole magnets that are used to steer protons around the Large Hadron Collider’s circular tract, non-superconductive magnets simply would not be strong enough to handle the proton beams, which would steer off-track, and at such operational energy levels upon hitting the collider pipe walls can apparently melt through meters of steel in nanoseconds
With the oncoming winter months and the two months delay to resurrect the LHC there is a possibility that because of the facility shutting down during the winter to save on energy costs there won’t be any collision until 2009.
September 23, 2008 at 11:32 am
Here’s an alternative headline for you:
Today’s Tom Scott cartoon makes no sense, as the end of the world as seen from the vantage point of the lower panel would not emit any sound waves, and furthermore the Solar System is not drawn to a realistic scale
There is no excuse whatsoever to publish a cartoon in complete ignorance of science as taught in every New Zealand high school.
September 23, 2008 at 11:35 am
To be fair, the cartoon was probably drawn several weeks ago, was not considered to be good (or topical?) enough to publish, but was kept in the drawer , until Mr Scott developed a case of Cartoonist’s Block – which has happened now.
September 23, 2008 at 12:19 pm
It’s a great cartoon! Despite the LHC being offline, it was probably an editorial decision to publish anyway. The cartoon is inherently funny and creative and readers would enjoy it.
[Poneke says: It was so factually inaccurate that it makes Scott and the ComPost look stupid, actually. They'd never have published it if they had read their own paper.]
September 23, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Today’s Tom Scott cartoon makes no sense, as the end of the world as seen from the vantage point of the lower panel would not emit any sound waves, and furthermore the Solar System is not drawn to a realistic scale
Have some pity for Mr Scott! How can you draw a convincing cartoon of a golfball sized disc and eight dots, together with an indefinitely large number of dots from the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud, scatter them over an over an A1 sized double spread of all the pages of 3 Saturday editions of the Duminion, label it the solar system, and expect them to publish it?
September 23, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Haha, I love your nicknames for the Dom …
- Dim-Post
- Duminion
- ComPost
September 23, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Only the ComPost is mine, Ropata.
Dim-Post is Danyl’s brilliant creation, one of my favourite blogs:
http://dimpost.wordpress.com/
September 24, 2008 at 9:55 am
Oops (Duminion) – mine was a straight typo…