Life, the Universe, and Everything (but not in that order.)

I forgot to mention before I left for the reading on of the best things I heard today. Scientists in New York may have created a black hole. In New York. Not out in space, where things can collapse into it. Though matter is falling into it. It's not as hazardous as I'm making it out to be, in fact the scientists don't believe it to be a threat at all. The idea is pretty cool, and I understand the desire to do something just for the sake of better understanding a phenomenon, so I'm not going to criticise them, especially since they apparently didn't intend to create a black hole, assuming that is what has actually happened. It could be some other occurence that exhibits black hole-like tendencies. In fact, it is possible that black holes do not exist, as they are still theory.

The reading was great. Ms. Nelson read an unpublished short story entitled Dick. Hopefully it will be published soon, I'd like to read it. It wasn't a particularly happy story, but I thoroughly enjoy her treatment of the differing psyches of her characters.

I was reading an article on the competition between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs, and it mentioned something I don't recall hearing about before now: the Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD). I really like how this disc sounds. It is a little larger, physically, than a DVD (or Blu-Ray or HD-DVD,) but where DVD holds 4.43 gigs, Blu-Ray holds 25-50 gigs (more if 4 or 8 layer is achieved) and HD-DVD holds 30 gigs, HVD is a one terabyte disc. I can hardly fathom one terabyte of removable media. I don't have one TB of hard disk space. I have about 1/3 of that right now. I really hope this HVD format hits the market relatively quickly, not just for its direct effect of massive removable media, but because it will by necessity drive down further the costs of hard disks as well. And I can never have too much storage space.