With the Surface Pro Microsoft has made a statement on what a PC should be for the next five to ten years.   Rather than fading away the PC will become thin, lite, and easy to use while retaining the flexibility that has always been the hallmark of the personal computer.   That said, Surface Pro is not perfect for all uses.  These are my impressions after spending a week with the Microsoft Surface Pro 64 GB. 

 

Certain media sources have with the announcement of a possible black hole 26,000 light years away at W49B, mentioned the possibility of a wormhole. (I'm looking at you LA Times.) As a fan of many sci-fi programs which featured some variety of wormhole, I would welcome that. As a student of actual physics I don't think that such a thing can exist based on everything we think we know about black holes and quantum mechanics.

How would we recognize truly alien life on a planet that is probably like a half molten Venus, and why we don't even bother trying.  How could we detect any kind  life on any extrasolar planet at all?   

Given what we know about chemistry, astronomy, and physics we can say plenty about extrasolar planets.  We can even have informed scientific opinions or the presence or absence of life as we know it on such planets.   Why can't we say anything about life as we don't know it?  To understand this we need to understand how life as we know it could be detected by astronomers. 

 Things everyone should know about real black holes in  comparison to fictional black holes.  Most importantly they don't suck things into them.   

Black holes do not suck everything in like some kind of vacuum cleaner.   A mini black hole like the one created by Springfield's collider would start out with the mass-energy of two sub atomic particles.  Gravitationally it would not be more attractive than those particles were, which is not at all.  

They don't float.  However they can have an effective surface charge and if rotating a magnetic field.  (These are called Kerr-Newman black holes.)   

The X-Ray laser was a main weapon envisioned for the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).  The descendants of that technology are used to image nano-scale structures the size of individual proteins.  This is a prime example of how science is not a moral pursuit. Science simply reveals tools for our use. 

The Curiosity rover has landed safely on MARS, we have seen the image of the wheel on the surface.    There were good reasons to doubt the "Sky crane" approach to a landing.  Just one computer glitch, just one wrong calculation, just one strange interaction of various systems and the story would be different.  


The difficulty of this has been compared in recent days to "sticking the dismount" in gymnastics.  This is that times a million.  It's like making a robot that can do the routine and land on it's feet, based only on its AI, while falling from space! It was a perfect 20*.