I had a conversation last week with some people who were frustrated that they saw a lot of discussion about lack of progress on LGBT rights, but didn't see the kind of practical, meat-and-potatoes organizing on LGBT issues as they did on things like health care-- things like, call this congressperson and exert pressure on this legislation. I was surprised to hear this, because I could name several groups or bloggers doing such organizing right now. We realized that maybe some of the less flashy but still quite practical activism on gay rights isn't getting the attention it needs, and as a result may not be connecting with potential volunteers.

Let's do something about that. Here, after the jump, is a short list of projects in need of volunteers and phone calls now. My rules for putting a group or project on this list is that it should:

• Have real volunteer activities that you can start doing right away-- not just "sign up for this mailing list and we'll ask you for money occasionally".
• Direct volunteer efforts toward a specific, immediate goal, preferably something where effort goes directly toward changing a law.

Let's not just talk about equality, let's start making it happen.

Read more »

But challenging as they are, it's not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It's the smallness of our politics.

-- Barack Obama, 2007, announcing his plans to run for President.

Revelers revealing how small they are.

--TPM commenter BlindBat, today, "Conservatives Revel in America's Olympic Defeat".

Here's the thing about the Republicans.

Read more »

The Washington D.C. City Council now looks set to legalize same-sex marriage in the district, with the first step in the process to be taken on Tuesday.

According to a copy of the bill, the city code would be changed to state 'marriage is the legally recognized union of two people' and 'any person ... may marry any other eligible person regardless of gender.' Catania's bill, which states religious organizations and officials have the right not to participate in same-sex marriages, is expected to pass the council easily when it comes up for a vote around Thanksgiving. Ten of 13 council members will co-introduce Catania's bill Tuesday, and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) has pledged to sign it.

The Washington D.C. city council floated a test balloon on this subject earlier this year, when they passed a bill under which Washington D.C.. now recognizes as valid same-sex marriages legally performed outside the district (the new bill would add the step of Washington D.C. granting same-sex marriage licenses itself). The first bill passed the council without real incident and failed to make any ripples with the other potential obstacle to marriage equality in D.C.-- the U.S. Congress, which under the "Home Rule" act has the right to veto any local law passed by D.C.'s elected city council by passing a joint resolution of disapproval. Between the ground cleared by that previous bill and the support lined up for this one, the new bill seems certain to pass.

Any marriages performed by the city of D.C. under this bill would of course not be recognized by the federal government, which under the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act does not recognize any same-sex marriage. A bill to repeal the DOMA was introduced this last month by Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York, but this is not expected to come up for a vote before the 2010 elections: Congress has several other gay rights bills under consideration, such as the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, which the Democratic leadership has said must be completed before a bill like Nadler's can be considered.

Over the last month, I've seen occasional freakouts from the blogosphere about Obama's position on the public option. Obama keeps saying-- as he has since the health care reform debate began this year-- that he wants, supports, would prefer a public option. But throughout this debate, he has refused to call a public option a necessity for the bill. He has refused to rule out public option alternatives-- he and his surrogates consistently refer to the public option, at best, as the "best way" to achieve their goals. He has refused to say he will oppose a bill that lacks the public option. Leaks about Obama's plans for next week indicate this is not likely to change.

This has lead to some consternation among the blogosphere. Whenever Obama reasserts his position that he will not kill the health care bill just because it lacks a public option, we see a bunch of blog posts and comments talking interpreting this as meaning that the public option is "dead", and that Obama MUST DEMAND a public option or they will never vote for a Democrat again.

I want to take a moment to talk about why Obama is unlikely to do that, why Obama probably doesn't need to do that, and how we get the public option passed anyway.

[Continues]

Read more »

Today the House adopted a rule on H.R. 1913, known as the Hate Crimes bill or, in previous Congresses, as the Matthew Shepard Act. This means they can be expected to take up and vote on the bill within the next few days-- and according to the Advocate will vote as early as tomorrow, Wednesday. (The Senate version of the bill was also introduced today but may take longer to come to a vote.) If this is an issue you're following, the time to contact your Congressperson is now. You can do this easily by calling 866-346-4611, the House switchboard.

If you haven't been following this bill, you can find its text here. It does two simple things:

1. Expands the existing definition of a "hate crime" to include gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability . (Under existing law, if someone commits a violent crime against someone which is motivated by the victim's race or religion, then that crime receives a harsher sentence than it would otherwise. HR 1913 simply expands the classes protected by this rule.)
   
2. Gives federal law enforcement greater leeway and resources to investigate and prosecute hate crimes, in case local law enforcement lacks the resources to, or chooses not to, investigate.
   

And just to be clear about this, because there's been a lot of misinformation about this bill: Yes, it has to be a violent crime-- assault or murder, or attempted assault or murder-- to fall under the classification of "hate crime". Nothing is illegal under H.R. 1913 which wouldn't have been illegal already.

H.R. 1913 is a big deal not just for what it does, but because it is the first salvo in a larger upcoming struggle over LGBT equality at the Federal level. The White House has laid out an aggressive agenda on LGBT rights, but up until this last week there has been silence from the Democratic leadership on implementing that agenda. That agenda is now finally being put into practice. Nancy Pelosi this week explained the schedule for this year, rephrasing a comment she has made several times this year, "we have the hate crimes legislation first and the ENDA [Employment Nondiscrimination Act] bill the next step after that". The other two big issues on the White House's gay rights agenda-- federal recognition of same-sex marriages and civil unions, and a removal of the ban on gays in the military-- are, according to both Pelosi and Barney Frank, on hold until next year.

This is a realistic schedule-- ENDA and Matthew Shepard are both bills with known support, both of which very almost passed into law in the last Congress and were stopped only due to maneuvering from the Bush White House and procedural errors by the House leadership, so it makes sense to prioritize those first. Still, it's going to take a lot of work to get these bills into law, especially given that the version of ENDA coming up in this Congress is more aggressive (i.e. trans-inclusive) than the one considered last Congress; and anyone who supports LGBT equality will need to keep on the Democrats in specific and the Congress in general to harness the momentum from these two bills into the more difficult fights over DADT and recognition of relationships next year.

UPDATE: C-SPAN is showing the house vote at 247-175 and completed. HR 1913 passes the House. Next hurdle is the Senate...

Earlier today Open Left made a post about Barack Obama and gay rights, I made this post in the comment section, essentially disagreeing. Trying not to get too tied up in specifics, the goal of their post was for some reason to argue that Barack Obama agrees with and is identical to Rick Warren on the specific subject of gay marriage, even though they may disagree on other gay rights issues. My comment attempted to respond that even given that he won't say the magic words "I support gay marriage" Obama is an ally on gay marriage in several specific objective ways, including that for example Obama supports federal recognition of same sex marriages where they exist. You can read the posts yourself if you like but the nastiest thing in my response, as far as I can tell, was the line:

Chris, Matt, this is why you have no allies: Because you throw them all away.

A couple minutes after making this post, Open Left showed me as logged out, and my ability to log back in was gone. (Attempts to log back in were met with a password error; attempts to use the "lost password" feature resulted in a new password mailed to me, which also met with a password error.) An email asking for verification as to whether I had been banned was not responded to. I am, apparently, now banned from Open Left.

I have some thoughts about this, and what I am taking away from this incident about the current state of the blogosphere in general.

Read more »

I've seen suggestions that the just-revealed pregnancy of Sarah Palin's daughter doesn't matter. I think it does. This is why:

Q: Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?

[Sarah Palin]: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.

The thing that's important about Palin's daughter's pregnancy is not that a 16-17 year old got pregnant out of wedlock and the family chose to support it. If that's their choice, that's their choice. The thing that's important is that Palin wants to create a situation that will tend to leave everyone else's 16-17 year olds pregnant as well, with choice nowhere in the equation.

Palin wants to prevent teenagers from learning what they need to know about sex, and instead replace that teaching with filler that moralizes and preaches but doesn't do anything. She wants to prevent abortions even in cases of rape or incest. She wanted to amend the Alaskan state constitution to require parental consent for teen abortions, ensuring that the choice in cases like Bristol Palin's will be made by the mother's parents and not the mother. She was put on the Republican VP ticket more or less explicitly as a representative of the American evangelical subculture which believes all these things and wants to write them into our laws.

The Bristol Palin situation matters because of what it tells us about why Sarah Palin, and the subculture she represents, is doing all these things.

A drive-by commenter at 538 says:

Sarah and Todd Palin have issued the following statement: "We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby..."

Interesting. I see that this was Bristol's DECISION and they are proud of her DECISION. They are glad that she exercised her CHOICE.

They are in deed (if not in word) pro-choice.

A thread-starter at FreeRepublic says this:

Mary, Unwed Mother of Jesus, Did Not Abort the Baby
Bible ^ | 1 AD | Bible

Posted on 09/01/2008 12:03:15 PM PDT by xzins

Mary, unwed mother, did not abort the baby Jesus.

She did the right thing.

Joseph had his concerns, but he came around when God spoke to his heart about what he really believed.

Sarah Palin says she's "proud".

What we see here is the intellectual bankruptcy of the "pro-life", anti-contraception, anti-sexual-freedom crowd: that they don't and probably never did care about the sex, that they don't care so much about marriage as long as you get that in place retroactively, that their morality begins and ends with creating babies. This is what the "culture of life" is about, where its endpoint goes: Teen pregnancy isn't a bad thing or something to be concerned about, it's essentially neutral. The only point at which teen pregnancy becomes a practical or moral problem is if you try to prevent it.

So thinking about the fight ahead of us in opposing the California same-sex marriage ban Proposition 8, there are two things I keep returning to:

1. It is sometimes a little difficult for the average anti-8 volunteer to know exactly what the opportunities for activism are in one's particular area.

2. Since Barack Obama opposes Prop. 8, and I find it likely there is some decent overlap between Obama supporters and Prop. 8 opponents, I'm curious whether there's some way to build synergy between the Obama and anti-8 volunteer efforts.

In an attempt to help with these two things, I have created a group on my.barackobama.com: Obama Supporters Against California Proposition 8:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/ObamaSupportersAgainstCaliforniaProposit

The purpose of this group is to use the MyBo tools to track volunteer opportunities opposing Prop. 8 and supporting marriage equality. At the moment, I am using it to catalog emails and events from Equality for All, the California statewide effort to oppose Proposition 8; and BAYMEC, the LGBT election committee for the San Francisco Bay Area). At the moment there is a single event listed there (the ongoing EFA phonebanking in San Francisco against Prop. 8).

I hope that people find this useful. I think recent events have demonstrated the movement Barack Obama has not been building is not just a movement to get Barack Obama elected, but a movement to change America; and that movement can be a vehicle for real progressive change above and beyond Obama's election itself.

If you are a MyBo user, you can join the Obama Supporters Against California Proposition 8 group just by going to the link and clicking "Join Group" while logged in. The group is set up so anyone can add events, and if anyone else has any suggestions for activist groups besides EFA and BAYMEC that I should be watching for events to add-- or suggestions in general-- I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

Over the last few days I have seen several posters at TPM comment that they're getting burnt out on all election news, all the time, and a couple people have commented they'd even be interested in hearing about something other than politics for once.

The obvious solution to this, as I see it, is to talk about GIANT SCIENCE LASERS.

So let's do that for a minute. This is actually the perfect time to talk about giant science lasers, because we are very close to the completion of something called the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous science experiment that thousands of people have been working on for years and which finally-- after years of delays-- appears to be on track to get the "on" switch flipped sometime in July. 

The experiment works like this: Dig a 17-mile-long circular concrete tunnel under a mountain in Switzerland. Pump all the air out and freeze the insides to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, colder than deep space. Then, put two giant particle beams inside, and fire them at each other. 

Why on earth are they doing this? Well, the LHC is a kind of experiment called a "particle accelerator", which works on the principle of blowing things up and seeing what comes out. This isn't a very accurate way of describing how it works, but: you know that "E = MC^2" equation, the one that explains energy and mass are really the same thing? Well, the basic idea is that if you put enough energy in one place, that energy can slosh over to the right side of the equation and turn into matter. A slightly more accurate way of putting this is that everything in the universe-- matter, light, everything-- is made of particles, and each particle has a certain energy (which is the same thing as mass) associated with it. When you put a bunch of energy in one place, this energy turns into a collection of randomly picked particles, whose combined energies are equal to the energy you put in. 

This is incredibly useful for physicists, because it means that if you want to know what kinds of particles exist in the universe, all you have to do is do something that releases a bunch of energy, and you'll get a randomly selected batch of particles flying out of nowhere. Then all you have to do is catch the particles and see what they were. This simple trick has basically been the driving force behind particle physics for seventy years: the experimentalists keep building more powerful particle accelerators, giving them the ability to see particles with higher energies than they could before; then the theorists try to come up with a theory that explains why that set of particles exists; and the theories they come up with usually wind up predicting other particles, particles that haven't been seen yet, which means the experimentalists have to go back and build another particle accelerator to look for them. This game of experimentalist/theorist leapfrog has become so central to physics that physicists barely know what to do without it-- so much so that after the particle accelerator that was supposed to have been built in the 90s, the Superconducting Supercollider, got cancelled, the theorists all started getting cabin fever and raving about "11-dimensional membranes" and "the anthropic multiverse".

But now we've got the Large Hadron Collider, so that's okay. The LHC has about 7 times more energy than the last particle accelerator to get built (the "Tevatron" in Illinois, finished in the early 80s) and about 100 times the "luminosity". The LHC makes its energy by taking protons-- which, by the way, are "Hadrons", large ones-- accelerating them to incredible speed, and then smashing them into each other; so here "energy" refers to how much energy released is in each collision, and "luminosity" refers to how often the collisions occur. Luminosity is important because the higher your luminosity the more quickly you can gather lots of data. 

And you need lots of data, because the collisions in particle accelerator don't necessarily spit out the particles you want to see: the particles that come out are, again, random. Worse, you don't actually get to look at the particles themselves, because most of the interesting particles are horribly unstable and only exist for incredibly short amounts of time before falling apart or turning into something else (which kind of makes sense, because if the particles were stable and long-lived they'd just be hanging out all over the place and you wouldn't need a particle accelerator to look for them, right?). So the particle detectors that analyze the aftermath of the collisions don't actually get to look at the particles that were generated, just their aftermath-- the unstable interesting particles instantly fall apart into slightly less interesting but still unstable particles,  which then fall apart into boring stable particles. The detectors then pick up the shotgun spray of thirdhand boring particles that are left over.

So let's say that you get this spray of particles, and the spray of particles is consistent with the spray of particles you'd get from the decay of, I don't know, a top quark. You're then left with the question: Is this the aftermath of a top quark? Or is it just a random spray of particles, noise that coincidentally happens to look like the remnants of an exploding top quark? You can't really tell. The only way to figure out what you're looking at is to gather lots and lots of these little particle sprays and do statistical model fitting to shake the coincidences out.

The main thing the LHC is hoping to detect in its statistical model fitting is something called the "Higgs Boson". The Higgs Boson is the one outstanding item in the physicists' eternal game of leapfrog, the very last thing that the theorists are certain exists but the experimentalists have never found. The Higgs is part of what's called the "Standard Model", which is a collection of different known "fields" that show up in nature and are what particles are made out of-- like there's a field for electrons, and a field for each kind of neutrino and quark. There's one field, though, the Higgs field, that doesn't normally make particles-- instead it's just kind of this flat ocean of Higgsness, identical everywhere. Although the Higgs field doesn't ever do anything itself, though, the fact it's there has a huge impact on things-- particles would act completely different, and in fact wouldn't even have mass, if it wasn't for the Higgs field permeating everything and interfering with how all the particle fields operate.

Although the Higgs field doesn't normally form particles, one of the possible outcomes of a particle collider collision is that the collision could cause a ripple in the normally flat ocean that is the Higgs field, and that ripple would look just like a particle. This ripple is the "Higgs Boson" physicists at the LHC want to find, and if they can trap the Higgs Boson and measure what it's like then a lot of stuff about the Standard Model will start to make a lot more sense. There's also some other, speculative stuff that people are hoping the LHC might find-- like "supersymmetric superpartners" (don't ask) or "WiMPs" (which are the particles that a lot of people think are the cause of "dark matter"). But nobody's sure whether the other stuff even exists, so the Higgs is target #1.

All this LHC stuff is being done by CERN, who are incidentally the people who invented the World Wide Web (which just in case the giant concrete fortress under a mountain in switzerland didn't tip you off, that should prove-- yes, they are supervillains).

So, when's all this going to happen? Well, everything's actually ready to go already except the particle beams. The detectors have actually been running since the end of last year; since there aren't any collisions going on, they've just been sitting there measuring the cosmic rays from outer space that sometimes pass through the LHC's mountain. (Incidentally, if you hear anyone in the news claiming the LHC might somehow create tiny black holes or strangelets or something and destroy the earth, this is how you know to ignore them-- cosmic ray collisions are actually more energetic than the LHC, and those happen all the time in the upper atmosphere. If anything that could happen at the LHC was capable of destroying the earth, it would have happened millions and millions of years ago.)

The particle beam, according to the most recent reports I'm aware of, is set to switch on for the first time in early July; but once they turn it on, the first few months are going to be spent just testing it. So the assumption would be that the first "physics collisions" will be happening in September; again though they have to gather a lot of data before they can actually understand what any of it means, so we probably shouldn't expect published results for at least a year after the data starts coming in, probably even longer. But, nevertheless, after years of waiting, the collisions themselves are not far away.

So as the marathon primary finally winds to a close and the general election begins in earnest, as the election itself approaches and we move deeper and deeper into "silly season", remember this, and perhaps it will provide some comfort: Somewhere on the France-Switzerland border, underneath a mountain, things are blowing up.

FURTHER READING: IF ANY OF THIS ACTUALLY INTERESTED YOU, YOU MAY WANT TO TRY FOLLOWING THESE:

The USLHC blog -- This is a group blog where the U.S. contingent among the scientists at the LHC intermittently post about their experiences there

Not Even Wrong -- This blog normally exists just for this guy who works at Columbia University to complain about String Theory, but sometimes he gets distracted and writes startlingly in-depth analyses of up-to-the-minute science news instead

Dorigo -- This is actually a blog by a scientist working at the Tevatron, the LHC's predecessor in Illinois. Although it's not about the LHC, the author's experience with the particle accelerator he works for often allows him to give useful (although perhaps a bit pessimistic) insight into what to expect of the LHC

Over the last few days I have seen several posters at TPM comment that they're getting burnt out on all election news, all the time, and a couple people have commented they'd even be interested in hearing about something other than politics for once.

The obvious solution to this, as I see it, is to talk about GIANT SCIENCE LASERS.

So let's do that for a minute. This is actually the perfect time to talk about giant science lasers, because we are very close to the completion of something called the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous science experiment that thousands of people have been working on for years and which finally-- after years of delays-- appears to be on track to get the "on" switch flipped sometime in July. 

The experiment works like this: Dig a 17-mile-long circular concrete tunnel under a mountain in Switzerland. Pump all the air out and freeze the insides to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, colder than deep space. Then, put two giant particle beams inside, and fire them at each other. 

Why on earth are they doing this? Well, the LHC is a kind of experiment called a "particle accelerator", which works on the principle of blowing things up and seeing what comes out. This isn't a very accurate way of describing how it works, but: you know that "E = MC^2" equation, the one that explains energy and mass are really the same thing? Well, the basic idea is that if you put enough energy in one place, that energy can slosh over to the right side of the equation and turn into matter. A slightly more accurate way of putting this is that everything in the universe-- matter, light, everything-- is made of particles, and each particle has a certain energy (which is the same thing as mass) associated with it. When you put a bunch of energy in one place, this energy turns into a collection of randomly picked particles, whose combined energies are equal to the energy you put in. 

This is incredibly useful for physicists, because it means that if you want to know what kinds of particles exist in the universe, all you have to do is do something that releases a bunch of energy, and you'll get a randomly selected batch of particles flying out of nowhere. Then all you have to do is catch the particles and see what they were. This simple trick has basically been the driving force behind particle physics for seventy years: the experimentalists keep building more powerful particle accelerators, giving them the ability to see particles with higher energies than they could before; then the theorists try to come up with a theory that explains why that set of particles exists; and the theories they come up with usually wind up predicting other particles, particles that haven't been seen yet, which means the experimentalists have to go back and build another particle accelerator to look for them. This game of experimentalist/theorist leapfrog has become so central to physics that physicists barely know what to do without it-- so much so that after the particle accelerator that was supposed to have been built in the 90s, the Superconducting Supercollider, got cancelled, the theorists all started getting cabin fever and raving about "11-dimensional membranes" and "the anthropic multiverse".

But now we've got the Large Hadron Collider, so that's okay. The LHC has about 7 times more energy than the last particle accelerator to get built (the "Tevatron" in Illinois, finished in the early 80s) and about 100 times the "luminosity". The LHC makes its energy by taking protons-- which, by the way, are "Hadrons", large ones-- accelerating them to incredible speed, and then smashing them into each other; so here "energy" refers to how much energy released is in each collision, and "luminosity" refers to how often the collisions occur. Luminosity is important because the higher your luminosity the more quickly you can gather lots of data. 

And you need lots of data, because the collisions in particle accelerator don't necessarily spit out the particles you want to see: the particles that come out are, again, random. Worse, you don't actually get to look at the particles themselves, because most of the interesting particles are horribly unstable and only exist for incredibly short amounts of time before falling apart or turning into something else (which kind of makes sense, because if the particles were stable and long-lived they'd just be hanging out all over the place and you wouldn't need a particle accelerator to look for them, right?). So the particle detectors that analyze the aftermath of the collisions don't actually get to look at the particles that were generated, just their aftermath-- the unstable interesting particles instantly fall apart into slightly less interesting but still unstable particles,  which then fall apart into boring stable particles. The detectors then pick up the shotgun spray of thirdhand boring particles that are left over.

So let's say that you get this spray of particles, and the spray of particles is consistent with the spray of particles you'd get from the decay of, I don't know, a top quark. You're then left with the question: Is this the aftermath of a top quark? Or is it just a random spray of particles, noise that coincidentally happens to look like the remnants of an exploding top quark? You can't really tell. The only way to figure out what you're looking at is to gather lots and lots of these little particle sprays and do statistical model fitting to shake the coincidences out.

The main thing the LHC is hoping to detect in its statistical model fitting is something called the "Higgs Boson". The Higgs Boson is the one outstanding item in the physicists' eternal game of leapfrog, the very last thing that the theorists are certain exists but the experimentalists have never found. The Higgs is part of what's called the "Standard Model", which is a collection of different known "fields" that show up in nature and are what particles are made out of-- like there's a field for electrons, and a field for each kind of neutrino and quark. There's one field, though, the Higgs field, that doesn't normally make particles-- instead it's just kind of this flat ocean of Higgsness, identical everywhere. Although the Higgs field doesn't ever do anything itself, though, the fact it's there has a huge impact on things-- particles would act completely different, and in fact wouldn't even have mass, if it wasn't for the Higgs field permeating everything and interfering with how all the particle fields operate.

Although the Higgs field doesn't normally form particles, one of the possible outcomes of a particle collider collision is that the collision could cause a ripple in the normally flat ocean that is the Higgs field, and that ripple would look just like a particle. This ripple is the "Higgs Boson" physicists at the LHC want to find, and if they can trap the Higgs Boson and measure what it's like then a lot of stuff about the Standard Model will start to make a lot more sense. There's also some other, speculative stuff that people are hoping the LHC might find-- like "supersymmetric superpartners" (don't ask) or "WiMPs" (which are the particles that a lot of people think are the cause of "dark matter"). But nobody's sure whether the other stuff even exists, so the Higgs is target #1.

All this LHC stuff is being done by CERN, who are incidentally the people who invented the World Wide Web (which just in case the giant concrete fortress under a mountain in switzerland didn't tip you off, that should prove-- yes, they are supervillains).

So, when's all this going to happen? Well, everything's actually ready to go already except the particle beams. The detectors have actually been running since the end of last year; since there aren't any collisions going on, they've just been sitting there measuring the cosmic rays from outer space that sometimes pass through the LHC's mountain. (Incidentally, if you hear anyone in the news claiming the LHC might somehow create tiny black holes or strangelets or something and destroy the earth, this is how you know to ignore them-- cosmic ray collisions are actually more energetic than the LHC, and those happen all the time in the upper atmosphere. If anything that could happen at the LHC was capable of destroying the earth, it would have happened millions and millions of years ago.)

The particle beam, according to the most recent reports I'm aware of, is set to switch on for the first time in early July; but once they turn it on, the first few months are going to be spent just testing it. So the assumption would be that the first "physics collisions" will be happening in September; again though they have to gather a lot of data before they can actually understand what any of it means, so we probably shouldn't expect published results for at least a year after the data starts coming in, probably even longer. But, nevertheless, after years of waiting, the collisions themselves are not far away.

So as the marathon primary finally winds to a close and the general election begins in earnest, as the election itself approaches and we move deeper and deeper into "silly season", remember this, and perhaps it will provide some comfort: Somewhere on the France-Switzerland border, underneath a mountain, things are blowing up.

FURTHER READING: IF ANY OF THIS ACTUALLY INTERESTED YOU, YOU MAY WANT TO TRY FOLLOWING THESE:

The USLHC blog -- This is a group blog where the U.S. contingent among the scientists at the LHC intermittently post about their experiences there

Not Even Wrong -- This blog normally exists just for this guy who works at Columbia University to complain about String Theory, but sometimes he gets distracted and writes startlingly in-depth analyses of up-to-the-minute science news instead

Dorigo -- This is actually a blog by a scientist working at the Tevatron, the LHC's predecessor in Illinois. Although it's not about the LHC, the author's experience with the particle accelerator he works for often allows him to give useful (although perhaps a bit pessimistic) insight into what to expect of the LHC