LHC more likely to find a black hole for cash than a higgs boson

The Great Beyond: LHC repairs get pricier

More bad news from the Large Hadron Collider.

Repairing the damage from the electrical failure earlier this year will run to $21 million, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (AP). The original cost estimate for the repair was around $80,000, not including labour and the spares.

In addition, the particle collider will not be up and running before June. Previously it was suggested the particles could be whizzing round the ring by April (AFP).

“There is still a lot of work to do and we want to be sure that everything is in order before starting up,” says spokesman James Gillies (AFP / AP). “If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer.”

Can you believe this garbage? This project originally cost the world economy about 10 billion dollars, an astronomical sum to say the least, and it isn't even getting close to accomplishing its mission. What a waste! This illustrates perfectly the problems of socialism -- that the central planners will tend not to choose projects that actually produce new goods and services efficiently because there is no adequate way to count the costs.

This is HUGE

This is a major breakthrough, although I doubt we will see any commercial items using this technology for a number of years. Wireless power would have a MAJOR effect upon electronics as we know it.

The Power of Induction: Science News Online, July 21, 2007
Excerpt:

When Soljacic first presented the principle, it was unproved. All he could show were his calculations. "I expected that some people would think I was a crackpot," says Soljacic, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "This was pretty far out."



Perhaps it also didn't help that the participants at the symposium—a celebration of the 90th birthday of Charles Townes, who pioneered the laser in the 1950s—included 18 Nobel prize winners and dozens of other luminaries. Much to Soljacic's relief, he sold the scientists on his presentation.



A year and a half later, a bulb lit up in an MIT lab—unplugged. Soljacic and his collaborators had demonstrated a new way of coaxing magnetic fields into transferring power over a distance of several meters without dispersing as electromagnetic waves. The demonstration ushered in a technology that might eventually become as pervasive as the gadgets it could power. Laptops, cell phones, iPods, and digital cameras might someday recharge without power cords. With the proliferation of wireless electronics, perhaps it was just a matter of time before power transmission would go wireless, too.



The device that Soljacic and his collaborators put together had a disarming simplicity. On one side of the room, hanging from the ceiling, was a ring-shaped electrical circuit, about half a meter across, plugged into the wall. Hanging adjacent to the circuit, but with no physical connection to it, was a slightly larger copper coil looking like an oversize mattress spring. A few meters away hung a similar system with an ordinary lightbulb attached to the circuit. When the physicists sent power through the first circuit, the bulb lit up.



As expected, some energy was lost on its way to the lightbulb. However, a surprising amount reached its destination, the team reports in the July 6 Science. "The efficiency was 40 percent at the biggest distance we probed [more than 2 meters]," Soljacic says. At shorter distances, the efficiency was much higher.

The coils of this demonstration device would be too big to fit inside a laptop, let alone a cell phone. But this was only the first and simplest of several prototypes that the physicists have in mind. More tests are to come. The MIT team and other physicists say that in principle they see no obstacle to making such devices more compact and more efficient.

Best Rocketboom Ever

... on Chaos Theory...



Rocketboom - 6/12/07

Plastic Bags and the "Environment"

I watch a v-blog on a fairly regular basis called Rocketboom, and today’s installment is stranger than normal. It’s on plastic bags, of all things. The producers highlight how plastic bags are supposedly destroying the earth, killing marine life, etc. Then they talk about how governments can reduce this so-called damage, by putting a tax on plastic bags. Fortunately, the US has not adopted such measures.

A “plastic bag” tax (or any restriction on these products) is just one more way that governments wage war on the poor, despite insistent pleas to the contrary. A tax on plastic bags is nothing more than a cost that gets passed on to the consumer of the plastic bags through higher grocery prices, and the poor will certainly be burdened the most in the end. Furthermore, the argument about reusing the bags rings hollow. The poor don’t have the luxury of specialized storage containers, buying “high quality” garbage bags, or whatnot. Instead, we who don’t make much money reuse plastic bags all the time for all sorts of various things, from garbage bags, to packing materials, to long term storage. I wouldn’t consider myself poor by any means, and even I reuse plastic bags as much as I can.

With which should a government be more concerned: making groceries cost less so the poor can get by, or the state of the environment? The answer, truthfully, is neither. The government has no right to dictate how people trade groceries; the market will work to their advantage! As long as individuals are producing things that others value, they will have the means to trade for their survival. Nor does government have the right to force people at the point of a gun to give them money for ridiculous environmental protection measures. It’s immoral for individuals to steal, and just because the government calls that money “taxes”, the action is no more moral – it still is theft.

Scientists and engineers make products that people desire to accomplish useful purposes – ultimately these products are both for survival and enjoyment. Allowing the free market to work, and hence allowing we producers to make things that people want, promotes nothing less than the continuation of the human species. These measures of restricting trade, though perhaps well intentioned, are ultimately detrimental. In fact, I am convinced that environmentalists do not value humans much at all, as they are often more concerned with the well-being of non-sentient animals and the non-living “climate” than the well-being and preservation of human life. To make matters worse, they always endorse theft from others as the means of accomplishing their convoluted goals. Now that’s what I call a waste!