See Wikipedia, review in The New York Times, IMDB, and Google News.
Spoiler alert: don't read the text below
The plot makes a lot of sense. Antonio Banderas is a private detective who is hired by a Russian boxer and criminal to find his missing girlfriend, a stripper called Lexie who is also carbon-enhanced by $30 million in diamonds. He chooses the most sensible strategy to solve this puzzle: he must first find the Higgs boson.
The film directors have also understood what billions of viewers in the world are actually aroused by. During some boring and unexciting portions of the film, e.g. sex, the characters are made to discuss physics of neutrons which makes it much more thrilling.
Fine. So how does he find the Higgs boson? He must locate the most sensible place where the God particle may be produced by high-energy collisions. Where is the place? Obviously, it's in the basement owned by a billionaire who has built a private superconducting collider under his villa in the New Mexico desert. He employs a physicist who knows all about particle physics and spiritism.
See the key scene at IO9 where Banderas visits the haunted house with the superconducting supercollider and they just sketch the ideal channels where the cross section for the Higgs boson production could be high enough while they estimate the lifetime of the scalar particle. By the way, a nice by-product of the calculation is that the rich guy also plans to recreate the Big Bang and end the world as we know it. :-)
One thing to appreciate about the $17 million noir flick is the degree of realism. Finally, a movie has faithfully described the world of real private detectives whose actual methodology is based on the search for the mechanisms of the electroweak symmetry breaking. Based on the generally low rating, it seems that the critics have also understood that it's about particle physics.
Chemistry and Precalculus: new Wolfram Alpha iOS apps
See Wolfram Alpha blog to see what these two apps may do for your or your kids' courses at school. They're pretty clever apps.
Spice videos in Osama's collection
A large collection of modern porn videos was found in Osama bin Laden's villa.
Technical problems
Blogger.com has performed a maintenance on Wednesday 5/11, 10:00-10:40 pm PDF, see status.blogger.com. However, they made a mistake; I experienced intermitent problems with logging in as well partial or complete disappearance of the "profile" widget. Consequently, blogger.com went to a read-only mode. Bloggers such as your humble correspondent couldn't add new posts or edit the old ones. In the process of fixing the bug, Blogger.com engineers decided to use a "system restore" which means that they - temporarily - erased all posts added after 3:37 pm Prague Summers Time on Wednesday.
That affected 3 new posts on this blog. You may see the compassion - even Google's own official blogs such as Google Chrome Releases have been affected. In this particular case, a new blog entry about the latest stable Chrome version, 11.0.696.68, disappeared as well. Slow comments have been inaccessible across the blogspot.com domain, too.
Blogger.com had the lowest downtime among the major blogging platforms in 2010. I am afraid that after this huge downtime, it will no longer be the case. Still, this form of downtime was pretty user-friendly - a vast majority of the blog posts remained accessible. However, to make things worse for the company, Google's YouTube began to generate somewhat frequent "500 internal server errors" again. What are you up to, Mark Zuckerberg? ;-)
Ice-hockey
Sweden were the stronger team during the semifinals and they became the first team in the world that managed to beat Czechia, so they will play the final match.
