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CERN's LHC 'First Beam' to be broadcast live on Wednesday {Engadget}
Sep 8th 2008 10:56AM Take a certain mass of ordinary matter, say a marble-sized piece and stand a few feet away. That mass will exert a gravitational attraction on you. Now compress that matter until it forms a black hole. The impact on you, standing a few feet away, is zero. You still feel exactly the same gravitational attraction from the mass because its mass hasn't changed nor has your distance from its center. The only thing different is that the mass is now compressed into a much smaller size. So, you can theoretically get much closer to it and, since the gravitational attraction grows as you get closer to the center of the mass, you will eventually get close enough so that this attraction is too strong for even light to escape. That's the event horizon. As long as you're outside of this, however, at your several-foot distance, the compression of that mass from a marble into a black hole is utterly irrelevant.
If the LHC produces a microscopic black hole, the same principle applies. Almost none of the surrounding matter will notice if the associated mass is ordinary matter or a black hole since the gravitational attraction on anything that isn't ultra-close to it will be identical. Only those few particles that stray very close will be pulled in to make the black hole grow. Since most of space is empty, this will consist of a few stray subatomic particles that wander by. Since the process will be infrequent, it won't be nearly enough to compensate for the shrinking of the black hole due to evaporation through Hawking radiation. The black hole will not last long and will have zero impact. Even if it didn't evaporate, it would take eons to pull in enough mass to even be noticed by the macroscopic world.
So, this is a complete non-issue. In fact, LHC physicists would love for such a microscopic black hole to be created in order to study its basic properties.
World to end Wednesday {Engadget}
Sep 7th 2008 10:35PM The LHC isn't going to do anything that isn't done every second of every day as extremely high-energy cosmic rays collide with each other and other matter. It's just that these collisions are made to occur in a chamber in which extremely thorough monitoring is possible.
Even if micro black holes are generated, they'll be welcome and will be interesting to study. They'll pose no danger whatsoever. When you collapse matter into sufficient density to make a black hole, the mass doesn't change and surrounding matter isn't attracted to it any greater than before the collapse. What does happen is that the matter is compressed into a much smaller space, allowing other matter to approach it more closely until the gravitational attraction is large and the event horizon is eventually crossed. But this applies only to random small particles that wander this close. There's no noticeable influence at all on the surrounding matter at large. Plus, such black holes will evaporate relatively quickly.
Coaster-sized origami-optics lens boosts focal length, shrinks photog egos {Engadget}
Sep 4th 2008 11:12AM Seems like they're targeting applications for which bokeh isn't relevent. Think compact spotting scopes, spy satellite cameras and so forth. Anywhere you need magnification primarily for information gathering purposes.
Coaster-sized origami-optics lens boosts focal length, shrinks photog egos {Engadget}
Sep 4th 2008 11:08AM "A snooze-inducing Engineering TV clip"
Engadget, where we care only about consuming things and are bored by how they actually work. Seriously, this video did about as well as any video that actually attempts to explain an engineering concept and wasn't at all hard to understand. Anyone put to sleep by it likely has a hard time learning anything.
Microsoft patents Page Up / Page Down functionality, April 1st seen lingering in the distance {Engadget}
Sep 2nd 2008 10:17AM It's time tech journalists learn a bit about patents so that they can inform their readers a bit better. This patent covers neither the PU and PD keys nor the mere concept of moving to the same place on a new page. Rather, the claims (the only part of the patent that matters) cover a specific formula for computing how to do this for arbitrary zoom level. I don't even see mention of the specific claims in the article, even though they are sitting right there on the front page of the patent summary, linked to from the original GigaOm article that Engadget references.
It's also important to remember that patents can be challenged in court, especially if an inventing party can prove they came up with the idea first by producing evidence (such as mention in prior writings).
RED's next move: Monstro super DSLRs {Engadget}
Aug 30th 2008 9:16AM Digital cameras don't produce colors. They produce numbers that are later interpreted as colors in as flexible a way as is required. Indeed, one of the key RED innovations is their video raw format. As with stil camera raw, this provides arbitrary ability to use color profiles later in production to create whatever look is desired.
iPhone 3G reception just fine say curious Swedes with engineering degrees {Engadget}
Aug 25th 2008 10:38AM This test occurred and was reporting on. We don't exactly get to pick which phones were tested. Nor are there simply dozens of similar tests for us to all to chose from, one of which compares the US-market phones you'd like to see.
Two mammoth solar plants to generate 800 megawatts in California {Engadget}
Aug 18th 2008 11:09AM The stated area is the size of the facility. Not all of the area is for actual array deployment.
As for the cost, that's irrelevant. What matters is the cost per kilowatt-hr that consumers pay. How a company structures its internal costs is its business, assuming they are funding the endeavor themselves. If they did't think they could get long-term costs to the point where they can sell the final energy output profitably yet at a low cost, they wouldn't be getting into this business.
New "nanoantenna" material sucks heat from any source to cool devices, generates electricity {Engadget}
Aug 12th 2008 1:18PM Thermodynamics dictates that only the difference in temperature and thus in the blackbody IR spectrum between a warmer object and the antenna itself can be utilized and turned into useful work and that this conversion is less and less efficient as the two objects are closer and closer in temperature. So, positioning these antennas will be tricky. Close to a heat source, you get to be right up against a high temperature. However, the antenna also quickly heat up and the temperature difference goes to zero unless the antenna is attached to a good heat sink. Far from a heat source and the temperature is much lower (equivalently, most of the IR photons have gone off in other directions).
Tamron announces 15x zoom lens for Nikon, Canon DSLRs {Engadget}
Aug 1st 2008 4:57PM "in my experience tamron lens quality has been garbage. i've yet to read a review on a fully satisfied tamron lens user, but the idea is cool"
Take a look at the Tamron 24-135mm. It's built like a tank and has outstanding image quality. It's only downfalls are high weight and non-USM autofocus which is thus slower and noisier than I'm used to with my other Canon USM glass.
