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We all knew they were out there, including indirect evidence of one at the center of our galaxy (the jury is still out on that one). Now there are actual images, and data, of a black hole sucking down a star. Chandra and XMM-Newton both pulled X-ray data and images of the event. Check these links for more!

The ESA’s XMM-Newton home page, links to the information there.

Harvard’s Chandra Observatory Center.

If anyone has links to reactions from David Brin, Larry Niven, or other astrophysics gurus who write science fiction (the people who live in both my worlds, in other words), please pass them my way.

There are many points where Science Fiction and Geekdom intersect. I know, because I live there *grin*.

But some of them make a lot more sense than others, and this one is something I never expected or saw coming. But I should have, because it rings so true.

The Author in this case was Jorge Lois Borges, a brilliant writer who combined poetry and fantasy to touch the deepest parts of the human soul. The Geeks were the team from the Open Source project “Borges: An Extensible Documents Management System”. The thing that tied them together was a shared vision of how information could be organized, and how it would impact the people involved.

If you are a Geek, the link to explain all this is at Borges . If you want to understand both the logic and the basic human reaction to it, the link to the story that inspired the project is The Library of Babel .

He didn’t write in English, and his works were banned for many years in many parts of America, by short-sighted people who were frightened by the depths of true human experience he was able to call forth. The few who got past that found a treasure beyond belief. To learn more about this author and read some of his works, check out the Garden of Forking Paths.