Is it just me, or does no one seem particularly excited about the Olympics? I hate to admit it, but I'm at least a little relieved there might be a slowdown in election coverage. . .

Tech-Savvy Quote of the Week
This one comes from the Fortune archives (two years ago), courtesy of the New York Times this week:

[M]y wife has enormous capability. . . She even does my boarding passes — people can do that now. When we go to the movies, she gets the tickets ahead of time. It's incredible. -Sen. John McCain, presumptive Republican presidential nominee

Last Friday's Solar Eclipse
On Aug. 1, 2008, beginning over northern Canada, observers on Earth could watch this year's only total solar eclipse.

Islamabad's grand Faisal mosque in Pakistan
Credit: B.K.Bangash/Associated Press via New York Times

The Jiayuguan Fort on the Great Wall of China in the town of Jiayuguan, Gansu Province, China
Credit: David Gray/Reuters via Yahoo News

No One Clapped for Him at His High School Graduation. . .
. . .So Robert Soloway, aka the Spam King, got back at the world by becoming a prolific spammer. By the time federal agents arrested him in May 2007 for spewing illegal e-mails, "strangers hated him, blamed him for wrecking their lives [and], deemed him a time-sucking pariah who grated on millions of people worldwide," says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Why'd he do it?

"I was miserable going to school. I never went to football games or high school dances. I was overweight. And I would rush home and sit down on my computer and talk to people," he told the Seattle paper. "That was the only place I received validation. Not that that excuses my activities."

Yeah, he's been charged with 40 criminal counts, sentenced to nearly four years in prison and ordered to report to a federal prison camp on September 22. Soloway is the second person convicted under the U.S. Can-Spam Act.

Move Along. Nothing to See Here. . .
Geoscientists in Germany, Switzerland and the United States this month have shown, for the first time, that "an extremely fast climate change occurred in Western Europe . . . long before human-made changes in the atmosphere, and is causatively associated with a sudden change in the wind systems," ScienceDaily reports of new research published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Put simply, the researchers show that the climate rapidly cooled 12,700 years ago, in only one year — with no human obtrusion. And some Al Gore haters nodded approvingly.

A Day Worth Celebrating (Daily)
Apparently, Tuesday was National Underwear Day in the U.S.

No, really. There was a celebration and everything. For the sixth consecutive year.

This makes me worry about what you folks are doing the other 364 days of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider
This is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a ginormous particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles — the fundamental building blocks of all things — near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground.

View of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is one of two general-purpose LHC experiments designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, the energy region where physicists believe they will find answers to the central questions at the heart of 21st-century particle physics.
Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN via The Big Picture

Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. This model is known to break down at a certain high energy level.

While the mere size of the LHC constitutes an exceptional engineering challenge with unique safety issues, concerns have been raised regarding the safety of the LHC on the grounds that high-energy particle collisions performed in the LHC might produce dangerous phenomena such as micro black holes, strangelets and magnetic monopoles.

View of the CMS detector at the end of 2007
Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN via The Big Picture

And here, it seems, are its workers:

After watching that, I'm pretty sure my brain was just sucked through a black hole.

Enjoy your weekend.