The Future Approaches, and it's Scary

CNN article

The article itself isn't really that scary, it's actually kind of funny and cool to imagine. In Japan, where a decreasing amount of the population is actually part of the workforce, a store has "hired" a robot employee, that functions smoothly and can crudely interact with people.
The article states that, though this one can't speak, future ones will be able to do so smoothly and without hitch. They will be able to perform all the simple tasks required in running a store: stocking shelves, checking out groceries, etc. In the future, the article also states, robots may be more a cheaper alternative to such jobs as fast food restaurants; rather than having to pay employees, companies could just install these robots to do the job for them.
It sounds cool at a glance. It's the kind of thing we always see in movies, the kind of thing we've always imagined for the future, and for a country like Japan it's even necessary.
Upon further consideration, the author can see a process called "creative destruction": when a new technology is created to more efficiently solve a problem, it takes away jobs, because having people manually doing what robots can do is financially illogical.
Many people, especially minimally-skilled people like high school and college students, rely on these jobs to help pay the bills until they can acquire the skills for more advanced and specialized jobs. Some people who never have any formal education rely on them for much longer, maybe their entire lives. It is not ideal, but it is a fact of life.
I am not personally against progress like this. Perhaps because the lowest jobs are occupied, there will be more motivation to become educated and excel to higher jobs, safe from the threat of a mechanized takeover.
Or perhaps they will cause so large a dent in jobs that unemployment rates skyrocket, and no one can afford the products or services produced, causing economic collapse.
Either way, society and economics are changing, evolving. That is a certainty. The only uncertainty is: what they are evolving into?

Gyro-copter: How to Get Attention

Washington Post Article

Doug Hughes appears to be either a genius, a maniac, or both. Wednesday he pulled off a stunt that could have gotten him shot straight out of the sky: flying a gyro-copter through restricted airspace and onto the Capital's east lawn, carrying with him a cargo of roughly five-hundred letters each addressed to various Congress and House members, asking for reform.
The guy definitely has a crazy or dangerous side, considering the amount of risk it would be to fly an aircraft that weighs barely over 200 lbs into one of the most well-protected airspace in the world. Despite his warnings beforehand, he could have easily been mistaken for a militant or terrorist of some sort, and then gunned down before he could even get a chance to deliver his message...
Which is really the genius part. Hughes wanted to make a statement, a bold one, that he believed would change our country for the better, but he knew he alone couldn't do much to get the public's and the government's attention, unless he did something dangerous. Something outrageous. Our media today covers only the most phenomenal of news, the most morbid, and pulling off a stunt like this would certainly achieve the desired effect.
I personally think it was noble, and courageous for him to do something like this, basically a glorified protest. My only worry would be that it would end there: that it would be viewed as simply a gutsy stunt, that the news coverage will end with the verdict of his trial.
Unfortunately, I honestly wouldn't be surprised.

The Big Particle Bumper's Next Adventures Begin

http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/05/europe/hadron-collider-restart/index.html

Ladies and gentlemen this is it: mankind's largest machine ever to be built is powering up again, delving back into the secrets of Quantum Mechanics.
Just to straighten things out, the machine I'm talking about is the Large Hadron Collider. It's located near Geneva, Switzerland, and has a circular-shaped particle accelerator stretching roughly seventeen miles, according to the article. These accelerators then feed into two powerful and acutely refined mega-sensors that collect all the data created from bombing subatomic particles into each other at velocities approaching the speed of light.
The machine in it's last episode was programmed to detect the Higgs Bosun particle, a particle created when the very field that gives things mass is bombarded with huge amounts of energy at a single point. It proved a theory that had been mathematically predicted before then for over forty years, and helped to further complete what scientists are calling the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
Though the accelerator had completed the task for which it was originally designed, it was far from being done. It was shut down and put into a stage of further development, re-refining and re-calibrating its many sensors and devices for its new mission.
This new mission fascinates me every bit as much as the original: this time the LHC will be searching for dark matter, something which--combined with dark energy--accounts for 95% of everything in the universe. That means those billions of galaxies, with each containing billions of stars apiece, only accounts for 5%.
Oi.
Along with this the machine will be searching for the answer to yet another problem: the lack of antimatter (matter that is the opposite of our "normal" matter, and causes annihilation of both when in contact with it) that exists in the known universe.
I don't know about any of you, but just the thought of answering questions like these gets me excited. The pursuit of knowledge and understanding is one of humanity's most basic traits, one which everyday people struggle with and are driven by every day, whether they know it or not, and now we're applying that hunger to the most basic of nature's mechanisms.
I hope that one day I could join in such pursuits. Anyone else can feel free to join. It'll be a blast, I promise.