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Table-Top Black Holes

The desktop black hole, described in a paper submitted to arXiv on Monday, is made from 60 concentrically arranged layers of circuit board. Each layer is coated in copper and printed with patterns that alternately vibrate or don’t vibrate in response to electromagnetic waves.

Together, the patterns completely absorbed microwave radiation coming from any direction, and converted their energy to heat.

If black hole powered cars are in reach, we think the lack of a certain flying car can be overlooked. Don’t take this the wrong way. You’re not off the hook for our personalized jet dirigible yet.

NSA is Building a Computer as Large as the World
It’s proposed to be built in Utah of all places. A cyber storage library that would hold all the world’s knowledge. What a curious library this would be. We can’t help but recall the Geomagnetic Planetary HardDrive suggestion from a few years ago. It would be interesting to know how that is working out.

…this library expects few visitors. It’s being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for “signals intelligence,” the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital “pocket litter.” Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

World conversations are no longer localized. World conversations have been saved.

Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged from the Future?
God is now here and He’s a fan of Novikov’s self-consistency principle.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

[...]

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

(via new scientist, wired, @somebadideas, nybooks, @greatdismal )

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