Dim-Post is Danyl’s brilliant creation, one of my favourite blogs:

http://dimpost.wordpress.com/

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?

[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.]

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.

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.