My geek meter is off the friggin' scale. {head explodes}

[Thanks, Scott!]

[Thanks, Max!]

But it's the crashing that has two nuts concerned. They claim that the world might end this summer when CERN fires up their beast and creates black holes and stranglets. So, as any wacko will do, they've filed a lawsuit (in Hawaii) to stop it.

The NY Times covered the story and way at the end a CERN scientist had this to say.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

[Ref: NY Times]

If dragons appear, this is what we can expect:

The beginning of the video is kind of spooky, watching the robot cruise up a hill in the forest. However, it gets really awesome when you see how the robot handles changes in terrain (like ice) or getting kicked in the side. Amazing and awesome work can't wait to see these roaming the streets and hunting us like the outmoded flesh monkeys we are.

BigDog at Boston Dynamics

[Via: IEEE Spectrum and Gizmodo]

[Update 2008-03-26: Gizmodo posted this hilarious parody of the BigDog video.]

50 minutes of the great BBC/Nova program.