So called "Assault Weapons Bans" such as the now expired 1994 Clinton ban and the one still in place in states such as California seek to ban rifles that our misguided legislators feel have no purpose in civilian hands. They identify "evil features" they can use to generically classify these "military style" weapons in sweeping terms. Of course these features, such as plastic pistol grips, barrel shrouds, and bayonet lugs have absolutely nothing to do with the firearms potential lethality in the real world and are merely cosmetic features. After all, it really doesn't matter what color the firearm is if it fires the same ammunition right? Well, in the "spirit" of the California Assault Weapon Ban I decided to do my best to alleviate the fears of my fellow citizens and gun-banning legislators when I put together a new AR-15 for my wife. Below is the result of my painstaking work to transform an Evil Black Rifle (EBR) into a Cute Pink RIfle (CPR). Introducing the Hell Kitten AR-15!
This rifle is 100% legal in California because it is based on an "off-list" lower receiver made by Stag Arms and has no evil features at all, instead featuring a fixed stock instead of the evil collapsible stock, a muzzle brake in place of the vile flash-hider, and a MonsterMan Grip instead of the heinous and malicious plastic pistol grip. The C Products magazine looks like a 30 round magazine body but is permanently modified to only allow 10 rounds.
Leon Sempsrott, on my porch, in May of 2007
Doctor Who is back
Apr 2 2008 by Karen Price, Western Mail
WRITER Russell T Davies has revealed that one of his main aims when reviving Doctor Who was to create a weekly “event” for the whole family.
Despite the fact that episodes of the cult sci-fi show may feature the infamous Daleks and much gore, the Welshman was keen to resurrect the Time Lord after generations of children missed out on his adventures.
The fourth series penned by Davies starts on Saturday when David Tennant, in the title role, is reunited with TV funny woman Catherine Tate, who appeared in the Christmas Day 2006 episode.
She is one of a handful of big names, including ER actress Alex Kingston, Felicity Kendal and Sarah Lancashire, who Davies has introduced in a bid to make the show “bigger and blowsier”.
The series was revived by BBC Wales in 2005 and it is stars like Tate and Kylie Minogue, who appeared in the last festive episode, who are helping pull in younger audiences.
“We knew there were lots of people who’d not seen it before. We were writing for them, really,” says Davies on bringing back Doctor Who after 16 years.
“All the elements of the show were there, the Tardis, the sonic screwdriver, but it was a clean start,” he says. “The dread was that mum and dad would sit down and watch the show, but the kids wouldn’t because, let’s face it, you don’t want to do what your parents do when you’re a kid, and anything they watch is automatically bad.
“That was a very big worry at first, but I think it was a cynical view of families. It turns out kids love sitting with their mums and dads to watch TV, especially ‘event’ television like X Factor finals and things like that.
“I just knew if we could create that sense of event every week we’d stand a chance of being successful and getting an audience. And I was right,” he says.
And it is not just families which Doctor Who is appealing too – it seems famous names are also queuing up to appear in the show.
After starring in the Christmas 2006 special, The Runaway Bride, Tate loved the show so much that she wanted to commit to a full run of the programme.
“We had no idea Catherine was going to come back to us, none at all,” says Davies, whose other credits include writing award-winning series Queer As Folk and creating hit Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood.
“We couldn’t believe we got her for the special really, she’s so in-demand. And not just that, Catherine generates her own stuff, she’s a writer too, so she’s always busy.
“It came about after Catherine had a meeting with Jane Tranter, BBC Head of Fiction. Jane rang me and said Catherine had gone on and on about Doctor Who and how much she’d enjoyed the special. Jane said, ‘I might be mad, but if you ask her to do the series, I think she’ll say yes.’
“I thought it was ridiculous, but my colleague Julie [Gardner, BBC Wales’ head of drama] jumped on a train to go and meet with Catherine two days later. I didn’t go because I was busy saying, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, we’ll never get her’.
“But Julie went and Catherine agreed to a whole series and cancelled all her plans there and then! She moved to Cardiff for nine months to film as well, which is some commitment.”
And Davies is delighted to have secured the star, who has won critical acclaim for her sketch series The Catherine Tate Show.
“She’s absolutely fantastic,” he says. “That’s why we wanted to bring Donna back and why I wanted to write more for her.
“Obviously Catherine can do comedy with her eyes shut, and there’s a lot of comedy in Doctor Who, but when she hits the tragedy – and there’s a lot of tragedy for her character in this series – Catherine gives the most stunning performance.
“Seriously, when I pack my bags on Doctor Who, I am knocking on Catherine’s door and asking what we’re doing next. She’s brilliant.”
Davies also heaps praise on Scottish actor Tennant – the second Doctor Who he has worked with.
“There’s a danger we don’t talk about David often enough. He’s so powerful, and brave, and scintillating as The Doctor, there’s almost a danger of him blinding everything else. That’s why we have to have an equal aboard the Tardis in the companion. Suddenly it becomes a different dynamic and we see David upping his game to compete with Catherine. It’s amazing.”
But Davies admits that when it comes to guest stars, it can be difficult writing scenes for them.
“You can’t really write with a guest star in mind – well only in very exceptional cases.
“Kylie Minogue was one, and Catherine Tate’s first appearance another, where we booked them up well in advance,” Davies tells the Radio Times.
“But normally, it’s not possible because you only really start on an episode six weeks before you film it, so you never know whether someone’s going to be free.
“There’s a great danger in writing for someone and then they get offered a film, or they just don’t fancy it. So it’s dangerous territory to enter.
“If anything, we’ve tried to make the casting bigger because we’ve tried to make it a bigger and blowsier show.”
Davies is also keen to recruit the cream of the crop.
“You’ve just got to cast well. When you have David Tennant in the leading role, you can’t surround him with rubbish. You owe it to him to give him a cast that will excite him.”
One thing Davies won’t give away is storylines but he says there’s a lot to look forward to during the 13-episode run, including more in the way of darker material for Tennant as well as some comedy moments.
“I can say monster race the Ood are back, and they look fantastic, plus there are various other surprises, with everything building toward the most staggering climax you will ever see!”
Doctor Who is on BBC1 on Saturday at 6.20pm
What has Doctor Who done for Wales? Don’t miss the Western Mail Magazine this Saturday
A guide to the new episodes
Episode 1: Partners in Crime (guest star: Sarah Lancashire)
Set in modern-day London where a brand new diet pill is being tested by the mysterious Adipose Industries. The Doctor starts investigating when there are unexplained deaths and strange creatures in the shadows – but an old friend of his is also on the case.
Episode 2: The Fires Of Pompeii (guest stars: Phil Davis, Peter Capaldi and Sasha Behar)
Set in Pompeii AD79 where psychic powers are running rampant, a secretive Sisterhood conceals a horrifying High Priestess and beneath the ground, vast creatures are stirring. Donna challenges the Time Lord like no one has ever done before.
Episode 3: Planet Of The Ood (guest star: Tim McInnerny)
It’s Donna’s first visit to an alien world but, on the icescapes of a distant planet, the greatest danger might be from the human race itself.
Episode 4: The Sontaran Stratagem and Episode 5: The Poison Sky (guest star: Christopher Ryan)
Freema Agyeman returns as Martha Jones who is back home again in her new job as medical officer for a worldwide army dedicated to fighting alien menaces. But the menace is bigger than ever.
Episode 6: The Doctor’s Daughter (guest stars: Georgia Moffett and Nigel Terry)
David Tennant takes the Doctor into new territory with what is described as his “most spellbinding performance yet”.
Episode 7: The Unicorn And The Wasp (guest stars Felicity Kendal and Fenella Woolgar)
A classic murder mystery with a country house, vintage cars, a flapper, a vicar, a body in the library – and the disappearance of Agatha Christie.
Episode 8: Silence In The Library and Episode 9: River’s Run (guest stars Alex Kingston and Colin Salmon)
Two episodes of terror with an abandoned library, moving shadows, the gruesome Nodes and the horrifying Data Ghost.
Episode 10: Midnight (guest stars: Lesley Sharp, Lindsey Coulson, David Troughton)
Midnight is a planet leisure world with golden spas, diamond landscapes and anti-gravity restaurants. For once the Doctor’s left powerless and terrified as the knocking on the wall begins...
Episode 11: Turn Left (guest star: Chipo Chung)
The strands of Donna’s story begin to draw to a terrible climax as she finds her life, her family, her entire world being devastated. Only one person can help – and it’s not the Doctor.
Episode 12: Untitled and Episode 13: Journey’s End (guest stars: to be revealed)
The finale is a double bill but the title of episode 12 is remaining under wraps so it doesn’t give the game away. But there’s a threat on an epic scale as an ancient enemy is resurrected and the whole universe is thrown into danger. (guest star: Sarah Lancashire)
The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.
Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe's CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there's no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they're bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.
The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN's headquarters on the French-Swiss border. It's expected to tackle some of the deepest questions in science: Is the foundation of modern physics right or wrong? What existed during the very first moment of the universe's existence? Why do some particles have mass while others don't? What is the nature of dark matter? Are there extra dimensions of space out there that we haven't yet detected?
Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked darker questions as well: Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into "strangelets" that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?
Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner has been raising such questions for years - first about an earlier-generation "big bang machine" known as the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, and more recently about the LHC.
Last Friday, Wagner and another critic of the LHC's safety measures, Luis Sancho, filed a lawsuit in Hawaii's U.S. District Court. The suit calls on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to ease up on their LHC preparations for several months while the collider's safety was reassessed.
"We're going to need a minimum of four months to review whatever they're putting out," Wagner told me on Monday. The suit seeks a temporary restraining order that would put the LHC on hold, pending the release and review of an updated CERN safety assessment. It also calls on the U.S. government to do a full environmental review addressing the LHC project, including the debate over the doomsday scenario.
On Monday, District Judge Helen Gillmor assigned the case to a magistrate judge, Kevin S.C. Chang, for an initial conference on June 16. Wagner said he planned to ask for a more immediate hearing on the request for a restraining order - that is, once he has served the federal government with the court papers.
The case is currently being handled by the U.S. attorney's office in Hawaii, where Wagner and Sancho both live,`but that may not necessarily be where the legal proceedings end up. The Justice Department's Environmental and Natural Resources Division, based in Washington, is also being brought in on the case, assistant U.S. attorney Derrick Watson told me in an e-mail Wednesday.
In Washington, Justice Department spokesman Andrew Ames noted that the court papers had not yet been received. "We don't have any comment," he told me Thursday. "We'll comment in court when it's appropriate."
Debating doomsday
The defense attorneys would likely dwell on the regulatory and procedural questions rather than the worries over a cosmic catastrophe. Those worries have been around for years, and most physicists have scoffed at them for almost as long. The doomsday scenarios raised by Sancho and Wagner include:
Runaway black holes: Some physicists say the LHC could create microscopic black holes that would hang around for just a tiny fraction of a second and then decay. Sancho and Wagner worry that millions of black holes might somehow persist and coalesce into a compact gravitational mass that would draw in other matter and grow bigger. That's pure science fiction, said Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City College of New York. "These black holes don't live very long, and they have microscopic energy, and so they are harmless," he told me.
Strangelets: Smashing protons together at high enough energies could create new combinations of quarks, the particles that protons are made of. Sancho and Wagner worry that a nasty combination known as a stable, negatively charged strangelet could theoretically turn everything it touches into strangelets as well. Kaku compared this to the ancient myth of the Midas touch. "We see no evidence of this bizarre theory," he said. "Once in a while, we trot it out to scare the pants off people. But it's not serious."
Magnetic monopoles: One theory suggests that high-energy particle collisions might give rise to massive particles that have only one magnetic pole - only north, or only south, but not the north-south magnetism that dominates nature. Sancho and Wagner worry that such particles could be created in the LHC and start a runaway reaction that converts atoms into other forms of matter. But physicists have seen no evidence of such reactions, which should have occurred already as the result of more energetic cosmic-ray collisions in Earth's upper atmosphere.
The cosmic-ray argument has been applied to the black-hole and strangelet scenarios as well. If such dangerous things can be created, why haven't they already eaten up Earth, along with other planets, stars or whole galaxies in the billions of years since the universe arose? To answer that question, Sancho and Wagner pose a counterargument: Perhaps cosmic-ray collisions really are creating tiny black holes or strangelets, but those little bits of doomsday zip by too fast to cause any trouble. In the LHC, they say, the bad stuff could hang around long enough to be captured by Earth's gravity and set off a catastrophe.
In response, particle physicists are developing counter-counterarguments - based on their theoretical work as well as data from astronomical observations and experiments at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. For instance, the physicists would say that enough of the doomsday particles still should have been captured by neutron stars or cosmic gas clouds to have an impact. No such impact has ever been seen. Therefore, no doomsday.
CERN spokesman James Gillies told me that a 2003 assessment of the doomsday scenarios was being updated with the new information. Release of that updated report - the one that Sancho and Wagner apparently have been waiting for - is "imminent," Gillies told me.
Questions about the doomsday scenarios may well come up at CERN on April 6, during a public open house at the LHC. Some researchers have gotten the word to be prepared to talk about microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked.
Reality check
Saying something is absolutely impossible doesn't always come easy. Some scientists find it difficult to state categorically that such-and-such a theoretical catastrophe has no chance of happening, and Fermilab spokeswoman Judy Jackson told me that the doomsayers have "cynically distorted" that natural reluctance to rule out even the most outlandish theoretical possibilities.
The doomsaying can continue as long as scientists hold out even a tiny sliver of uncertainty. Jackson cited the example of Paul Dixon, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who has been saying for more than a decade that experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator are in danger of touching off an artificial supernova. Dixon is still going strong: He submitted an affidavit in support of the LHC lawsuit filed by Sancho and Wagner.
The current lawsuit could well be decided not by scientific arguments but rather by narrower regulatory issues. On that point, Jackson said that Fermilab has followed U.S. environmental regulations, just as CERN has followed European regulations. "Of course there are plenty of environmental laws and regulations, and they have all been followed to the letter," she said.
However, Jackson said CERN shouldn't be held to U.S. requirements when it comes to operating the LHC - even if the collider happens to be using magnets built by Fermilab. "Just because we built them doesn't mean we have any say over French environmental regulations," she said.
For his part, Wagner said he hoped Fermilab and the other defendants in the lawsuit would take another look at the doomsday scenarios - and speculated that a restraining order might not even be necessary. He noted that the startup schedule for the LHC has been repeatedly delayed, which would give more time for further safety assessments. (CERN's schedule currently calls for first collisions by the end of August, and the word is that the collider may not reach its full power of 14 trillion electron-volts until next year.)
Wagner suggested that cosmic-ray observations by the Pierre Auger Observatory and the yet-to-be-launched Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, could shed new light on the debate. "The way I look at it, this should be a basis to look for more funding to find a solution to the problems we raised," he told me.
I'm pretty sure most physicists won't see it that way. They're generally anxious to spend their time and their grant money using the LHC rather than chasing down cosmic improbabilities. The doomsday lawsuit could conceivably be dismissed once it comes up for a hearing - that's basically what happened to Wagner's earlier lawsuit against the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. But in the meantime, feel free to make your own arguments, counterarguments and counter-counterarguments in the comment section below.
Bonus round: For a different perspective on doomsday, check out this little tale from the late science-fiction great Arthur C. Clarke.
Update for 2:20 a.m. ET March 27: Documents relating to Sancho v. Department of Energy have been uploaded to LHC Concerns, a Web site that voices worries about the Large Hadron Collider. Also, CERN has a Web page that addresses the worries, plus links to safety reports for the Large Hadron Collider and the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. You'll find more discussion of all this on Slashdot.
