In case you’ve been canoodling with your supermodel and not reading this blog, you may not know that the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is due to go online.(1) Or is it? No one can really be certain. After 14 years and billions of dollars, it’s had a number of delays but they have intended to make up for lost time by just eliminating minor steps, like a low energy run.(2)

“We’ll be starting up for physics in May 2008, as always foreseen, and will commission the machine to full energy in one go,” said LHC Project Leader Lyn Evans.

Oh my.

But before you get concerned, let’s keep in mind that science is often done without being absolutely certain about every little detail. As train engines were being developed, they tested them using dogs because they were not certain how humans would respond to high speeds, 30 plus miles per hour. In hindsight that seems quaint but it was scientifically prudent. You can think of the LHC experiments like the early days of trains, except if something goes wrong you, your loved ones and the entire galaxy could be sucked into some alternate universe and be ruled by our new Strangelet Overlords.

I was puttering around the attic of the Cashominium, trying to sort through some old boxes, and I came across something you all might find interesting. Before any of this makes sense, I need to give you a little family background.

Like many, the Cash family has been here a long time (a long time for America, anyway - here a hundred years is a long time and in Europe a hundred miles is a long distance, so it’s all perspective) but we are not blueblooded fancy-pants Mayflower descendants or anything like that. We arrived just over 160 years ago. The mid-1800s were a popular time to leave Europe, what with land and opportunity here and there being the place where guys like Napoleon were still fashionable and ‘reform’ meant killing a lot of people, but we weren’t the working poor that left because of lousy potato crops or anything so dire.

More predictably, legend has it that old Jebediah left Britain under some questionable circumstances - namely a scandal involving a woman.

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I’m usually a pretty patient guy about marketing. Unlike some, I am not educated by it and, unlike others, I don’t look down on it. I know why it it exists and I appreciate its value but at some point in advocacy issues ( in this case the environment ) it invariably crosses a line from being funny to offensive and then it goes completely over the line into being the kind of junk science that needs to be ridiculed.

My latest gripe is the claim that low energy bulbs are a magic panacea for the environment and that they are wonderful in all respects. I don’t use them and there are a few compelling reasons why you should focus on other ways to save the environment also.

The main reason I don’t use them is because I am not smug enough.

You know what I am talking about. Who actually laughed at those Apple television ads where the smug, hipster guy is the Apple user and the buffoon uses a PC? It takes some true marketing incompetence to make Microsoft seem lovable but they did it. The only people who liked those ads were Apple users, who are already smug.

Now we have commercials where a hip CFL bulb guilt trips a traditional light bulb in the same condescending manner - and without about the same level of actual data behind it. It will sell some lightbulbs - and maybe make your cat insane, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s discuss light.

The whole point of light bulbs was to give us daylight at night - at first, anything was better than dark but we later discovered that the closer you can get to natural light, the better off you will be. Here is a chart showing the light spectrum, including daylight, incandescent and fluorescent bulbs.

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