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.

Need a laptop battery?

I own an IBM Thinkpad X31 laptop, and I use it to do most of my work for UT, AGST, and the church. It has functioned as an excellent tool for a long time, save for one issue: battery life. From the start, it lasted only about an hour, and it continually declined in quality over time. Now, the battery only holds up for about 15 minutes. Pretty bad, eh?

So I started looking around the net for new batteries. They ain't cheap, lemme tell ya. But I found some nice sites that specialized in replacement batteries for electronics of all sorts. Enter AtBatt.com. Not only did they have some an excellent selection, but they also have a student discount program. I thought, "what the hey, maybe they're serious..." and filled out the app. Within a day, I got an email saying they were more than happy to give me a discounted new battery. I called their phone, and had a great conversation with one of their head guys (Steve). He's a Christian interested in doing more than good business - he's also looking to help the environment through free market means by promoting eco-friendly rechargeable batteries.

I think these guys are pretty smart. They bought me as a customer AND they're working to spread some good around. That's some swell business right there. This is one of the easiest and best online shopping experiences I've had. Maybe if you're looking for a new battery for your laptop, camera, cell phone, or pretty much any electronic device you can imagine, you can check them out too.

So yeah, this is kind of like a sales pitch, but so what? Why not commend these folks who are doing good, honest business and talk about how they helped me out? That's the stuff the free market is made of!

Best of luck to you, Steve and the crew...

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.

Surface Computing

A fascinating new paradigm in computing... follow the link...

Microsoft Surface: Hands-on First Look

Remarkable technology

This is an amazing video of new software that will undoubtedly transform the way we think and use digital images... Frankly, I'm stunned.



TED | Talks | Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo (video)