1.15.2009

If work is a hologram...do I have to come in tomorrow? :)  Read the full article for more brain-bending stuff, such as "we can tell by measuring the blurriness of the universe".  It almost makes sense...Stephen Hawking, eat your heart out.
According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.
If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

1.12.2009

South America....NOT on my vacation list anymore

Glad my family got to go there as a port-of-call on a cruise as a kid.  Caracas, Venezuela is definitely OFF my vacation list forever.  From CNN:
"Foreign Policy magazine said in September that Caracas tops the list of five murder capitals of the world, with an official tally of 130 homicides per 100,000 residents. The city, which is Venezuela’s capital, has about 4 million inhabitants."
Of the top five, only one U.S. city made the list: New Orleans.  :)