Everything You Need to Know About Black Holes - One Week Late

A lecturer asked me to recommend a web site where students could read online news about Information Technology. One site that comes to mind is eWeek.com. It provides a good digest of recent ICT news, but I have heard it described as "Everything you need to know - One week late."

A useful feature of eWeek is the list of “Most Read” stories, which is currently:

• Microsoft's Big Windows 7 Week. Microsoft's 2006-2007 release of Windows Vista was reported as disappointing; causing many PC users to stick with Windows XP, so the release of Windows 7 has been widely anticipated.
  
• NASA Space Funding Reaches Critical Point. NASA is planning the future of space travel against a background of controversial decisions, such as: whether to use the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars, whether to use humans or robots to explore space, and whether space travel should be a commercial or government funded venture.
  
• Why the Droid Can Challenge the iPhone. Should mobile phones be locked to applications and services that Apple Inc. permits, or should you have a free choice to customise mobile applications and services, as with (An)Droid?
  
• Windows 7 Comes on USB Drives for Netbooks. Software and documents have traditionally been stored on spinning magnetic discs that are prone to mechanical failure, but we are now in the decade where solid-state memory (with no moving parts), has become a cost effective and more reliable alternative.
  
• Tilera Talks 100-Core Processor. Some calculations, such as simulating the collision between two black holes, would be too dangerous to try as experiments (1) and too complex to solve on an office PC, so scientists use dozens of computers on a single silicon chip, to complete their calculations in days rather than years. This new technology makes supercomputers available for business applications.

My comment (1) about making black holes collide is just a joke, as scientists do not have the ability to perform such an experiment. I explain the joke, because some people were needlessly worried by speculation that the Large Hadron Collider experiments could create a black hole. To observe the collision of two black holes would be a physicists dream, and it will eventually happen at some vast distance from our galaxy, and release enough energy to be detected on Earth. Scientists can simulate a collison of black holes using super computers, since it is described by Einstein's equations of general relativity. The above NASA image, showing two spiral galaxies colliding is somewhat relevant, as it demonstrates that cosmological events 100's of millions of light-years away can be viewed from Earth.

The business-like format of weekly publications made sense when they were printed on paper, but the Internet has enabled the era of reader generated content. The popular http://slashdot.org/, by contrast, has become the classic site where technology news is posted and rated by its readers. It is worth wading through the sometimes inane comments to find an occasional gem of alternative opinion.

Disclaimer: I have no interest in any of the above mentioned companies or organisations, and write this blog post for general interest purposes only.