Trouble in Sector 34

In our town it's tornado sirens. At 11 a.m. on the first Monday of every month, they test the tornado siren, and it always had the same effect on one of the women in the office. You could almost see her making the calculation of where her son was. There are a few sounds that always make you freeze and consider. Alarms. You hear a huge echoey variety in movies, always there for chilling effect. There are also fire, rescue, and police sirens, going off at random in your neighborhood, making you wonder momentarily if all is not well.

I was listening to a report about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) recently. Parts of these reports up to now have been about how some people think that when they turn this machine on soon that it will spawn black holes and it will be the end of Earth. Physicists say this is absurd, this machine is just supposed to usher in a new golden era of understanding in physics. Detractors are doing everything from lawsuits to death threats in order to stop the collider from being turned on. They hear that alarm signal in their head, the end of the world is near. The most recent report was about how the collider has had a setback during its startup. Apparently a relay blew out and they have to warm it back up from 2° above absolute zero (thats about Fahrenheit 451 below zero) before they can repair it. The atom smashing that will unlock the secrets of the universe will have to wait for a few more months. One of the reporters that is following the LHC closely got a cryptic message that there was "Trouble in Sector 34" at the LHC. Obviously, the 7 mile diameter ring is divided into sectors on the engineering drawings for maintenance purposes, and the relay that blew out is in the 34th sector. The interviewer remarked that "Trouble in Sector 34" sounded like a movie title, some sinister X-Files kind of movie, maybe.

So in this case, with the LHC, we have both figurative and literal alarms going off. This is also going on with the economy and government. For years, people have put out warnings that have gone unheeded. With the financial meltdown, it makes you wonder who keeps reaching over and muting the alarms until things got so out of control that the special effects explosions start happening and the ship starts going down in flames. You always wonder when you see scenes where the pilot is in the distressed cockpit with multiple alarms going off and they are still steadily working toward averting the disaster. You want a cool hand under fire. You want someone that continues to work for solutions while the alarms are bleating in their ears. That's what the siren song teaches us.