By A SLAC Employee

This is hard. I don’t want to make things awkward between us, but there’s something on my mind I think we need to discuss. Every day we come to work—we try to solve the mysteries of the universe, try to develop a better understanding of the atoms that surround our existence. But somewhere along the way, I think something got lost in translation.

I think it’s time. We need to talk about the giant particle accelerator in the room.

I know what you’re thinking. “What are you talking about? We work at SLAC—we talk about the particle accelerator all day, every day.” But I’m not talking about that giant particle accelerator. No. I’m talking about the other one. The particle accelerator that keeps you up at night, the one that haunts your dreams and invades your thoughts. I’m talking about the giant particle accelerator in your heart. Sometimes it’s hard to see—sometimes we look at it and think, “Hey, that’s a real particle accelerator.” But at the end of the day, we’re deceiving ourselves. We know it’s not real.

The only particle accelerator is the one in our minds, and the longer we try to delude ourselves, the longer it will take us to realize that those “particles” that seem to be bouncing about are nothing more than figments of our imagination, colliding with each other in some tragic Shakespearian drama.

But that all stops today. I’m not going to let this particle accelerator control me, and neither should you. At stake are not only our lives, but the lives of our husbands and wives, our sons and our daughters. What most people don’t realize is that everyone has a giant particle accelerator in their lives. Some people call their giant particle accelerator “mother-in-law,” others call it “pepper spray,”—I call mine “a giant particle accelerator,” but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what we call it. What matters is that everyone has two giant metal tubes in their mind, working day in and day out to smash tiny things together, and until we have the courage to talk about it, nothing will ever get done.

Friends and acquaintances of sophomore Will Bradley report that his latest idea for a start-up consists of a product that is functionally indistinguishable from Google Docs. The “revolutionary” product, which Bradley is calling myDox, would allow users to save their documents in the cloud, work collaboratively in real time and “make spreadsheets and stuff.” His plan for myDox also includes a chat sidebar, “once they get most of the initial kinks worked out.”

Bradley rolled out the idea for myDox while leaving chemistry lecture last Thursday, but was disappointed by the lukewarm response it received from his peers. “It’s a good idea. That’s why Google made it, like, 10 years ago,” noted one friend. “He seems to think he’s going to get VC money. He really doesn’t understand how all this works,” added another.

After significant ridicule, Bradley eventually added that myDox is somewhat similar to Google Docs, but added, “myDox is going to be the MySpace to Google Docs’ Xanga. It’s going to be a game changer.”

Last week Coasta Concordia, an Italian cruise ship carrying 4,200 passengers, ran aground and capsized off the coast of Giglio in the Mediterranean Sea. According to Francesco Schettino, the ship’s captain, the decision to send the cruise ship barreling towards the coast at high speed with no time to change heading or to prepare passengers for a collision was made as part of the ongoing protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA. In what many have called “a pretty inconvenient week” millions of students and thousands of cruise passengers found themselves cut off from essential services including Wikipedia, Boing Boing, and safety on the Coasta Concordia.

Meredith Wilkins, a Coasta Concordia survivor explained her experience. “No one saw it coming. We’d had discussions about how it was too big to fail, how it was to important to ever go down, how too many people depended on it. We were wrong. I’ve been through a lot of traumatic experiences–I was even on that cruise ship that ran aground, but nothing compares to the feeling I had when I tried to access Wikipedia only to see a black screen. It was like my whole world was turned upside down and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.”

“People think SOPA is harmless, but we’ve seen time and time again that’s simply not true,” remarked Captain Schettino, as he nursed a beer and tried fruitlessly to access megaupload.com. “We saw last week that SOPA is a threat to commerce—just look—it caused a ship with over 4,200 passengers to sink.  It’s time for America to realize SOPA just won’t work.”

After blacking out for an entire day on January 18th, Wikipedia reportedly had a huge headache and felt like it couldn’t eat anything, even though it knew it really should have.

Wikipedia awoke on January 19th to find almost all its articles reduced to stubs, and nearly every citation missing. In addition, the online encyclopedia checked its wallet and discovered the “A Personal Appeal from Jimmy Wales” donations had been stolen.

“I didn’t even have that much to drink,” said Wikipedia as it popped about 7 Tylenol into its mouth to try to get rid of the dial-up sound that kept ringing in its head. “I remember talking to Reddit. See, I remember. I’m fine.”

After examining Wikipedia’s texts, analysts have concluded that it is really dangerous to binge-protest anti-piracy bills. One embarrassing text said, “fffffffuuuuuuuuuuu sopajkljjkhjk!! ; /,” but Wikipedia claimed that it was auto-correct. Observers agree that Wikipedia’s behavior was certainly not in accordance with community standards.

Jealous of all of Wikipedia’s attention, Google tried bragging that it had blacked out too. However, Facebook said that Google totally didn’t get any action, only had a couple drinks, and barely even browned out.

If you follow technology news, it will come as no surprise to you that the popular Silicon Valley social network Facebook announced that that they have reached 7.5 billion users, and surpassed their main competitor: Earth.

“People said we couldn’t do it,” said a hoodie-sporting Mark Zuckerberg, as he threw hundred dollar bills in the air. “But through the dedication of our engineers, and the narcissism of all of our users, we were able to achieve the impossible once again.”

The blogosphere has erupted with commentary on the subject. Chief Blogomaniac at FacebookStalkerWorld.com Corey “The Real Deal” Hector writes: “It’s no wonder people switched from Earth to Facebook. Earth has gotten stale. What has it done to its UI recently? Facebook just launches timeline, and boom!–everyone is there.”

As the Flipside tech columnist, I’ve been following social networks in depth for the last two months, and I have to agree. On Earth, you have mountains, and rivers, and skyscrapers. But on Facebook, you have pictures of mountains, pictures of rivers, and pictures of skyscrapers. Mountains go away when you leave the mountain. Facebook Photos are forever.

If your still an ancient Luddite and Earth-user, I say it’s time to hop off the bandwagon and hop on Facebook’s virtual-bandwagon-game, since everyone in the world is there, and then some.

Since Gmail got its new facelift, users have noticed its new clingy attitude.  “Every time I log onto my email, Gmail asks me how it looks,” said faithful Googler Craig Perper.  “Honestly…it’s been looking heavier lately.  Like maybe it got wider margins or started taking in more spam.  But we’ve been together for so long, I can’t tell it that.”  Perper admitted to just commenting that he “slightly prefers new version” because it was encouraging but not too harsh toward the old version.

Perper reports he’s noticed changes in Gmail’s demeanor.  He said that recently there was a pop up asking, “Does this theme make me look fat?”  Before he could say no, Gmail snapped, “That’s what I thought. I’m hideous!” and shut down before he had a chance to read his email.  The next day, after completing a note to his parents, Perper moved to navigate away from Gmail for a minute.  A pop up quickly emerged, questioning: “You’re going already?  So soon?  Don’t you have someone to email?  Or want to look at pictures of puppies? Don’t leave me.”

“I’m afraid to open my email now,” says Perper.  “I know the next time I go in, Gmail is just going to freak out and ask where I’ve been.  I think I’m going to start using Hotmail again. That was always fun.”

CEMEX AUDITORIUM–In honor of Big Game, week, IBM brought their supercomputer Watson to take on teams from Stanford and Cal in a game of Which One of You is a Computer?

A packed audience took their seats in Cemex Auditorium, and little did they know they were in for the most suspenseful competition in years. “We looked around the entire Stanford and Cal campus, and through a cutthroat and rigorous process, we found the students who were most like computers,” said comedian and host Tom Crain, as he continued to jumble his words. “But help me if I know what a computer is.”

When the competition began, the robotic students from Stanford and Cal were no match for Watson. Watson was able to answer that he was a computer within a nanosecond, while the humanoid student participants were still perceiving the question.

When asked about the loss, Stanford team member and Mechanical Engineering major Robin Orman ’13 said, “Well, the thing about Watson is that he is a computer, so he is slightly better at being a computer than us.” Orman continued to zone off into outer space. “But only slightly.”

The Flipside asked the audience for comment about the event, but they were too busy playing with their smartphones.