Note: Light Friday comes to you early this week because I'll be blogging from the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) on Friday. The show runs through Saturday, and I'll be bringing you updates as they happen. Be sure to check back tomorrow for IMT's view of the latest manufacturing technology developments seen at IMTS.

Gates, Seinfeld and a Spot that Sells Nothing
Microsoft Corp. kicked off a $300 million marketing campaign on Thursday. The minute-and-a-half spot, featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, is selling nothing (What's the deal with that?), but is the first in a new campaign "aimed at improving the image of its Windows Vista operating system and strike back at Apple Inc.'s 'Mac vs. PC' ads,'" Reuters reports.

(Shake it, Bill.)

Constructing the World's Most Powerful Magnet
There is a $10 million magnet currently under construction at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida. When finished, the magnet is expected to reach 100 tesla — "the holy grail of magnetic field strength" — according to IEEE Spectrum this month.

The strength of this magnetic field is the kind of power needed "to test the properties of newly discovered high-temperature superconductors like iron oxyarsenide," which may result in better, cheaper MRI machines and high-voltage power lines, says Greg Boebinger, director of the Magnet Lab. "A 100 T magnet would also let you conduct certain zero-gravity experiments without traveling into space and let you develop magnetic propulsion systems that could eventually replace those that burn rocket fuel."

"And in another first," says IEEE Spectrum, "if all goes according to plan it will reach that level — about 67 times as high as a typical MRI — without blowing itself to smithereens."

Fingers crossed, folks. Fingers crossed tightly.

Good News: The World Didn't End
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) cranked the ignition of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), that huge atom smasher in Europe, for the first time yesterday. The world's largest particle collider — also the biggest, most expensive scientific instrument in history — passed its first major tests by firing two beams of protons in opposite directions around a 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground ring Wednesday morning in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

No actual atoms were smashed yesterday, and no results are expected for months. "Still," Wired yesterday noted, "like first light in a telescope, the first beam in the particle accelerator is a landmark moment for a program that has spanned more than 20 years and involved tens of thousands of scientists."

Physicists around the world now have much greater power to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to learn about their structure.

"The start of the collider came over the objections of some who feared the collision of protons could eventually imperil the Earth by creating micro-black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars," the Associated Press notes. (See earlier, last item)

"Next up for the collider is cranking up the energy of the proton beams to about 10 trillion electron volts, more powerful than other particle accelerators like Fermilab's Tevatron but still short of the proposed maximum collision energy of 14 trillion electron volts that the researchers hope to reach," according to Wired.

The next big moment will come when the first particle collisions occur. At full power, trillions of protons will race around the LHC accelerator ring 11,245 times a second, travelling at 99.99 percent the speed of light. It is capable of engineering 600 million collisions every second. When two beams of protons collide, they will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun, concentrated within a miniscule space.

Five years of LHC assembly in under six minutes:

CERN in under four minutes:

PhoneCar
Howard Davis, who owns a business-focused telecommunications services company, built his bright red PhoneCar from a 1975 Volkswagen Beetle in 1985 "as an adjunct to his passion for collecting telephones," according to Wired.

Credit: ThePhoneCar.com

Is it fuel-efficient? What's the mileage? Is it expensive to upkeep? Who cares! It's a phone car!

How to Break Your Computer
Self-explanatory:

Reminds me of an exchange between two characters from the late, great Sports Night:

Dan: You're gonna need to get somebody to fix my computer.
Kim: What's wrong with it?
Dan: It's in several pieces on my floor.

On a Serious Note...
Last Thursday, a little more than a week before the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, steel beams finally started going up for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum last week. (Of course, this is only after construction began, quite breezily, for two new stadiums to house the Mets and the Yankees.)

The memorial and the museum are costing $530 million, financed by private donations and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. An $80 million pavilion at the site of the former twin towers is to be paid for by New York State.

Progress on the redevelopment of the World Trade Center has been slow, frustratingly so, plagued by design changes, embarrassing infighting, controversy, "sizable" questions and what Mayor Michael Bloomberg calls "a multilayered governance structure that has undermined accountability from the get-go." The original completion date for the project was 2009, but now the hope is to have the memorial plaza ready for visitors by Sept. 11, 2011. But detailed designs for a polygonal pavilion of the National Sept. 11 Museum and Memorial were also revealed Tuesday.

Although it could be considered a city photo-op ploy to show progress just in time for the tragedy's anniversary, New Yorkers can be content to cut their unrivaled cynicism with two towering rays of hope.