The Spook Has Moved!

my new address is:
http://www.althespook.com/ravings/
please drop by! And did I mention you can finally comment? Really!

Honey, Remember Those Black Holes You Lost?

Well, I found them, just in time for Christmas!

Now, if you are not a cosmologist specializing in the mechanics of black hole formation in the early Universe, you may not be aware of the missing black holes. Rest assured, however, they were indeed missing. And now, thanks to the efforts of the Chandra and Spitzer Space Telescopes, they have been found unharmed! Astronomical Search And Rescue Teams across the Universe can relax and head home with the knowledge of a job well done.

The problem was a simple one; there weren't enough quasars. A quasar (Quasi-Stellar Object) is a very young galaxy, formed right after the beginning of the galactic era in cosmological time, which clumps so much mass into its greedy little center that it collapses into a black hole. The black hole then begins spewing out huge amounts of radiation until it drives away all the gas and dust used to form stars in the young, hungry galaxy and eventually settles down into a fat old age, nibbling the odd star unwary enough to venture too close to its event horizon and accretion disk. The young galaxy enters a comfortable middle age with only modest star formation but able to live off its saved resources like globular clusters until old age arrives and it either gets ripped apart by a passing galaxy or gobbled up by a galactic cluster or cosmic attractor.

But based on the values from the Universal Microwave Background, there should be a lot more visible quasars in their young, raging "Linkin Park" stage than our instruments were finding. These were the "lost black holes" referenced in our title today. And now the team of Mark Dickinson and Emmanuelle Dadi have located the signature of the missing relativistic offspring in the superheated dust clouds surrounding many galaxies at the edge of the observable universe.

Basically, the team of researchers looked at the data gathered by the Spitzer infrared telescope from 1000 "dusty" galaxies whose centers we cannot see due to large rings of dust surrounding them. They noticed that about 200 of these galaxies were too hot in the infrared portion of the spectrum; their dust had to be heated by something more than just stars. Using X-ray data from the Chandra scope in an overlay technique they call "stacking", the scientists realized that there had to be supermassive, quasar sized black holes in the overheated galaxies! This in turn led them to theorize that since the number of dusty galaxies is large enough to contain the "missing" black hole population, it is very likely where they have gone. Further observations will be needed to confirm their theory, but for now we can all rest easier knowing that our black hole population is safely accounted for. (Images courtesy of NASA.)

The Clover Is Running Gigabit Ethernet....

Or should we say, Etherroot....

Every so often a scientific result shows up that stands conventional wisdom on its collective head. This article at Science Daily reveals that Dutch researchers have confirmed a vegetative intranet based on runners that transmits chemical messages as well as viral infections, just like our mechanical intranets:

Recently Stuefer and his colleagues were the first to demonstrate that clover plants warn each other via the network links if enemies are nearby. If one of the plants is attacked by caterpillars, the other members of the network are warned via an internal signal. Once warned, the intact plants strengthen their chemical and mechanical resistance so that they are less attractive for advancing caterpillars.

Thanks to this early warning system, the plants can stay one step ahead of their attackers.

A vegetative Norton Anti-Caterpillar! Unfortunately, this sort of connectivity needs a firewall as well, as the researchers determined:

However there are two sides to the coin. That is not just the case for the Internet but also for plants. It appears that plant viruses can use the infrastructure present to rapidly spread through the connected plants. The infection of one plant therefore leads to the infection of all plants within the network.

There is reason to believe far more complex biochemical signaling is going on as well in the Clovernet, and that similar intranets exist for other runner-based plants. Other research is looking into "wireless" plant intranets using airborne signals from pheromones and similar compounds.

Rumors that McAfee is attempting to develop a version of their popular security software for Clovernet are considered premature at this point. (Images courtesy of NWO.)

A Brief Note About Comments

After some discussion it appears that the Kelgarries Blogswarm won't be able to support comments at this time due to sheer volume of material we need to work with to achieve our goals. Once we migrate to our own servers (scheduled for early 2009) we'll be able to support a full comments implementation.

Thanks for your interest, and enjoy the blog!

How To Subscribe To Epiphanies As An RSS Feed In Internet Explorer 7

It has come to our attention that many readers of Epiphanies would like to have the ability to know when new posts are available automatically. Fortunately, the internet and IE7 provide this feature very nicely.

Rather than duplicate postings and eat up space here at Blogspot, we have posted a very simple but quite effective Tutorial on the matter at our sister blog, Tutorials On Using Voltaic Difference Engines. Enjoy!

Crossing The Event Horizon Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

The Ergosphere is one of the two theoretical event horizons around a rotating Black Hole, or Schwarzchild Discontinuity. The true Event Horizon is the point from which nothing can return (unless Black Holes can evaporate, that is!) The Ergosphere (also called an Ergoregion) is a theoretical zone between normal space and the Black Hole's Event Horizon where things are, to coin a phrase, in a highly unusual state (Kerr space) and massive amounts of energy (from the rotation of the Black Hole) may emerge at any time, permitted to do this by the very fabric of quantum reality itself (thus the name incorporates ergon, the Greek term for work) via the Penrose Process.

It is important to realize that our sciences themselves parallel this condition, with new information being continually obtained that challenges or even refutes previously unquestioned scientific paradigms.

This blog is intended to be your gateway, estimable reader, to a keyhole aperture on that wild, wonderful and utterly terrifying realm where reality itself is nothing more than an ongoing gedankenexperiment, and Bell's and Legget's Inequalities rule all. (Images courtesy of Wikipedia.)