One Man's Trial, and Gratitude for Life

Rich Brodsky is Atomic Skunk. He's a musician whom I met via social networking. He writes cool ambient music. He also had brain surgery earlier this week. Second time in ten years, to address a slowly growing tumor. His remarkable blog post, written quickly after his experience, "Mr. Skunk's Wild Ride," is surely worth reading.

I wish the Skunk well in his recovery.

A Bigger Bet on the Large Hadron Collider

Cribbing from the style of InstaPundit.com, I'm writing a short item here (rather than my usual long-winded ones) highlighting an interesting piece in First Things.

In it, physicist Stephen Barr suggests that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has to do more than discover the Higgs boson particle to be interesting. That's pretty much a given. Rather, it should also shed light on why the Higgs boson, in the Higgs wave, in the Higgs field, doesn't make life impossible. For Barr at least, to discover, via the LHC, some countervailing force to the Higgs stuff, if I may, provides support for an "anthropic" or human-life centered view of our little region of the multiverse. Hmm, can God be far behind?

P.S. To my students who might be visiting my blog. Please forgive yet another story about the LHC. I assure you I'm not a physics geek masquerading as a philosophy teacher.