the Large Hadron Collider is scary.

This is the Large Hadron Collider. For those of you who are unfamliar, the LHC is the world's largest particle accellerator, a 27 km tube that has been constructed underground near Switzerland for the purpose of accelerating protons to nearly the speed of light and then smashing them together. Most physicists are hoping that the reactions that result from these collisions are going to lead to important discoveries about the nature of the universe. Oh yeah, and there is also a small group of scientists who believe that the LHC is going to create an artificial black hole that will destroy the Earth.

Today, for the very first time after many years and several billion dollars, they turned it on.

So while the fact that I am here writing this at the moment is a good indication that the world, as of yet, has not been destroyed, I will provide a handy website here that lets us know if any black hole, world-ending funny business is going on. While the general scientific consensus indicates that we are probably going to be fine, I am not going to be making any long-term plans just to be sure. In fact, I believe I'll use the Large Hadron Collider's potential apocalyptic capabilities as a further excuse not to clean my room. So unless we are all swallowed by a black hole later today, everyone wins.