Large Hadron Collider

Can't believe everyone is being so silly about the LHC, apart from that facinating article about it managing to shut itself down, really...? What was it going to do that doesn't happen with much more energy when all sorts of high speed objects (with occasionaly very violent results) attempt to pass through the planet Earth at the speed of light?

I can remember standing, as a young child watching a very worrying display in the Science Museum showing me exactly how often I was probably being hit by showers of nasty particles caused by Galactic cosmic ray particles smashing into other objects in the Earth's atmosphere (to very little effect)...I will admit that I was a little unsettled, especially upon discovering that they were radioactive (growing up at the tail end of the cold war)...but it's not done me a huge amount of harm so far and if that kind of event is weaker than what is going on at the LHC...(to quote Stephen Hawking - "Collisions releasing greater energy occur millions of times a day in the earth’s atmosphere and nothing terrible happens")...

Still, it is a great story..."Swiss black hole consumes planet"...not that anyone would even have time to write the first letter of the headline if nature somehow did manage to defy Stephen Hawking's brain... ;)