hole

Why the Large Hadron Collider must be stopped

I am not an intelligent designer. Nor am I a resident of France or Switzerland.

But this Large Hadron Collider experiment, in which particles are breaking the speed limit somewhere beneath the French/Swiss border and then crashing into each other like teenage drunks in fairground bumper cars scares the semi-comatose bejaysus out of me.

These scientists claim to know what they are doing. But scientists always claim to know what they are doing. Then they discover, while doing the thing that they claim to know they are doing, that they are doing something entirely different.

Is any government monitoring … Read more

Don't panic: Large Hadron Collider won't spawn voracious black holes

Correction, 11:00 a.m. PDT: This story incorrectly reported the size of the particle accelerator. It has a circumference of 17 miles.

Remember the fear that the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb in 1945 might ignite the atmosphere? The Large Hadron Collider, a massive particle accelerator 17 miles in circumference that will begin operation Wednesday, comes with its own apocalyptic possibility: teensy black holes with gravitational appetites voracious enough to swallow the Earth.

But you can breathe easy, because some scientists believe that worry is just as baseless as the A-bomb's flaming atmosphere.

On Tuesday, the … Read more

Youths ordered to apologize on YouTube

Two teenagers who posted a malicious "fire in the hole" prank on YouTube were slapped with a court order to post an apology on the same video-sharing site, according to a report in Florida Today.

The sentence, devised by the judge, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, was created to serve as a deterrent to what is viewed as a growing problem of youths filming malicious, or violent, acts and posting them online, in the hope of generating notoriety.

In this particular case, a 23-year-old Taco Bell employee was stationed at the drive-up window, when a car loaded with teenagers … Read more

Photos: LG's 'Scarlet,' the TV with a hole

LG's "Scarlet" range of televisions are causing quite a buzz. Is it the massive marketing campaign? Is it the intrusive red color that the back of the TV is finished in? Could it in fact be the glowing red/white hole on the front of the TV? Whatever it is, people want to know about this TV, so we got LG to send us one, and we've taken some photos of it.

We're looking at the 32-inch model, so it's only a 720p TV, which is fine for most uses, and we suspect that … Read more

Former greenskeeper now about to become the Masters champion

Unlike Carl Spackler's fantasy in Caddyshack, the Golf Launchpad is almost too real. I hit a lot of bad shots in golf, and I hit a lot of bad shots in Tiger Woods golf using the Golf Launchpad. This USB controller from a company called Electric-Spin is not new (see my awful swing in this old product video), and its new feature won't be ready until sometime this summer, but that didn't stop Crave from taking some hacks with it now that spring has sprung.

The Golf Launchpad lets you use your own clubs to hit a … Read more

Casio crams 7x zoom into ultracompact camera

I'm starting to believe that camera manufacturers are able to stuff tiny quantum singularities into their products. The only way I can explain the increasing range of the internal zoom systems in ultracompacts is with a fold in space. Casio's latest fold holds a 7x zoom, with the 35mm-equivalent range of 35mm-266mm, in an inch-thick ultracompact.

With a camera so small and light, shake can be even more of a problem than usual with long zooms. Casio compensates with no less than four different antishake techniques, including a mechanical CCD-shift image stabilizer and the usual combos of high-ISO … Read more