Comments on: Daily Show Does CERN

By: Daily Show Explains the LHC | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

Daily Show Explains the LHC | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:39:11 +0000

[...] can always count on the Daily Show. As John presaged earlier this month, correspondent John Oliver visited CERN to do a report on the LHC, which has [...]

By: Harold

Harold — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:38:04 +0000

I was eating dinner at CERN the other day in the cafeteria, and was wondering why there was a man outside, holding a rolled up piece of paper, riding one of the LHC dipole magnets. It all makes sense now!

By: John

John — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 23:56:26 +0000

Thanks, Richard, for the first person account – it will indeed be interesting to see what emerges after editing!

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:53:14 +0000

If other readers are interested, here are some more photos of my interview with John Oliver in the CMS cavern:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2424221&l=4e7e85964f&id=627068573
I have included captions, some of which reflect to my best recollection the questions he asked me. How would you have answered?

By: Luke

Luke — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:01:47 +0000

Awesome. That is all.

By: Bourgeois Nerd

Bourgeois Nerd — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 02:28:13 +0000

Ah, after seeing some dictionary entries, I think this is a case of a word that has a defintion split between its denotative and colloquial usages. I’ve always used “inane” to mean something like “lame, square, irrelevant,” not “silly.” Maybe its a generational thing. (This is what you get, BTW, when English majors invade a physics blog: nitpicking about the word “inane” and its usage.)

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:02:01 +0000

I was the “one of our guys” that John Oliver interviewed in front of the CMS detector this afternoon. Not that it is important, but he did not ask “is there anything you do here that’s not boring?” The question he asked me was more like “can this [pointing to the detector] produce anything boring?” In the straight style I was asked to follow, I explained that most of the physics that the detector is expected to see is indeed already understood, and in that sense could be called “boring,” but it is those very rare events that we hope to detect that should be interesting as they shed new light on our understanding of the universe.
More amusingly, he pulled out an iPhone and said “Isn’t this great? Can I check my email on that [again pointing to CMS]? Isn’t there an app I can download to do the same thing? And such things are getting smaller all the time. When will this be small enough to be in your kitchen?” I think the best part of my response was that while you cannot check your email with CMS, with it you can check out the first moments that followed the beginning of the universe. We will see what makes it to the final edit.

By: John

John — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:27:36 +0000

I am getting that a lot of people confuse “inane” with “insane” and/or react the same way to the word. Not that John Oliver is not insane, or that his humor could not better be described as insane than inane. Quite the contrary, he’s a flaming Brit loony of the purest sort, on par with John Cleese or Benny Hill. With tongue firmly in his cheek, his stinging sarcasm typically annihilates his target on the first shot. It is most definitely inanity at its finest. Can’t wait to see CERN’s fate in his hands.

By: R.

R. — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:07:59 +0000

Great story!
I vote against using inane to describe the only respectable News show on television – might send the wrong message to some. It struck the wrong note when I read it the first time.

By: doublechateau

doublechateau — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:47:49 +0000

From wordnet.princeton:
inanely – fatuously: vacuously or complacently and unconsciously foolish

seems like the right word to me.