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There was a big to-do a couple of years ago about a cluster of unusual cancers near
Brookhaven National Laboratory (site of the RHIC).

IIRC these were possibly connected to leakage of tritium and various nasty chemicals into the ground. There was speculation that this led to contamination of the local water supplies.

I don't recall any allegations of this being directly related to the lab's research, just to poor handling of hazardous material. The scandal led to the replacement of the lab's management team.

See http://www.oer.dir.bnl.gov/ for more information on their cleanup efforts.

There was a big to-do a couple of years ago about a cluster of unusual cancers near
Brookhaven National Laboratory (site of the RHIC).

IIRC these were possibly connected to leakage of tritium and various nasty chemicals into the ground. There was speculation that this led to contamination of the local water supplies.

I don't recall any allegations of this being directly related to the lab's research, just to poor handling of hazardous material. The scandal led to the replacement of the lab's management team.

See http://www.oer.dir.bnl.gov/ for more information on their cleanup efforts.

That's the fun part -- lots of house-sized detectors! The quark-gluon plasma expands and cools (actually "hadronizes", collapses back into more ordinary particles) long before they are detected. This means that you need to analyze the particles that come out of the explosion and determine from their properties whether they were created in an ordinary collision or whether a QGP was formed.

As far as the actual detectors go, there are a variety of options -- from scintillation detectors that detect tiny flashes of light when a particle travels through a plastic paddle, to Cerenkov detectors that detect rings of light that form when a particle travels faster than the speed of light in the detector's medium, to time-projection chambers that use the particles' ability to ionize gas to create a 3D "CCD image" of the trajectories. Each detector type has its own advantages and disadvantages, and in the experiments at CERN and RHIC a variety of detectors are wrapped around the collision points. Check out NA49 and PHENIX for two experiments that I've worked on in the past few years (although I'm a software engineer now).

I got to see a presentation by one of the lead physicists working on RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Colider) 3 or 4 years ago. Follows is as much as I can remember about it and quark gluon plasma (disclaimer: I have been out of the physics community for 2 years now, so some of my quantum may be rusty)

In order to create quark gluon plasma you need a lot of energy. Most colliders work on the principle of getting light ions (like stripped helium atoms) and making them go really fast. RHIC decided that what would be more useful is to take really heavy ions (E = mc^2) and collide them. The will be using stripped gold atoms. (When I say stripped, I mean they got every electron off of them, all 79 of them) The have the two streams going in oppisite directions till they get up to speed, then ram them into each other.

I'm going to butcher anything else I say about this, so go check out this cern page for more info on quark gluon plasma. It has a really cool animation on their main page showing the collision.

In a RHIC collision, just like in a demolition derby, the colliding objects won't be completely destroyed. The ion bunches will actually pass through one another, creating a hot, dense area that will last only a tiny fraction of a second. As this area cools, some of the ions' energy will convert to matter -- just like Einstein's E=mc^2 equation predicts!

In a RHIC collision, just like in a demolition derby, the colliding objects won't be completely destroyed. The ion bunches will actually pass through one another, creating a hot, dense area that will last only a tiny fraction of a second. As this area cools, some of the ions' energy will convert to matter -- just like Einstein's E=mc^2 equation predicts!

Just because some people are bored enough to follow your spam-style links (the one in this message's parent included) doesn't mean you're getting the full on thing. I can't believe you even got 300 hits from it. (hits='seperate GET requests' in your mind, correct?)

Anyway, for a study done on the Slashdot Effect, previously linked to by Slashdot though done by an independent source, check out
The Slashdot Effect - An Analysis of Three Internet Publications, by Stephen Adler.

In addition to this, read his addendum, demonstrating what happenned after the original paper was mentioned here. Also bear in mind the fact that this was some time ago and that this site's userbase is growing all the time.

------

Just because some people are bored enough to follow your spam-style links (the one in this message's parent included) doesn't mean you're getting the full on thing. I can't believe you even got 300 hits from it. (hits='seperate GET requests' in your mind, correct?)

Anyway, for a study done on the Slashdot Effect, previously linked to by Slashdot though done by an independent source, check out
The Slashdot Effect - An Analysis of Three Internet Publications, by Stephen Adler.

In addition to this, read his addendum, demonstrating what happenned after the original paper was mentioned here. Also bear in mind the fact that this was some time ago and that this site's userbase is growing all the time.

------

-A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Back in January, a /. story lead me to this article containing a prize anecdote:

Those well worn issues of how one make money with open source technology were batted back and forth and Richard always won the argument. Gerry, IBI's CEO, said at one point that SAP, the second largest software company in the world, does not give away its software for free, and it never will. SAP customers pay lots of money to buy their software and don't want it to be free. Richard responds by saying that he is going to write a GPL'ed version of the software SAP sells. It will take time, but there will be a freely, source code distributeable version available sometime in the future. How can you argue with that.

When I read that, I wanted to kiss his pate and laugh. At the time, I was one of three in our company charged with finding an ERP package to replace all our RS/400 OLTP and PC business intelligence applications. It would then fall to me to implement these changes company wide in 90 days. We were left with choosing between the lesser of five evils. Why? Our budget required that the software licenses be within US$200,000 per 30 users. Final cost for the project worked out to US$417,000 per 30 users.

My response in the thread was essentially "FreeSAP: Now that's the work of a patriot! Is this a declared project? Where do I sign up and what can I contribute (equipment, money, industrial eng research, code, APICS pulp, blood)?" ;)

In reply, AC summed-up the problem:
I found his comments about writing GPL'd SAP clone software to be hilarious. He can't be serious. Just who does he think is going to write all that code? I mean, the free software community considers the Linux kernel and Mozilla to be "large" projects, both of which are trivial compared to writing software to compete with SAP from scratch. He would have to mobilize an army of free software developers, most of which would have no personal interest in or use for the kind of software SAP sells.
A clarification was submitted by RMS.

My point in this is to reaffirm that no Open Source software venue, aside from the NOS, could be of greater benefit than OS ERP applications. In the original 'Request for Comment and Quote' to ERP vendors, I listed 300+ functions that were essential to our business. The winning package checked-off all but two. In fact, only about seventy of those functions are handled meaning I had to write separate applications and find little better than compromises. In so many cases the goal could be met with a SQL trigger but all the application logic is in the client app!

Frankly, I'm awfully tired. I know that closed-source ERP applications have cost many others as dearly; I believe that hurts our economy broadly.

Back in January, a /. story lead me to this article containing a prize anecdote:

Those well worn issues of how one make money with open source technology were batted back and forth and Richard always won the argument. Gerry, IBI's CEO, said at one point that SAP, the second largest software company in the world, does not give away its software for free, and it never will. SAP customers pay lots of money to buy their software and don't want it to be free. Richard responds by saying that he is going to write a GPL'ed version of the software SAP sells. It will take time, but there will be a freely, source code distributeable version available sometime in the future. How can you argue with that.

When I read that, I wanted to kiss his pate and laugh. At the time, I was one of three in our company charged with finding an ERP package to replace all our RS/400 OLTP and PC business intelligence applications. It would then fall to me to implement these changes company wide in 90 days. We were left with choosing between the lesser of five evils. Why? Our budget required that the software licenses be within US$200,000 per 30 users. Final cost for the project worked out to US$417,000 per 30 users.

My response in the thread was essentially "FreeSAP: Now that's the work of a patriot! Is this a declared project? Where do I sign up and what can I contribute (equipment, money, industrial eng research, code, APICS pulp, blood)?" ;)

In reply, AC summed-up the problem:
I found his comments about writing GPL'd SAP clone software to be hilarious. He can't be serious. Just who does he think is going to write all that code? I mean, the free software community considers the Linux kernel and Mozilla to be "large" projects, both of which are trivial compared to writing software to compete with SAP from scratch. He would have to mobilize an army of free software developers, most of which would have no personal interest in or use for the kind of software SAP sells.
A clarification was submitted by RMS.

My point in this is to reaffirm that no Open Source software venue, aside from the NOS, could be of greater benefit than OS ERP applications. In the original 'Request for Comment and Quote' to ERP vendors, I listed 300+ functions that were essential to our business. The winning package checked-off all but two. In fact, only about seventy of those functions are handled meaning I had to write separate applications and find little better than compromises. In so many cases the goal could be met with a SQL trigger but all the application logic is in the client app!

Frankly, I'm awfully tired. I know that closed-source ERP applications have cost many others as dearly; I believe that hurts our economy broadly.

They are not claiming that these conditions haven't existed since the big bang. (That would be absurd.)

Please, reread the bit about cosmic rays. Every day the earth is bombarded by millions (I'm way underestimating here) of cosmic ray particles so energetic that they laugh heartily at the feeble attempts of Brookhaven to match them.

As far as whether the conditions the RHIC is intended to reproduce have existed after the big bang, I'd refer you to an authoritative source, the RHIC web site, which states:

While many RHIC collisions will produce interesting results, a rare few might create something even more special: a new form of matter.

Actually, it's not new to the universe, just to human eyes. It's thought to have existed ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang at the dawn of the Universe. It may also exist in the cores of very dense stars called neutron stars.

You wrote:

When we do it in a lab, we can be there to watch. But as far as the earth is concerned, it is very old hat indeed.

RHIC will operate at energies of up to about 100 GeV per nucleon (that is, proton or neutron).

There is lots of scientific information about RHIC here. Follow the links to "Documentation" and "RHIC Design Manual" for detailed information about its motivation and specifications.

mister attack says:
The idea that we are going to destroy the world with the RHIC is absolutely ridiculous. I remember reading that a large number of physicists thought the first nuclear weapon would ignite the atmosphere, destroying all life on Earth. Didn't happen.

This is a logical fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc. Just because we haven't destroyed the earth in the past doesn't mean we can't do it.

Now we have a _journalist_ - not even a Ph.D. in physics - claiming that we're going to create a black hole with the RHIC.

Ad hominem. In fact, objections have been raised within the scientific community. They have been taken seriously enough to be reviewed by the laboratory. They disagreed, of course.

This is a remote possibility, to say the least - collisions at much higher energy than this happen in our upper atmosphere daily without destroying us. But assuming for a moment that a black hole is created, what happens? The answer is simple: it will evaporate.

At last a real argument. I happen to agree with you in principle; I'm not going to lose sleep over these experiments. But I don't think that going around shouting "rubbish!" at people is the way to make your point. There are valid scientific questions to be raised here, and while the field of high-energy physics may be dominated by people who believe it's perfectly safe, the objections do not come from left field. It may not be this experiment, but I would not rule out the possibility that in the near future we could devise experiments that would be capable of creating (say) a microscopic black hole.

I'd be more worried about ballistic nukes from China.

Most people should worry about a) heart disease, b) lung cancer, and c) an auto accident, in roughly that order. Since we all know that very few people give those very real dangers any thought at all ....

No, I don't believe RHIC is going to kill us all. But can we indeed come up with an experimental device that could? Most certainly. And human history is filled with enough follies by people who "know what they're doing" (say, Challenger) that I don't put all my trust in the intelligentsia here. The only safeguard is an atmosphere of collegiality where objections such as the one raised against RHIC are treated seriously and given due consideration in a peer review process.

That has happened, and has completed. It's only afterwards that the media really got hold of the story, and as they always do, they report it as if it were two equally valid political positions. Don't give in to the hysteria by treating all such objections with contempt.
----
Lake Effect, a weblog

a committee of prominent physicists has also written a report, titled "Committee Report on Speculative "Disaster Scenarios" at RHIC". you can find it at http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/rhicreport.html . you will find the three 'disaster' scenarios described there.

sorry, no black holes or strangelets!

patrick.

That said, we did give Brian Paul access to the conformance tests for his own personal use, as an aid to improving Mesa.

There will be a great deal of OpenGL activity on Linux in the next few months, from SGI as well as others. Stay tuned. BTW, if anyone is thinking about going to the Open Source / Open Science conference at Brookhaven National Lab in October, I'll be speaking on OpenGL and Linux there (mostly a status update aimed at researchers, though).

Jon Leech
OpenGL Core Engineering
SGI

I will, in time, write up an article on the RHIC startup, but for now, I've whipped up a quick FAQ for those of you interested in learning a bit about the collider from some one on the inside. That's me. By the way, we are oranizing a conference titled Open Source/Open Science, on the use of open source in science. So if you guys want to see the RHIC for your selves, then you are welcome to come to BNL, hear about Open Source and see the collider and its detectors! [A shamless plug by one of the conference organizers. :) ]

I will, in time, write up an article on the RHIC startup, but for now, I've whipped up a quick FAQ for those of you interested in learning a bit about the collider from some one on the inside. That's me. By the way, we are oranizing a conference titled Open Source/Open Science, on the use of open source in science. So if you guys want to see the RHIC for your selves, then you are welcome to come to BNL, hear about Open Source and see the collider and its detectors! [A shamless plug by one of the conference organizers. :) ]

I will, in time, write up an article on the RHIC startup, but for now, I've whipped up a quick FAQ for those of you interested in learning a bit about the collider from some one on the inside. That's me. By the way, we are oranizing a conference titled Open Source/Open Science, on the use of open source in science. So if you guys want to see the RHIC for your selves, then you are welcome to come to BNL, hear about Open Source and see the collider and its detectors! [A shamless plug by one of the conference organizers. :) ]

How do collisions with an energy greater than the equivalent of two gold nuclei bumping into each other at 99.9% of the speed of light at an angle of 180 degrees occur naturally? Please enlighten me, as I know very little about cosmic radiation.

I don't either, really, but the energies of some cosmic rays are just insane. The introduction to the RHIC documentation gives an upper bound for the beam energies of 100 GeV/nucleon. Cosmic rays have been seen with energies in excess of 100TeV (1000 times larger).

These are very rare, of course, but we certainly see several every year. This is why studying cosmic rays is still a useful thing, even though we have these amazing accelerators. :)

How do collisions with an energy greater than the equivalent of two gold nuclei bumping into each other at 99.9% of the speed of light at an angle of 180 degrees occur naturally? Please enlighten me, as I know very little about cosmic radiation.

I don't either, really, but the energies of some cosmic rays are just insane. The introduction to the RHIC documentation gives an upper bound for the beam energies of 100 GeV/nucleon. Cosmic rays have been seen with energies in excess of 100TeV (1000 times larger).

These are very rare, of course, but we certainly see several every year. This is why studying cosmic rays is still a useful thing, even though we have these amazing accelerators. :)

Just to make things clear, I'm a grad student in physics, working on the BaBar experiment (at SLAC in SanFran). My analysis involves kaons, which are bound states of strange quarks and up/down quarks. And yes, physics has produced many, many kaons over the years. So I think I know what I'm talking about.

--Bob

The one premise that has kept modern science respectable is peer-review for all work before it is published. Beyond the political problems inherant in any field, this prevents false and/or misleading information from being mistaken as fact. Every scientific scandal (e.g., polywater, cold fusion, base metal transmutation) has been the result of untested, unsubstantiated prelimary results being released as fact without peer review. It is important to remember than scientists were among the first to collaborate on projects via e-mail and later the web. Scientific projects do not occur in the vacuum of a single lab: there is most often communication of preliminary results to other labs around the world is the norm. In many ways the current development process of the Linux kernel, etc. is very similar to any scientific research project. The Brookhaven National labs established the Protein Data Bank in 1967. Every protein structure that has been determined, and published, has been place in the PDB for public access. This is the scientific version of open source.

I'm not affiliated with BNL, but merely someone who has been to Brookhaven National Lab with the past few months and seen some of the open source apps they have on the synchrotron floor. I highly recommend attendance of this one. Can't wait for Oct. 2. The macromolecular guys and many others at the NSLS have Linux boxes all over the place, folks, doing anything you can imagine. Can't wait to see an organized display of the OSOS stuff being worked on.

Gotta get front-row tickets for this event. Any scientists from the Boston area want to carpool down to BNL via the Long Island Ferry? It's on a Saturday but I can't think of a better reason to play hookie, personally. email me at: ubiquitin@crystallography.net

I'm not affiliated with BNL, but merely someone who has been to Brookhaven National Lab with the past few months and seen some of the open source apps they have on the synchrotron floor. I highly recommend attendance of this one. Can't wait for Oct. 2. The macromolecular guys and many others at the NSLS have Linux boxes all over the place, folks, doing anything you can imagine. Can't wait to see an organized display of the OSOS stuff being worked on.

Gotta get front-row tickets for this event. Any scientists from the Boston area want to carpool down to BNL via the Long Island Ferry? It's on a Saturday but I can't think of a better reason to play hookie, personally. email me at: ubiquitin@crystallography.net

I'm not affiliated with BNL, but merely someone who has been to Brookhaven National Lab with the past few months and seen some of the open source apps they have on the synchrotron floor. I highly recommend attendance of this one. Can't wait for Oct. 2. The macromolecular guys and many others at the NSLS have Linux boxes all over the place, folks, doing anything you can imagine. Can't wait to see an organized display of the OSOS stuff being worked on.

Gotta get front-row tickets for this event. Any scientists from the Boston area want to carpool down to BNL via the Long Island Ferry? It's on a Saturday but I can't think of a better reason to play hookie, personally. email me at: ubiquitin@crystallography.net

You're right. I'm much more interesting in conformational modes of floppy molecules (as for pharmacophore prediction). And CCSD? I try to stay away from ab initio work and stick with classical molecular dynamics. Regarding the last of your three, we leaned more towards steered umbrella sampling, and the closest thing to Monte Carlo was the Langevin term.

:)

think of the slashdot effect (SE) as an avalanche, or a statistical mechanical critical exponent problem.

I model it more like queuing theory. There is a population of N people checking Slashdot. Different people check /. at different time intervals, which creates a distribution of checking frequencies n(t), most likely with a Poisson distribution.

I believe most people will follow a link the first time it comes up, though this also has a distribution. (A few people will check a link several times, but the effect is lessened somewhat by caching.)

Thus, I would expect to see a roughly t*exp(-t) shape to the Slashdot effect, so it should start linear and have an exponential tail.

As it turns out, there is some data to test this theory. Alas, it isn't very good data given the large-ish bin size and the existance of the data in graph form only. It looks like it can be eyeball fit by a Poisson function.

Still, I don't really see an exponential growth curve as you suggest (though again it's hard to tell) and I don't intuitively feel that your description is correct.

Ahh, there is a possibility. If I view a link then forward to friends, who forward it to friends, etc, then there should be an S-shaped growth curve. But I only see about a couple percent of the /. articles forward to the different groups and mailing lists I read. (Though extrapolation from one datum is rather imprecise :).

Still, I assert it's less precise to describe it as a critical exponent problem than as a Poisson distribution.

Posted by hackerzarus:

ftp://phyppro1.phy.bnl. gov/pub/mirror/redhat-main/starbuck/
ftp://ftp.eecs.umich.edu /pub/linux/redhat/redhat/starbuck/
ftp://ftp.wtfo.com/pub /linux/redhat/ftp.redhat.com/starbuck/
and of course, ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/starbuck/

Posted by hackerzarus:

ftp://phyppro1.phy.bnl. gov/pub/mirror/redhat-main/starbuck/
ftp://ftp.eecs.umich.edu /pub/linux/redhat/redhat/starbuck/
ftp://ftp.wtfo.com/pub /linux/redhat/ftp.redhat.com/starbuck/
and of course, ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/starbuck/

http://www.dne.bnl.gov/CoN/index.html