Idle vice

Having established my incompetence as a lepidopterist, I shall now effortlessly demonstrate my near complete ignorance of matters botanical. This blossom is one of many adorning a large shrub outside the house I live in. It reminds me in its way of an Alpine flower called edelweiss, in intrepid search of which Asterix and Obelix once went to the place latterly known as Switzerland, in typically Gallic-Celtic-comic-epic fashion.

When I looked for the above links (thereby discovering that this tropical blossom, beyond being small & white, scarcely resembles that Alpine flower), I found something else called Edelweiss. 'Expérience pour DEtecter Les WIMPs En Site Souterrain.' A Science Project Calvin would be proud of, looking into the nature of Dark Matter, no less, through the prism of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles and Supersymmetry, using ultrapure Germanium. The site is disarmingly dodgy; the language swashbucklingly sumptuous. It starts like an exuberant Olympic Sumo commentary before really hitting its stride in far-fetched 50's comic strip mode:

With unprecedented confidence, and zero background, EDELWEISS excludes the WIMP candidate reported in February 2000 by the DAMA experiment, set in the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory... The EDELWEISS experiment, protected by 1600 meters of rock under the Alps, is using ultrapure germanium detectors, operated at a temperature of 20 millidegrees above absolute zero… The 1600 meter rock overburden reduces the cosmic flux by a factor 2 million, and the neutron flux by a factor ten thousand.

I remember reading somewhere about another big budget physics experiment at CERN that offered the remote but titillating possibility of spoiling everybody's afternoon by creating a mini-black hole. Well, not yet, apparently. But it did start an appropriately apocalyptic discussion at gyre.org.