GreenStrat is now two months old, and so it’s time to revisit the progress that was made over the month of March. First the numbers:

GreenStrat’s visitor numbers were down slightly from February. The site averaged about 19 visits and 59 page views per day (down from 22 and 73 a month ago). That works out to 3.08 page views per visit, down from 3.28 last month. On a positive note, visitors still spent the same amount of time visiting the site, at just over 4 minutes per visit. Additionally, ad revenue more than tripled from a month ago. I nearly earned enough in March to buy a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee (though a cup from Starbucks is still a ways away). There are now 37 pages of content on the site, though I only added one song during the month.

During March I focused most of my time spent with GreenStrat on redeveloping the site design. GreenStrat got an entirely new look focused on making the site cleaner, repositioning valuable content, and making better use of ads. I think the numbers from March reflected this work: with less new content being added during the month, visits dropped slightly. However, the redesign paid immediate dividends in increased click-throughs on ads. I’m also really excited about the new design and think that it makes GreenStrat a significantly better site.

Another reason for the slowdown in content is that I began planning for my wedding this month. On my list of life’s priorities, my wedding now ranks slightly higher than GreenStrat. But work will continue slowly and steadily on the site, and I’ll revisit again next month to see how things are going. Until then, go check out GreenStrat!

Matt & Alina got married last weekend! Check out the Photos and watch ‘exclusive’ video of the first dance!

The problem with predicting the end of the world is that you look really stupid when it doesn’t happen, as illustrated in this article from the New York Times, which is paraphrased in brief below:

Fourteen members of a Russian doomsday cult on Tuesday abandoned the remote underground bunker where they had been hiding for nearly half a year awaiting the end of the world.

They said that God had given them a signal to leave,” said Oleg Melnichenko, deputy governor of the Penza region where cult members have been holed up since October. “All are in good health, considering they have spent half a year underground,” said Melnichenko.

The sect is an ultra-devout splinter group of the Russian Orthodox church. They reject processed food and say bar codes on products are the work of Satan.

Cult members had refused to come out of their bunker before the apocalypse, which their leader Pavel Kuznetsov — now undergoing psychiatric treatment — predicted would happen in April or May this year. Kuznetsov did not join his followers in the bunker, saying God had different tasks for him.

This article from the New York Times explores the grounds of a lawsuit recently filed by two physicists in federal court seeking to stop CERN from using its new $8 billion particle accelerator. The question: are crazy physicists in Switzerland unwittingly constructing a doomsday machine that will tear apart the fabric of our universe, creating a black hole that will eat the earth? The article is paraphrased in brief below:

Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

But Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

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.”