The Man with the "Geniusness"

Before I get to today's thing, I have to address something that has been bothering me. This (sorry about the "new Mexico" typo...:

It seems that I have people coming in from all 50 states except for one... New Mexico. Anybody want to tell his or her New Mexican friend to come visit this site for 2 seconds for me to get a fifty states collection? And this would make a really nice Mu Alpha Theta Nationals: The Game problem where the answer is 49... anyways..

You know the Large Hadron Collider? You know, the giant thing that will create a black hole that will suck the living brain out of you (or find the roots of physics... but that's not as cool). Ever imagine what will happen when you stick your head inside a stream of protons traveling nearly the speed of light? A person named Anatoli Bugorski did.

Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned - as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.

Apparently this is one of those old model ones without the complex vacuum/magnetic tubes around it... but I'm no particle physicist. As a result of this stupid incident:

Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue. The inside of his head continued to burn away: all the nerves on the left were gone in two years, paralyzing that side of his face. Still, not only did Bugorski not die, but he remained a normally functioning human being, capable even of continuing in science. For the first dozen years, the only real evidence that something had gone neurologically awry were occasional petit mal seizures; over the last few years Bugorski has also had six grand mals. The dividing line of his life goes down the middle of his face: the right side has aged, while the left froze 19 years ago. When he concentrates, he wrinkles only half his forehead.

Now... that's the perfect Botox solution right there.

- http://www.neatorama.com/2008/10/05/the-man-who-stuck-his-head-inside-a-particle-accelerator/
- http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/realitycarnival.html

-runiteking1

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