April 2010
April 4, 2010
OK, guys. Remember the controversy about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and how it was going to cause a black hole? Well, instead it caused time travel.
A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large
Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was
from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he
had traveled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.
The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.
Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device that resembled a kitchen blender.
Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie
and rather too much tweed for his age, would
not reveal his country of origin. "Countries do not exist where I am
from. The discovery of the Higgs
boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and
Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here
to stop it ever happening."
This isn't the first time
time-travel has been blamed for mishaps at the LHC. Last year, the
Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer
Holger Bech Nielsen put
forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so "abhorrent" that
it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery.
Professor Brian Cox, a former CERN physicist and full-time rock'n'roll TV scientist, was sympathetic to Mr Cole. "Bless him, he sounds harmless enough. At least he didn't mention bloody black holes."
Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.
If you don't know what the Higgs boson is, look it up. Oh yes, the date of that article was April 1.
April 11, 2010
Good start this month.
April 16, 2010
SEC finally does something useful: it charged Goldman with fraud. I hope that they cannot weasel out of this. If the facts are anything close to the allegations, they are just contemptible. I certainly would not trust any of the big firms on Wall St.
April 24, 2010
Doing pretty well this month, but not performing as well as IWM and QQQQ. When the market is good, those are the areas that seem to outperform. Of course, I invest fairly conservatively.
April 27, 2010
Three timely cartoons. Mark Wahlberg has said he consults a priest before taking a part. I wonder if that applied to Boogie Nights. Interesting that the NFL is more forthright than the pope. And of course a cover-up is par for the course in the Catholic Church. Then the ratings agencies were useful only to the sellers.
Sec Staff Watching Porn on the Job
So the NFL Commissioner has a Better Rep than the Pope
Exactly What Happened in the Financial Markets
May 1, 2010
Certainly a volatile month - particularly the last three days - down, up, and then down. We will see what next month brings. My first reaction is that the market is nuts, but so what? It is just what we have to deal with.