• I don’t have much to say. Um, yeah. Except in some cases…
• I have too much to say. When I really get going on a subject, I’ll end up with walls of text about space probes or megabytes or hamburgers. tl;dr
• I lack focus. My blog is too general to even appeal to me.
• I’d rather do than write. I’ve tried to write about my interests, but writing about them necessarily takes time away from doing them.
• I lack the ego. It really takes the wind out of my sails when there are hundreds of millions of blogs and there is literally no reason for anyone except the people I know to read mine. Besides, I could just tell them what I want to say directly. But then they don’t get to deal with my superfluous italicizing.
• I never know how to end a post. Um, yeah.

Time-traveling bosons can try as hard as they want, but the Large Hadron Collider’s real Achilles’ Heel?  Bread.  And birds,  apparently.

A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating on parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic safety detectors would have shut down the machine.

I admit there are some eventualities you just can’t plan for, but come on!  How are you going to destroy the world if you’re thwarted by bread?!  I mean… no.

(via Universe Today, Bread Dropped By Bird Causes Problems for LHC.)

Hey, pretty neat. One problem: where did I get a signed copy of this CD? I can’t remember! And who is John Sid? The signature obscured by the sticker is definitely John Flansburgh’s, consisting of a bespectacled smiley face in place of the “o.”  I can only assume that the top signature is one of John Linnel’s pseudonyms; he has been know to sign things “J.Lo Linnel” among others. This does not solve the problem of where this CD came from, however. Anybody have any ideas?

It also works with square megaparsecs and yottameters, but I think I’m the only one geeky enough to even know those units existed.

In the game I am charged with preparing a Blue Helena, a cocktail with supposed mystic properties, which will cure an ailing opera singer and return her voice to its once former glory. After completing this task I thought it would be interesting to actually make the drink. If you have not yet played Syberia, and plan on doing so, I would skip the directions since they are the actual recipe used in solving the in-game puzzle. Just look at the picture or something.

Blue Helena recipe

• 1 part vodka
• 1 part blue curacao
• 1 part honey (warmed)
• dash of lime (or lemon)

Fill a shaker with ice. Add the vodka, curacao, and honey and shake vigorously. Strain the contents into a highball glass filled with ice. Squeeze in a dash of lemon or lime and gently stir.

The result is a pretty blue drink that basically tastes like a Kamikaze. The honey adds little to the flavor, quickly hardens, and sticks to the ice or the side of the glass. Overall not a failure, but nothing to write home about. Now I’m off to play more games in search of drink recipes.