Does Space Curve Back Around On Itself?

The cosmos are vast, seemingly going on forever in every direction away from oneself. The same was once true, though, of the vast sphere of Earth.

Eventually, as our means of navigation improved, we discovered that if you go any direction on the surface of Earth from a starting point, and can maintain a straight line course, you will come back to where you started.

What if the universe is like this, as well? Could it be? And, if it were, given its vastness, could we ever really know?

The following Forbes article takes the form of an intriguing Thought Experiment asking exactly these questions, and offering some of the best answers we have in an area of inquiry for which we in fact have very few.

#BlindMeWithScience #Cosmology #SpaceTime

Does anyone know of a Keyboard Cover for, or which is compatible with, the HP Chromebook X2? Asking for a friend who looks just like me, has the same first and last names as me, and just bought one yesterday... that lucky devil...

;-)

Movie Wins by +CinemaWins is yet another of my essential YouTube Playlists for cinema geekery, the yin to +CinemaSins (which I told you about earlier: https://plus.google.com/+EliFennell/posts/4o5BmhBgciZ) yang, and quite deliberately. It's not easy to do videos finding the good things in movies, even very bad ones, and keep it light, humorous, and be an appealing Channel Host, but they manage to do so with aplomb. I especially appreciate the attention to musical score, which can often stand out brilliantly even in dreadful movies.

Change.Org Petition To Save Google+

I very much doubt this will do any good, but I signed it anyways, and you should too if you care about this place. I'm pretty sure we'd be toast even if we got a million signatures. But, if nothing else, it may have some influence over how this network winds down and how well we're able to migrate everything from here to other networks of our choosing if they see how many of us loved the product.

It only takes a few seconds, so, why not?

#SaveGooglePlus #SaveGPlus

"The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition." - W. H. Auden

I just want to say, to my fellow #GPlusRefugees starting to make that move away from here to other networks and services: don't lose that exploratory boldness that brought you here in the first place.

While I understand the desire to avoid trusting another big company that could 'pull the plug' at any time, playing-it-safe with demands for Open Source/Decentralized/Nonprofit Social Thingies also risks you never finding that unique place and unique people that make it worth your time even if it does come to a sudden end.

After all, if any of us here now had played-it-safe, we wouldn't have taken a risk on G+, and made connections and had experiences that made it such sad news to hear we would be shutting down in the first place.

Everything ends, eventually. The only question when it does is: Was it worth it to you? Do you regret your time and effort? Or would you not trade them for anything? For me, it's the latter, so I will not be too timid to take a risk again.

#GooglePlusMassMigration #GPlusMassMigration

Stephen Hawking's 'Final' Paper: 'Soft Hair' and the Black Hole Information Paradox

Black Holes gobble up matter, energy, and even light and time into their inescapable gravity maws. Traditionally, nothing had been thought to escape this, resulting in a paradox: although it should never be possible to erase all information about a given thing from existence, anything thrown into a Black Hole appeared to do exactly that. As a result, Black Holes were called hairless, or bald, to indicate that although we could define them by mass, charge, and spin, we could not recover anything about the qualities of these possessed by any object which crossed the Event Horizon.

Eventually, one Sir Stephen Hawking conjectured that Black Holes also possess temperature, and thus obey the laws of thermodynamics previously believed not to apply to them, and that they eventually decayed through emitting a type of radiation called Hawking Radiation. It then became necessary to reconcile this Information Paradox: where it may have been possible to imagine information going into a Black Hole and staying there forever, beyond reach, it is a paradox to think they can both radiate, and yet also erase all information.

In 2015, Hawking teamed up with a pair of colleagues to propose a partial resolution to the paradox: at least some information about the electrical charges of objects falling into Black Holes may be preserved in a halo of zero-energy photons around the Event Horizon, called 'soft photons' or 'soft hairs'. Where a hairless Black Hole is distinguished from others only by mass, spin, and charge, hairy Black holes also differ entropically.

Now, in what may, or may not, actually be his final paper, Hawking joined with a team of colleagues earlier this year to calculate the thermodynamic entropy of Black Holes with a particular profile of soft hair, finding that their results agreed with Hawking's original formula for calculating Black Hole entropy.

It is not certain, however, that there are no other papers forthcoming with his name upon them.

#BlindMeWithScience #StephenHawking #BlackHoles

Is Google Home Hub a Secret Fuchsia Device?

The Google Home Hub, announced at the most recent Made By Google event alongside new Pixel Phones and Slates, is different from other Smart Home Hubs by their OEM partners.

Whereas those other devices run a stripped-down Android OS called Android Things, the Google Home Hub doesn't, and is instead described as running on the "Cast platform", i.e. the platform used for Google Cast devices like their popular Chromecast dongles.

On the surface, that would appear to mean they run an even more stripped-down Android OS running a single APK, a stripped-down Chrome for Android app optimized for media and display casting and some degree of interactivity (e.g. controlling cast media from a phone or browser, or using a phone as a game controller for a cast game).

9to5Google, on the other hand, thinks the real story may be more colorful, pun intended, as the device also appears as a known test device for Google Fuchsia, an OS currently in development which may, for at least some devices, come to replace Android. Fuchsia is not, it should be said, a mere version of Android or Chrome, though it has features of both, including support for Android apps and plans for Cast support. 9to5Google does a weekly look at this Operating System, which is actually ideally suited for these sorts of systems.

So, is it a Fuchsia device? Probably not. More likely, it is currently just a test device, with the Cast platform as its native platform, though this does not rule out a future upgrade to Fuchsia, and strongly suggests Fuchsia devices will soon be hitting the market if nothing else.

#FuchsiaFriday #GoogleHomeHub #MadeByGoogle

My first Google+ Post, before I had even discovered the virtue of 'going Public' with Posts. I had such optimism for this place back then...

#ShowMeYourFirstGooglePlusPost