Technobriefs
January 19, 2009
Astrophysics, stranger than fiction: OK, the wave/particle duality is odd, quantum mechanics is weird, spooky action at a distance is well, spooky. But those are all minor league odd compared to this: Our world may be a giant hologram. (Warning: read it soon, New Scientist articles disappear behind a pay-per-view wall quickly). Noise picked up by an instrument built to detect gravitational waves may doom the experiment because the universe itself does not have sufficient resolution since it is merely a hologram! Not what they were looking for, but a helluva discovery if true. Recent string theories suggest the apparently 3 dimensional universe actually has 7, 10, 11, or 26 dimensions. If Craig Hogan's theory is correct, the universe has only 2 dimensions. Welcome to Flatland!
Google: an attempt to estimate the power required to perform a Google search lead to consternation and controversy: How Google searches lead to our destruction, 'Carbon cost' of Google revealed, Measuring your Google search's carbon footprint, while Google Argues Its Searches Are Environmentally Friendly and Google emits rebuttal to carbon claims. Also, a response to last July's Is Google Making Us Stupid? article in The Atlantic (which as I recall ends up answering its title with "no, not really"): How Google Is Making Us Smarter.
Technobits: Apple Allows 3rd Party Web Browsers into App Store --- A Breakthrough in Imaging - Seeing a Virus in Three Dimensions --- Search the web for any song in the world.