03.30.08 -- Mixed Feelings

Department of Psychology, HELP University

-----------------

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Click here for abridged post in LARGE PRINT.

MIXED FEELINGS

Puzzle by Paula Gamache, edited by Will Shortz

Anagrams of the circled letters in the entries of TOENAILCLIPPERS (23A); CASEYSTENGEL (30A); TELEPHONE (52A); SLUTSKAYA (68A); THIRDGEAR (88A); POTATOMASHER (109A); SPORTS EQUIPMENT (118A); BEDROOMEYES (14D); PADDEDENVELOPE (16D); PINSTRIPEDSUIT (50D); and EMPTYHANDED (67D) provide ELATION, ECSTASY, HOPE, LUST, RAGE, SHAME, PIQUE, BOREDOM, LOVE, PRIDE, and EMPATHY.

Other mixed feelings-related entries in the puzzle include INSULTS, ATPLAY, PITY, ENRAPT, SADCASES, ILIED, FRIENDS, NODAT, GOTEM, ATHEIST, GAMUT, GUISE, EASE, SOPUP, EATOUT, ELOCUTES, and somehow SHLEPP.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Seven Deadly Sins or the Seven Vices - Avarice -- reverse of original as a negative

-----------------

Interesting configurations of the crossword include EDEN crossing ADAM linked to EVE; ARIA linked to SOLO; YESNO crossing ISEE above SEA; AKEEM and KHAYYAM sharing a K; “YEE-haw!” alongside HIE; the crossing of ART and ARM; and the confusion of the circled T in THIRDGEAR, is it really RAGE or am I missing something?

Nonsense in the puzzle includes DOO and DAT, LAALAA, YEE, GOTEM, AAA, AABA and OGPU. The clue for EPEE, (125A. Blade of Grasse) was interesting enough. Stuff that gave me trouble was PHENOL, PURIM, AVIONIC, NITTI, and STRETTO -- all in the same area.

People in the puzzle for these mixed feelings include Casey Stengel, Toni Morrison, Fred, Little Nemo, Nia Vardalos, Irina Slutskaya, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Nitti and Capone, Omar Khayyam, Erik Satie, et al.

I don’t particularly care for having to work anagrams separately from a puzzle after the solution -- none of the anagrams in the circled letters could possibly be of any help during the solve. So, when the puzzle is completed, unless one is obsessed or finds it necessary for some reason or other to perform such a function (say for amusement or writing a blog) it’s really a big afterthought. That aside, this is an orderly Sunday puzzle, but one of which I do have mixed feelings!

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, 1504.

-----------------

For today's cartoons, go to The Crossword Puzzle Illustrated.

Click on image to enlarge.

Puzzle available on the internet at

THE NEW YORK TIMES -- Crossword Puzzles and Games

If you subscribe to home delivery of The New York Times you are eligible to access the daily crossword via The New York Times - Times Reader, without additional charge, as part of your home delivery subscription.

1. Lively, in mus.; 5. 101, in a course name; 10. “Little ___ in Slumberland” (pioneering comic strip); 14. One on two feet; 19. Literature Nobelist Morrison; 20. Word on a wanted poster; 21. He’s seen on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; 22. Serengeti grazer; 23. Pedicurist’s need; 26. Antics; 27. Zingers; 28. Toot one’s horn; 29. Scrooge’s nephew in “A Christmas Carol”; 30. Wearer of uniform #37, retired by both the Yankees and the Mets; 34. Entered pompously; 38. Clears; 39. Relating to flight technology; 41. Carnival site; 42. “Inka Dinka ___”; 43. Close overlapping of fugue voices; 45. Prince ___, Eddie Murphy film role; 47. Caboose, e.g.; 48. Frolicking; 52. Whispering party game; 54. Vardalos of the screen; 55. Diva’s delivery; 58. Holiday celebrating deliverance from Haman; 59. Narrow inlet; 60. Textile factory fixture; 62. ___ fide; 63. Lingo suffix; 64. Unfortunate development; 65. Bone-dry; 66. Divider of wedding guests; 68. Champion figure skater Irina; 72. Leaves for lunch?; 75. Author Janowitz; 77. Professor ‘iggins; 78. Picassos and Pissarros; 80. 55-Across, e.g.; 81. Bewitched; 83. Penlight battery size; 84. ___ radiation; 86. De-Mille output; 87. Early millennium year; 88. Manual transmission position; 91. French dome toppers; 93. Big shot after making a big shot, maybe: Abbr.; 94. Kind of question; 95. Peter Shaffer play based on the lives of Mozart and Salieri; 98. “___ -haw!”; 99. Make haste; 100. Like sugar vis-à-vis Equal; 102. H.S. subject; 106. Heartbreaking situations; 109. Kitchen implement used with a little muscle; 112. In the mail; 113. K.GT.B. predecessor; 115. Popular Toyota; 116. Users of 118-Across; 118. Bats, balls, gloves, etc.; 122. False appearance; 123. Capital of Italy; 124. Annie of “Ghostbusters”; 125. Blade of Grasse; 126. Lugged; 127. Zenith; 128. Company-owned building, e.g.; 129. Sch. Research papers.
Down: 1. Place for a fan; 2. Writer Peggy known for the phrase “a kinder, gentler nation”; 3. Actually existing; 4. Stately dance with short steps; 5. Tempts; 6. Elite athlete; 7. Error indicator; 8. Suffix with adverb; 9. Hit TV show with the theme song “Who Are You”; 10. Port west of Monte Vesuvio; 11. Fall setting; 12. A, B and C; 13. Mantra syllables; 14. Come-hitcher look; 15. Coming-clean words; 16. Protective mailer; 17. Music producer Brian; 18. License to drill?: Abbr.; 24. Milano of “Who’s the Boss?”; 25. Carbolic acid; 29. Top-rated TV series of 2001-02; 31. Consort of 21-Across; 32. Capone henchman; 33. “They’re in my hot little hands!”; 35. BlackBerry rival; 38. Land of Ephesus; 37. Acknowledge tacitly; 40. Heads in the Pantheon?; 44. Variety; 46. Poet Omar ___; 48. Rhyme scheme of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”; 49. “Star Trek: T.N.G.” counselor Deanna; 50. Some business attire; 51. Yellow Teletubby; 53. Composer Satie; 57. Letters before many a state’s name; 58. Brush up on; 61. Whiteboard cleaner; 64. Subj. that deals with mixed feelings; 67. Bearing nothing; 69. Japanese eel and rice dish; 70. “King Lear” or “Hamlet”: Abbr.; 71. Boxer’s measurement; 73. Touched down; 74. Medics; 76. Nonbeliever; 79. Classic Dana fragrance for women; 81. Representations of a winged woman holding an atom; 82. Big name in skin care products; 84. Entire range; 85. Amazon parrot; 89. Opening for a crystal ball gazer; 90. Dine at a diner; 92. F equivalent; 96. Not dis; 97. Declaim; 101. Estimated: Abbr.; 103. Chemical cousin; 104. Lug: Var.; 105. Online protocol for remote log-in; 107. Discontinue; 108. Absorb; 110. Like lip-glossed lips; 111. Deserves; 114. Cause for an R, perhaps; 116. Badge holder: Abbr.; 117. Status ___; 118. Main; 119. Day ___; 120. Dawn goddess; 121. Divisions of gals.

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said.

“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.

“Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he said.

But Mr. Wagner is not mollified. “They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe,” he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda.”

In an e-mail message, Mr. Wagner called the CERN safety review “fundamentally flawed” and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission’s standards for adhering to the “Precautionary Principle,” he wrote, “and has not been done by ‘arms length’ scientists.”

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.

Mr. Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.

Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.

Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would set the atmosphere on fire.

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.”

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes would probably not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Dr. Mangano and Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the last few months on a paper exploring all the possibilities of these fearsome black holes. They think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings until they have been peer reviewed, Dr. Mangano said.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Source: NYT