A couple of news stories on the English “Daily Telegraph” news site caught my eye. First one that said:
Legal bid to stop CERN atom smasher from ‘destroying the world’
The world’s biggest and most expensive scientific experiment has been hit by a last minute legal challenge, amid claims that the research could bring about the end of the world.
James Gillies, spokesman for CERN, insisted that despite the huge amounts of energy the Large Hadron Collider will produce, it posed no risk to the safety of the planet.
He said: “The case before the European Court of Human Rights contains the same arguments that we have seen before and we have answered these in extensive safety reports.
The Large Hadron Collider will not be producing anything that does not already happen routinely in nature due to cosmic rays. If they were dangerous we would know about it already.
“We are now concentrating on firing the first beams around the collider and then on fine tuning it until we can get collisions, when the science will start.”
A spokesman for the European Court of Human Rights confirmed the lawsuit had been lodged and the petition to obtain an emergency injunction against CERN was rejected. She said: “There will therefore be no bar to CERN carrying out these experiments but the applicants can continue with this case here at the ECHR.”
and then, another story
JK Rowling ‘delighted’ at decision to ban Harry Potter encyclopaedia written by a fan
JK Rowling has spoken of her “delight” at winning her copyright battle against a fan who planned to publish a Harry Potter encyclopaedia.
She had described the Harry Potter Lexicon as “wholesale theft” of her work.
In court papers, Mr Vander Ark, 50, said he was a teacher and school librarian in Byron Centre, Michigan, before recently moving to London to begin a career as a writer.
He said he joined an adult online discussion group devoted to the Harry Potter books in 1999 before launching his own website as a hobby a year later.
Since then, neither Rowling nor her publisher had ever complained about anything on it, he said.
In his court statement, Mr Vander Ark said the Lexicon “enhances the pleasure of readers of the Potter novels, and deepens their appreciation of Ms Rowling’s achievement”.
Rowling, who has earned £560 million through the Potter books, told the judge she had not brought the case for the money, but because the Lexicon was “atrocious” and “sloppy” with “very little research”.
The seven Potter books, which ended last year with the final book in the series, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, have been published in 64 languages, sold more than 400 million copies and produced a film franchise that has pulled in 4.5 billion US dollars at the worldwide box office.
On the one hand Science and on the other Fiction. Totally me. Add to that the “geek” factor that I am running the new Google Chrome web browser (and loving it)!
I wonder, in the JK Rowling story, when it says “adult online discussion group devoted to the Harry Potter” if that means it was a group for grown ups, or whether the tone of the postings were “adult” in nature. If it’s the latter I can clearly see why Rowling would object - slashfic ought to have nothing to do with a kid’s genre book! Authors have a tenous (at best) relationship with fan fiction writers. Some encourage it (Rowling has said in the past that she was “flattered” that people wanted to write their own stories based on her characters), some tolerate it, others actively try to stamp it out (Anne Rice has consistently and aggressively prevented fan fiction based on any of her characters, as has Raymond E. Feist and Anne McCaffrey).
