Tipping

Tipping is a weird, anachronistic, degrading, and yet ubiquitous and multicultural custom.  Certain service providers get tipped, others don't.  Those who do, depend on those tips to supplement an otherwise insufficient wage.  Those who don't, presumably, are paid acceptably without tips.  Weird, right?

First of all, I suspect the origin of the custom, at least in the European-influenced part of the world, is insultingly class-ist.  Here's what I think must have happened.  Some servant is employed at some house or inn or coach house, or whatever at some pitiful wage that barely allows that person to exist, let alone have a family.  Along comes a "gentleman" who is served by said servant.  Being kindly, if not particularly enlightened, the served, in appreciation of the service or the company, offers the servant a "little extra" so that he (the servant) might have a drink or buy flowers for a girl or whatever and which payment will not be known to his employers (otherwise they would claim it for themselves).  That servant will naturally do whatever he thinks might elicit the same response from others or that same returning "customer".  The process catches on.  The employers, seeing that the servants have another source of income, and (here's the really disgusting part) not wanting them to rise above their station, reduce that wage so that the total now (with tips) is no better than it was before (without them).

And that's where we are.  I don't want to stiff a waiter or a cab driver or a bell hop or anyone.  But they should be paid a proper wage by their employers, and I should be charged accordingly for the service.

The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is up and running.  As far as I know, the destruction of the Universe, or even our part of it, has not occurred.  Whew!

Hadrons, of course, are "fat" particles, not to be confused with baryons, which are "heavy" particles, although some confusion is understandable as baryons are hadrons.  But then, so are mesons which are not heavy, although, generally speaking, neither are baryons, you know, compared to say, water buffaloes.  Everyone agrees, though, that both mesons and baryons are definitely fat.

But amidst all the speculation about whether or not the Higgs Boson will be detected and what is symmetry breaking, anyway, I think something really important has been overlooked.  Or, at least, I haven't heard any public discussion:
Is the collider large, or will it collide large hadrons?