Sensible Erection | LHC out of commission for months

Saturday, 20 September 2008

quote [ The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva will be out of action for at least two months, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) says.

Part of the giant physics experiment was turned off for the weekend while engineers probed a magnet failure. ]

[sci&tech] [by f00m@nB@r@1:58pmGMT] [+10 Interesting]

Comments

nbob said @ 2:35pm GMT on 20th Sep
or they're just saying that whilst they figure out how to contain the giant black hole...

metternich said @ 2:48pm GMT on 20th Sep
Who, the Mac people, the Microsoft people, or the LHC people?

nbob said @ 3:33pm GMT on 20th Sep
your mom!

...the LHC ppl

Silent said @ 3:16pm GMT on 20th Sep
About the Mac/Pc thing.
Now I can find it funny, but all these commentors seem to be on this entire trip about how this is irrefutable proof that Microsoft can't compare to Apple.
They're only gonna make themselves look stupid if they all act all fanboy over it, just use it for the funny and move on guys.

kishi said @ 3:51pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:1 Insightful]
Yeah, that's why it annoys the hell out of me. They act like it's proof that Microsoft uses Macs. No, jackass, it's proof that an ad company uses Macs for graphic design. Is that a shocking revelation? About as shocking as the revelation that people who take the Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux wars personally are frequently huge douchebags.

maryyugo said @ 4:00pm GMT on 20th Sep
well... i dunno... it's sort of ironic that a stupid add by stupid ad agencies to promote microsoft is done on a mac. exactly why doesn't really matter. sort of like having a meeting to work on promotion for kentucky fried chicken and holding the meting at a fine upscale yuppies restaurant. sort of like al gore promoting reducing "carbon footprints" and having a house that consumes more energy than a cruise ship. sort of like schwartneneger promoting energy conservation from the helm of his hummer h2... you know... irony.

take o/s wars personally? nah. all the available computer operating systems, like fast foods, are unfit for human consumption. they take far too much attention and have way too difficult a learning curve. but i don't expect understanding or sympathy about that here where almost everyone takes the difficulty and frustration of operating computers for granted.

-_- said @ 5:23pm GMT on 20th Sep
But everyone loves their bloatware don't they?
At this point I think someone should set up some evolutionary algorithms to try to "breed" a better operating system .. see where that takes us.
There's just too few programmers who work in binary/assembly to pull it off with humans .. well, plus that kind of programming seems to make humans a bit crazy.
Maybe a cube farm of autistic programmers could do it but that's just a more complicated evolutionary algorithm in my opinion.

devilsad said @ 10:02pm GMT on 20th Sep
What are the parameters for success for an evolutionary model? Do you have a lab full of humans booting up endless numbers of nearly identical operating systems and seeing if a) they actually work, and b) rating their user friendliness?
If you leave it up to only quantitative measures of success like operation speed and disk space, you'll end up with a command line OS. Maybe not what most people would like to use.
Probably OSS comes closest to an evolutionary model of success, if someone creates a useful add on or patch to the kernel or libraries, it will be replicated and spread among the other users and possibly incorporated into the main distributions if it is really beneficial.

rezties said @ 5:48pm GMT on 20th Sep
Actually, none of those things are irony.
Making food doesn't mean you are limited to that food. If so, Willy Wonka's gonna get Diabetes.

Al Gore's propaganda sounds ironic because propaganda is supposed to. While he's naturally trying to overcompensate after the fact, it also wasn't as it was reported.
http://www.algore.org/forum/al_gore_news_and_events/policy_positions_and_record/refute_smear_gore_home_excessively_high_en

Schwarzenegger.
His H2 is known to run off hydrogen or kittens or some other alternative, replenishable fuel.
http://www.motortrend.com/auto_news/112_news041129_hummer/index.html

And if all the available computer OS's were too difficult, computers would have remained esoteric calculation tools.

It's about as ironic as advertising Verizon Wireless on Cable TV. It's just a vehicle.

Alanis said @ 6:34pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:1 Funny]
It's like raayyaaaaaayyynnne, on you wedding day!

brat#3 said @ 6:45am GMT on 21st Sep
+ a million Ed Byrne.

maryyugo said @ 6:49pm GMT on 20th Sep
willi wonka might have died of diabetes. "Two men who appeared in Marlboro advertisements - Wayne McLaren and David McLean - died of lung cancer.

from: here.

now that's irony, don't ya think?

Saint_Marck said @ 7:01pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:1 Insightful]
Nope, irony would be if they lived to 100 with the lung capacity of a teenager.

theolypse said @ 2:17am GMT on 21st Sep
That would be one form of irony.

rezties said @ 4:46pm GMT on 21st Sep
Another, would be Iron Man. Get it? Irony?

Okay, fine. How about how his suit isn't Iron, but 'Gold-Titanium alloy'?

relm said @ 9:02pm GMT on 20th Sep
I imagine a client telling an ad agency "Oh, we insist you use this software to do your design work, not this software that you usually use and are familiar with" and then I'm glad Microsoft didn't do that

Chop-Logik said @ 4:09pm GMT on 20th Sep
+1 Thumb

maryyugo said @ 4:25pm GMT on 20th Sep
yeah, when i saw it, i thought it had to do with the banking system.

mrcucumber said @ 5:14pm GMT on 20th Sep
So I guess the end of he world has been postponed. I'll have to reschedule all my appointments until it's back online.

kang said @ 5:32pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:1 Underrated]
Brilliant ad campaign by Microsoft for a change (in the extended). It neuters those amusing Mac commercials without saying bad anything about the Mac itself. A positive message? Don't they know this is an election year?

I'm not really biased toward PC or Mac, I've just never felt a need to go to a Mac. I don't really understand the ferocity that Mac lovers have toward PCs but sometimes it seems to have the opposite intended effect (not talking about this post, just in other cases). Like when I went in an Apple store for the first time last week, and got a vague sense of ... trendiness I didn't I needed. Whether that was from actual Mac users or just their marketing campaigns, I don't know - but it's not there in PC outlets.

But that's all I say about it because I like f00m@nb@r's posts and I don't want to press his buttons. :-)

hellboy said @ 11:48pm GMT on 20th Sep
I've been a diehard Mac user from the very beginning (I've used Windows professionally at a pretty high technical level and hated it), couldn't care less about being trendy (I was a Mac user during the Dark Ages, remember), and I think the Jerry Seinfeld ads are abysmal, painfully funny in a very unintentional, WTF-are-they-thinking way....

...and I agree with you, the "I'm a PC" ad is actually a very smart, well-done counter-ad. Be interesting to see Apple's response. Maybe they can get Jason Alexander.

Narrenschiff said @ 7:35am GMT on 21st Sep [Score:1 Insightful]
If they can get Larry David I'm switching to macs.

Nostrildamus said @ 5:36pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:3]
"I came across a bizarre paper recently suggesting that the LHC might be shut down. Not because of the funding cuts that have been threatening particle physics projects around the world, nor because of law suits accusing the LHC of threatening life on Earth... No, the paper suggested that future effects caused by the production of particles, such as the Higgs, could ripple backwards in time and prevent the LHC from ever operating."

Links to the paper:
Abstract
PDF

f00m@nB@r said @ 5:40pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:1 Insightful]
lol

-_- said @ 5:41pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:1 Underrated]
Yeah, don't you just love theoretical physics :D

f00m@nB@r said @ 8:53pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:2]
there's no physics in this paper.

-_- said @ 12:22am GMT on 21st Sep
But it's based on/links to this article which supposedly is (according to the site tags).

f00m@nB@r said @ 4:59am GMT on 21st Sep
anyone can post to the arxiv. even you. it is NOT a refereed forum.

f00m@nB@r said @ 1:22am GMT on 22nd Sep
ok, i retract the statement. i judged based only on the corresponding author's email address, which was not an institutional address. looking at the actual paper, it does seem that the authors are members of established physics research institutions.

i'll have to delve to make a better judgement. don't hold your breath. i'm pretty impatient with papers since finishing up the phd.

Silent said @ 5:47pm GMT on 20th Sep
But.. if the future events have negative rippling effects which stop said event, then the effects can't happen, so the event has to happen, which means it can't.
When will science stop destroying the world!?

monkeytooth said @ 6:53pm GMT on 20th Sep
antiprotons do funny things
ImageHost.org

Saint_Marck said @ 6:58pm GMT on 20th Sep
No, only the present exists, which means whenever there's a machine like the LHC and events surrounding it's planned activation cause the activation event to approach a probability of 1, the damaging particle events will manifest. It has nothing to do with the future.

Raikva said @ 7:53pm GMT on 20th Sep
That doesn't not make sense to me - as long as you remove the word 'will'.

Saint_Marck said @ 9:40pm GMT on 20th Sep
I'm not a scientist, I just stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

flat_michael said @ 10:02pm GMT on 20th Sep
and the extra apostrophe.

radioelectric said @ 11:54pm GMT on 20th Sep
"only the present exists"

I'm sure that's patently untrue.

eddiebax said @ 6:05pm GMT on 20th Sep
Re: Mac/PC: Walk into any ad agency, or onto the stage of any commercial shoot, and Macs will outnumber Wintel 30 to 1. Macs have a decade long head start on Wintel in the arena of graphics, and all those people who, 20 years ago wanted to do computer based graphics, picked up a Mac.

The only Wintel boxes you see belong to the accountants.

¿ said @ 7:43pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:1 Informative]
What is a quench?
A cryomagnet is basically just a closed loop of superconducting wire that allows an electric current to flow perpetually through it without any resistive losses, thus generating a stable, "permanent" magnetic field. The wires that are used to wind high field cryomagnets are only superconducting when cooled to very low temperatures. For this reason, cryomagnet coils are submerged in liquid helium at 4.2 degrees Kelvin.
Although there is no resistance in a cryomagnet coil when properly cooled and energized, there is a great deal of energy stored in the electric current. If, for any reason, a very small portion of the superconducting wire stops being a superconductor (goes "normal"), then the resistive heat generated in that section of wire will cause neighboring sections of wire to also go normal, resulting in a chain reaction that swiftly warms the entire coil and causes all of the stored energy to be dissipated as heat. This process takes only a few minutes, and can result in an impressive display of rapidly boiling liquid helium, similar to a geyser.

Video of a magnet quench:

EPT said @ 1:55am GMT on 21st Sep
That video could do with a better plot.

Saint_Marck said @ 6:04pm GMT on 21st Sep
I keep waiting for the giant robot to begin attacking but it never does.

f00m@nB@r said @ 8:53pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:1 Underrated]

Asscheeks Akimbo said @ 9:24pm GMT on 20th Sep

pleaides said @ 2:42pm GMT on 21st Sep
I was waiting for that.

sacrelicious said @ 9:34pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:4 Insightful]
in other news, Apple's "I'm a mac" ads were made on smarmy self-righteousness.

(also, there's no reason that I can see that that ad could not have been made on a pc -or the mac ads for that matter- running the same software. it's just that top advertising firms flush with more cash than they deserve can afford to pay the extra money for the prestige and e-penis lengthening qualities of the shiny mac systems, and thus have had their entire industry geared towards macs for years. had they demanded that the work be done on pc's it would have cost more and taken longer simply because they people doing it are not used to the windows platform like the rest of us who can't afford to pay twice as much money for an equivalent system or piece our computers together out of components from other computers that other people have thrown out. if mac were interested in catering to anyone other than the upper-middle class and rich they would produce an OS for the PC platform, and windows would begin to fade into distant memory. but they are not, so users of PCs who desire the greatest possible hardware and software compatibility are stuck with merely an adequate OS rather than an ideal [or iDeal] OS. but, I think it was neal stephenson who observed that ideally OSes should be invisible and not something the user should even need to think about since their only real practical function is as a matrix upon which software runs, so placing an OS on such a pedestal in the first place is fundamentally flawed to begin with. perhaps our current economic crisis will affect a positive change in this area)

Misanthrope said @ 7:11am GMT on 22nd Sep
I think you switched what's supposed to go in parentheses.

mattfish said @ 9:49pm GMT on 20th Sep
Bend over, I'll probe your magnet failure

Rojo^ said @ 11:38pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:1 Informative]
LCH webcam feed

Copperhead said @ 5:08am GMT on 21st Sep [Score:1 Funny]
All I get is some guy in an orange suit whacking some sort of crawling thing with a crowbar.......

pleaides said @ 2:43pm GMT on 21st Sep
Damn. That's the 3rd time someone's got me with that shit.

Viking_Biochemist said @ 9:34am GMT on 21st Sep
They lost a ton of liquid helium, which started my husband making pained noises about how much money that shit'll cost them. His department just spend $100 000 on a few kilos to fill an NMR machine.

Although apparently it's much cheaper in the US, from which all helium commeth.

pleaides said @ 2:44pm GMT on 21st Sep
+1 Commeth. :)

Saint_Marck said @ 6:05pm GMT on 21st Sep
I read taht cheap helium is also a limited resource and might be running out.

sacrelicious said @ 6:24pm GMT on 21st Sep
[squeaky voice] we didn't listen![/squeaky voice]

sacrelicious said @ 6:18pm GMT on 21st Sep
how do you lose a ton of helium? how do you even have a ton of helium, cause how do you even weigh a ton of helium to know that it's a ton, and not just, say, zero pounds of helium, which could be anywhere from a whole fucking lot of helium to not any helium at all?

attention science geeks: yeah, I know. you don't actually have to tell me.

Sean said @ 7:12pm GMT on 21st Sep
You put the scale on the roof instead of the floor.

f00m@nB@r said @ 7:56pm GMT on 21st Sep
ceiling.

maryyugo said @ 9:17pm GMT on 21st Sep
maybe mass rather than weight? maybe some fanciful bastardization of a volume unit of measure? with the press, who knows? good point tho.

zkhan said @ 5:01am GMT on 24th Sep [Score:1 Interesting]
Do I have to say that this is also exactly what we’d be told if something super-freaky had happened when they first turned this thing on, something so super-freaky that they’re afraid to turn it on again? “Obligatory winter maintenance period?” Good one.