Slashdot Mirror

If anything else would have been better to suit the scientists' at CERNs needs, they have been using it. They have a practically unlimited budget and they are extremely competent. They used the best tool available for the job. Why is this so contraversial? Because it treads on some people's "feelings" of what is better?

Maybe you should check the facts. Have a look at http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/840543/files/lhcc-2005-024.pdf (page 77). They clearly explain why they chose Linux, and why they chose a RH-based version.
The article wasn't about how important was Oracle RAC in the discovery, it was about how important linux was. Fact is, the choice of the base operating system is almost irrelevant in the paper that details the Tier-1 infrastructure.

Why the need to bring out the strawmen? Nobody said anything different than what you are saying here and your arguments can be equally applied to anything under the sun.

It's not strawmen. When you say it is the best tool available for the job, you don't present facts. And no, just because the top clusters use it doesn't make it an ideal tool. The same way Windows isn't the perfect desktop, or Renault isn't the best auto manufacturer. However, if you do read the report, you'll find out they chose linux because they already used it internally, so for them it was the best choice.

No shit and a great algorithm coupled with the best kernel for the job is even better.

I'd say stock linux is probably miles away from "the best kernel" (from a pure technological perspective) for a numerical computing cluster (the scheduler is optimized for multi-process smp and responsive task switching, not single-process smp with almost no task switching and heavy latency requirements), but my experience with it is quite limited. A paralelizable algoritm on a given problem can reduce execution time 100x - do you really believe that choosing a different operating system (or kernel or whatever) makes a difference that big?

The point is that it can be customized that way. Thanks for pointing out one of the reasons for CERN's choice.

Where did I said it couldn't?

BS.This is CERN we're talking about. They can afford whatever they want and they chose Linux.

If only there was a way to know for shure... Oh wait! There is! Citing from http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/840543/files/lhcc-2005-024.pdf Page 78:

For a couple of years the CERN version has been based on the RedHat Linux Distribution. RedHat changed their licensing policies in 2003 and they have been selling since then their different Linux RH Enterprise versions on a profitable basis. After long negotiations in 2003/2004 CERN decided to follow a four-way strategy:
collaboration with FNAL on Scientific Linux, a HEP Linux distribution based on the re-compiled RH Enterprise source code, which RH has to provide without charge due to the GPL obligations.
buying RH Enterprise licences for the Oracle on Linux service having a support contract with RH
pursuing further negotiations with RH about possible HEP-wide agreements.
An investigation about alternative Linux distributions came to the conclusion that there was no advantage in using SUSE, Debian or others. SUSE, for example, is still available free of charge. However, the rather different implementation would require significant effort in adapting our management tools. In addition there are question marks about the community support.
CERN will continue with the described Linux strategy for the next couple of years. The situation will be kept under continuous review.

So, they didn't choose generically Linux, but a RH-based version because of... wait for it... vendor lock-in. And to cut licensing costs, they decided to only license the copies that were related to their Oracle RAC cluster. If you read the report, you'll also find that not only they use a TON of internally-developed software, but also that the choice related to operating systems is almost irrelevant in the big picture. And please note, while the report has a bird-eye view of the whole structure, it only details the Tier-1 datacenter/computing grid. The data is accessible/replicated to dozens of computing grids all over the world (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Science_Grid), and while most of them also run Linux (many of them are run by public entities with tight budgets such as universities and institutes), it seems to be more important what applicational software they run on it than what operating system is used. In a way, a zealot would be happy - it means that Linux seems to be ubiquous. Or irrelevant as a key choice. For me, it's all good.

[AC, as of some mod points spent]

ROOT, Data Analysis Framework

I never said anything about a "death knell for science." My point was that smart governments realize that public works projects, especially those that benefit scientific research and understanding, can have a positive value for their nations far in excess of their capital cost, because they make their nation(s) more globally competitive.

if US companies could've made a competitive bid, they would've been doing that for the LHC.

What makes you think that the LHC was constructed by companies selected by competitive bid? See, for example, these instructions from CERN:

Question: Can I send my Price Enquiry to any Bidder?
Answer: The Technical Officer has to take into account the technical competency of the firm as well as the
origin of the supply or service (which should be originated from CERN Member States and preferably from
poorly balanced Member States).
[...]
Question: Why it is so important to know the origin of the supply/service?
Answer: Member states contribute to CERN’s budget, therefore one of the main procurement goals is to
achieve balanced industrial return for Member states. [emphasis added.]

This is the point -- the nations that compose CERN recognize the value of the organization to their industrial base. If they didn't, they would just keep the money they invest in CERN. Instead, they make the investment because they realize that they, as nations, get a stronger, more capable -- and, therefore, more valuable -- industrial base as a result of CERN. It's a good investment.

I have never understood this attraction to the "free market" in dealings between nations. One of the reasons China is gaining market share wrt the US in many fields -- from photovoltaics to high-speed rail transport -- is that it subsidizes their development. Supporting technologies critical to the nation's future is not a crime -- most nations do and, arguably, all should. The US did the same with many technologies, from the telegraph to the railroad, in the 19th Century, and the spending of public funds to develop technology for the public good reached new highs in the federal funding of scientific research during and after WWII. The nation benefited greatly from this investment of public funds -- why not now? Is it really better to stand by, and watch our economy become more and more dependent on the industries of other nations?

Assuming you're in the US, that's just not true. The United States have had observer status at CERN since 1997.

Here's a quote from the relevant press release:

Council delegates applauded warmly as representatives of United States of America were welcomed to the Council session for the first time as official Observers. This new status follows the agreement between CERN and the United States for a contribution of $531 million to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project which was signed in Washington on 8 December (see PR07.97).

It's quite likely that more funds have been contributed by the US in the 15 years since then.

So thank you for your contribution. You were part of the LHC project from the start.

CJ

With hindsight, this probably shouldn't be a big surprise. There were some reports earlier this year about Loch Ness having a small but measurable tidal activity; something like 1.5mm across its 35km length. Given that the instruments at the LHC are apparently so finely tuned that they can track continental drift[1], it shouldn't really come as a major revelation that they can detect lunar tidal activity across the diameter of the LHC.

[1] Coincidentally, I found out about this as part of the whole issue over neutrinos supposedly travelling faster than light, which was finally given the official "no they don't" by CERN today.

And when that does happen, I'm sure that the cost of manufacturing and maintaining/operating MRI's will drop significantly. In the meantime however...

Anyways, thanks for the heads up. Once you had alerted me to it, I did find the mention of new YBCO wire allowing high Tc magnets to be built back in 2007, and that the test magnet supported .96T at 77K. That's on the low end of MRI field strengths and it's not clear they'll be able to get much more out of it. Who knows though, maybe they'll be able to use variants of the pre-stressing coil fabrication techniques being developed for Niobium-Tin to increase the ceiiling. That would be trickier to pull off with an MRI-sized magnet though.

not to mention the CLOUD project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research!

Brought to you by the society for redundantly linking redundantly to redundant links

I believe they also did an experiment at CERN

Cosmic rays are charged particles that bombard the Earth's atmosphere from outer space. Studies suggest they may have an influence on the amount of cloud cover through the formation of new aerosols (tiny particles suspended in the air that seed cloud droplets). This is supported by satellite measurements, which show a possible correlation between cosmic-ray intensity and the amount of low cloud cover. Clouds exert a strong influence on the Earth’s energy balance; changes of only a few per cent have an important effect on the climate.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/CLOUD-en.html

However, his mechanism is that nearby supernovae cause cooler climates (how???)

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/CLOUD-en.html

According to the article: "The (hot) fusion community is still living with the aftermath of the cold fusion scandal from a quarter century ago".

While I agree it's a terrific response technically, It's incredible to now see hot fusion scientists from MIT blaming their problems on cold fusion in the 1980s when the scandle is more about what MIT did unprofessionally to discredit cold fusion / LENR; see: http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/mitcfreport.pdf
"The events of 1989-1992 are past history, but one must learn from the past or be condemned to repeat it. I hope that MIT students will also study the wrongs that have been done by MIT faculty and staff, which perverted the process of science in this area. Ironically, those very faculty and staff who so loudly pontificated about the alleged unethical actions of cold fusion researchers Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons are themselves most culpable. They launched distortions about cold fusion that have gained such wide currency."

To explain why PhDs may think and act this way, read this book:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

Just search on Widom-Larsen, LENR, and so on.
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=177379

Yet, some at MIT are finally moving beyond the shame:
http://cleantechauthority.com/lenr-resurrected-by-mit-the-early-detractors/
"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) looks to be one of the first academic institutions to validate the claims that cold fusion is real. Cold fusion is now more commonly called Low-Energy-Nuclear-Reactions (LENR), partly to avoid the stigma the term "cold fusion" evokes. And in a strange twist of fate, MIT -- who was one of the most aggressive detractors of cold fusion in the 1990s -- is now leading the charge in resurrecting the technologies it once vilified.
    Dr. Swarts and Prof Hagelstein of MIT publicly demonstrated how a device can not only run itself indefinitely, but their experiment also produced ten times the energy output that was input. They ran the experiment for two days to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technology using a NANOR by Jet Energy. The device, as of this publishing, has been running for five days straight."

Of course, even if LENR does not pan out, we'll have dirt cheap solar long before 2050, too, with widespread consumer-level grid parity in just a few more years, and then probably a stampede of research dollars into solar afterwards (making use of the fusion plant in the sky):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity

That said, I agree with the people at MIT that basic research and applied research should be funded much more lavishly. I think it would be quite reasonable to spend a hundred billion dollars on fusion research just because it is a neat thing and especially would have value in space exploration (assuming other things were also funded at that level like solar panels and LENR and so on).

Although even a vast increase in funds won't really resolve the competition problem in academia given the exponential growth of PhDs; see what this physicist has to say:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

We need a basic income, a bigger gift economy, better local subsistence, and more participatory planning at all levels of government so researchers would truly have more financial freedom to pursue basic research of all sorts.

In what way is this unique? Are these machines in any way superior to the machines used to bore the tunnels for the 2nd avenue subway in NYC or the ones used in the construction of the LHC at CERN?

Seems like this machine might be larger, but is that it?

Like this? Why? You just proved Fermilab's not capable of keeping up with the LHC, so I'm left wondering what it would cost to retrofit Fermilab to that level. I think concentrating on CERN is a better basket for our eggs.

Then again, I'm a dilettante (not an expert).

CMS is the Compact Muon Solenoid: a particle detector, a muon collider would be something very different. You can think of it as the successor to LEP (the old CERN electron collider, that was dismantled to make room for LHC), the same way LHC is the successor to Tevatron.

A muon collider would be a machine complementary to the LHC, being able to look for things LHC can't see and to look with grater precision at anything the LHC may find.

I'd love to see them try a muon collider.

Like this? Why? You just proved Fermilab's not capable of keeping up with the LHC, so I'm left wondering what it would cost to retrofit Fermilab to that level. I think concentrating on CERN is a better basket for our eggs.

Then again, I'm a dilettante (not an expert).

Fermilab is the organization (like CERN); Tevatron is the accelerator (like LHC).

If not: Tevatron couldn't keep up with LHC, but then, neither could CERN's ISR keep up with Tevatron. That's silly. There's no reason to think that other, solid science can't happen at Fermilab despite their hadron collider being superseded by CERN's.

Thanks for the excellent explain. "It just made no sense at all to keep the old machine on." It's thirty years old. Damned straight it's obsolete, even if very cool tech for its time.

I'd love to see them try a muon collider.

Like this? Why? You just proved Fermilab's not capable of keeping up with the LHC, so I'm left wondering what it would cost to retrofit Fermilab to that level. I think concentrating on CERN is a better basket for our eggs.

Then again, I'm a dilettante (not an expert).

Here is a quick discussion on the increase in energies from Steve Myers, director for accelerators and Sergio Bertlucci, director for research: https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1423359

Yeah, PER PROTON. Want to read about the "beam dumps" LHC uses to dissipate the beam's energy when they need to remove it from the accelerator ring?

http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/components/beam-dump.htm

"Each beam dump absorber consists of a 7m long segmented carbon cylinder of 700mm diameter, contained in a steel cylinder, comprising the dump core (TDE). This is water cooled, and surrounded by about 750 tonnes of concrete and iron shielding. The dump is housed in a dedicated cavern (UD) at the end of the transfer tunnels (TD). "

"The nominal LHC beam contains an unprecedented stored energy of 350 MJ, contained in 2808 bunches with a beam sigma of the order of 0.3 mm."

So, we can detect Higgs but we can't detect multiple typos in the damn summary? Really?

I've just checked... There is no TYPO detector at CERN so that'll explain that problem!

"Status of Windows 7 at CERN - As of end of March 2010, Windows 7 is officially supported at CERN. It is also the default operating system to install on the computers that meet the minimum hardware requirements."

FROM -> https://winservices.web.cern.ch/winservices/Help/?kbid=010301

* And of course, CERN runs its webservers off Windows also, not Linux... -> http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.cern.ch

(So what was that about Linux being so installed @ CERN? Not saying it doesn't EXIST there, there's always some deluded PHOOL, like yourself, that believes "Open 'SORES'" is "good/better" lol... but, per the above? Seems you did your usual "FAIL" level performance!)

APK

P.S.=> QUESTION: How much MORE do I have to keep "blowing you away" with? Oh, this will do "nicely" I think, lol -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2604450&cid=38607134 for starters... lol!

... apk

In medicine, one of the offshots from CERN & the LHC has been the development/improvement of the MRI scanner.

This story got me thinking that many of the tasks routinely executed on personal computers (perhaps cryptography, video decoding, and such) may benefit from including a FPGA in PCs to serve as a programmable coprocessor. Much like graphics-intensive software can come with shader code to offload processing to the GPU, couldn't a video codec or an implementation of SSL or whatever come with code that would allow an FPGA to do part of the work?

I googled around and found that at least CERN has done something of the sort, but that was over seven years ago. There was a story on Slashdot about something of this sort, but it's even older than the CERN publication. Is anyone working on this sort of idea? If not, why? Is it simply a matter of cost, or is there some other issue that makes this impractical?

Maybe I just suck at googling...

As said at http://cms.web.cern.ch/news/cms-search-standard-model-higgs-boson-lhc-data-2010-and-2011, they have excluded 128 – 525 GeV at 99% confidence level. I am not sure they measure higher than 525 GeV with LHC for now. I would expect that existing theories for the Higgs put limits on its mass. Of course theories can be wrong, but if all theories about the Higgs are wrong, then there is no such particle.

They didn't make any specific claims today, except that there's an energy region that looks quite promising. Read the official press release

Page where the Dec 13th talk material will appear:
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=164890

"Actually, most scientists agree"-d that the earth is flat, that bad air causes malaria, that flogiston is behind fire, animal magnetism technology is the way to go in medicine and stomach ulcers are caused by stress

"most scientists agree", but only one is needed to prove them wrong http://user.web.cern.ch/public/en/Research/CLOUD-en.html

1. Radiation therapy can expose vital tissues near cancer to 20Sv total radiation, yet, people fret over 1mSv/yr... And yes, you read that correctly, 20,000mSv dosage to tissues that are vital for your life, yet, people and doctors still go for this... Well, I guess people do not know the dosage ;)

2. Nuclear weapons are not nuclear power. I wish all the weapons were dismantled and we simply use nuclear power to peaceful purposes only.

3. What were the practical applications of probing the atom? How about Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Some may know this as MRI as it was renamed because people were freaked out by the word nuclear. Heck, many even prefer CT scans over NMR because they do not want radiation - ignorance is bliss!!

Anyway, who cares what practical applications we can thing of based on CERN or Fermi labs. The purpose of research is to find knew knowledge. You find it, and applications will come.

Who would have thought that CRT and radio waves would give us TV? Who thought that discovery of the electron would get us radio, internet, everything we have today? Actually, hyperlinks (as in HTML) is brought to you by particle physics people - they wanted an easy way to reference documents on this new computer network they had.

http://ref.web.cern.ch/ref/CERN/CNL/2001/001/www-history/

Get smart people together to find new knowledge, like CERN, ITER, Fermi labs, and a ton of other research institutions, and you end up with knowledge that can be as fundamental as the discovery of the electron.

4. Regarding fusion, most definitely yes, it will be cleaner than fission. In fission, you split heavy nucleides like Uranium, and you end up with other slightly less heavy nucleides that can be radioactive, toxic, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_products#Yield

With fusion, the only output from the reaction is Helium - helium is non-radioactive. In addition, you get a neutron. The neutron can combine with stuff in the reactor and make it radioactive. The idea is to select materials, like steels, to minimize capture of this neutron and hence maximize life of the reactor (the neutrons will slowly degrade the reactor). Anyways, this neutron capture is the only way materials can become radioactive. There is no Sr-90 or Cs-135 produced. Only helium and some radioactive steel.

The nice thing about being able to select materials is you can minimize amount of radioactive waste created (ie. the reactor itself would be the only waste). This waste also tends to have *short* half-lives, ie. a few months to a few years, instead of "forever".

Finally, it is impossible to make weapons from fusion reactor tech. It is also impossible for the reactor to meltdown or release any significant radiation.

In fission, the safety mechanisms in the reactor are there to prevent uranium from getting to close with itself, from prevent it to undergo chain reaction. But secondary short lived isotopes produced from U fission are so radioactive, they they produce a fraction of reactor's power irrespective if reactor is shut down or not. These daughter nucleides are the reason why nuclear reactors need cooling after shutdown or they will melt themselves. They will not explode (in nuclear terms), but will melt. A melted reactor tends to not retain its integrity very well ;)

In fusion, the reactor's purpose is reversed. Hydrogen doesn't fuse by sitting in a jar! You have to maintain very precise conditions and expend a lot of energy to get it happily together into Helium. Any failure of any system will diverge from this optimal condition and hydrogen will stop fusing. Reactor stops. And since there is no heavy radioactive daughter nucleaides like with fission, the reactor will not melt itself after it stops, no matter what.

So in summary, of course fusion is safe and cleaner than fission. Uraniu

These guys might take exception to Gandalf's advice :)

(completely disregarding the fact that the guy in TFA did, in fact, know what the thing was; he just wanted to find out what made it tick)

Check out Cling. It is a perfect example of how C/C++ could be the "scripting language" used instead of ECMA. Think CINT for the browser. IMHO all scripting languages should be usable but...

http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/what-cling
#include <iostream>
        using namespace std;

int main()
{
        int array[8];
        for(int x=0; x<8; x++)
        {
                cout < < "enter a digit:" << endl;
                cin >> array[x];
        }
        for(int x=0; x<8; x++)
                cout << array[x] << endl << flush;
        return 0;
}

cint array.cpp
enter a digit:
1
enter a digit:
2
enter a digit:
3
enter a digit:
4
enter a digit:
5
enter a digit:
6
enter a digit:
7
enter a digit:
8
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

FWIW. ROOT is a data-analysis framework/toolbox that was originally developed by a few guys at CERN and is now used all over the work in research. Mostly in fundamental physics, but I believe there are a few companies that use it as well (see the website). The papers application is another interesting example...

I guess gnuplot and xmgrace fall in a similar category. There must be specialised utilties/toolboxes in other fields as well, but I would not know where to look.

Others have given pretty many examples. It may be worthwhile to mention the Web, from CERN http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/webstory-en.html

'we screwed up but we don't know why so look at these'

Really don' t think that is how they put it. But maybe you watched the CERN webcast and know something I don't.

My understanding is that they started looking for this effect because it was speculated about in this paper.

Some quantum gravity models allow for subliminal neutrino dispersion.

Yet, given how extraordinary this results is you certainly want to make sure every aspect of it is thoroughly scrutinized.

Well there is a project which is used to send neutrinos and has a decay tunnel. The tunnel just doesn't go all the way, as that's not needed.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Research/CNGS-en.html

Within 20cm:
"The distance between the origin of the neutrino beam and OPERA was measured with an uncertainty of 20 cm over the 730 km travel path."
from CERN's press release

The official announcement will be only tomorrow:

http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=155620 ...and yet the news wires are already there.

Parse ambiguity. The article doesn't actually say that Gran Sasso is part of the Alps; it says "The neutrinos are fired deep under the Italian Alps at Gran Sasso". There's some grammatical ambiguity in parsing the sentence - are the neutrinos being fired "at Gran Sasso" i.e. towards Gran Sasso, or starting at Gran Sasso? The other ambiguity that you noticed is "Italian Alps at Gran Sasso", which could be parsed to mean the Italian Alps are at Gran Sasso. What they mean is, more accurately stated by CERN, "The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso project will send a beam of neutrinos under the Alps to the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome. The second paragraph in the BBC article does make this clear: "Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early."

I'm a bit taken aback that they've allowed a non-European country to join, but the United States is still relegated to "Observer status" (E.g. 'Source of $$$, but not allowed to participate or become a full member')

Then you'll be glad to know that the US are not a "source of $$$" for CERN:
CERN budget by states [2009 budget, seems to be the newest available].

Yes, goods and services (designing and building stuff) did and do come from the US too, but those
happen with full scientific involvement of several big American universities and research facilities.

I have no idea where you got the idea from that the US don't participate in CERN research,
or are even somehow forbidden to do so.

you would have no problem if Palestine is admitted as a full member?

No problem.

As soon as Palestinian contribution to CERN becomes significant enough.

• AWS could be good value for money, if you DON'T have data-intensive tasks (otherwise it gets expensive quickly)
• Grid could be even better value for money, assuming you can get the service AND assistance in your lab, for low or zero cost (eg. in US/EU this should be fine)
• Owning hardware is a MUST if you have sensitive data (medical, financial etc) or just need to build local expertise (more input needed here)

Assuming the later, check among Supermicro & Dell servers. Last time I needed to setup a cluster, the Dell R610s were a good pick, giving great manageability over the LAN, low volume and decent features (balanced storage space along with cpu capacity, around 8 cores + 8 TBs per 1u blade). Don't rule out also options like Shuttle XPCs, they are damned robust in thermal aspects (hey, you'll be running these continuously, won't you?). Finally, don't underestimate the need for local sysadmining; you will likely need to setup a queueing system (Torque, *PBS*, SLURM, SGE, LSF, NQS, Condor) and manage the whole thing. This won't happen automatically, take a note on that. If you run something of the pbs or sge family I can happily help with setting up a tool called qtop

So wait, if I show that clouds are caused by anything besides weather systems, you'll concede the hypothesis "clouds occur mainly because of weather systems" as falsified?

Done: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/CLOUD-en.html

Mr. Rucker (har) may also want to read the actual paper in Nature. You'll need to view it through a library that has a subscription, though. The citation is:

Kirby, J. et al. 2011. Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation, Nature 476, 429–433 (25 August 2011)

It is strange that the "climate-change/global-warming religion" didn't prevent its publication. I also don't see much evidence that "CERN is not offering much press on this", given that the paper is in Nature, a rather well-known scientific journal, and CERN itself has a press release about it, where this statement is made:

"The CLOUD results show that a few kilometres up in the atmosphere sulphuric acid and water vapour can rapidly form clusters, and that cosmic rays enhance the formation rate by up to ten-fold or more. However, in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, within about a kilometre of Earth's surface, the CLOUD results show that additional vapours such as ammonia are required. Crucially, however, the CLOUD results show that sulphuric acid, water and ammonia alone – even with the enhancement of cosmic rays - are not sufficient to explain atmospheric observations of aerosol formation. Additional vapours must therefore be involved, and finding out their identity will be the next step for CLOUD."

There are more details on that page, such as this PDF, which states:

"This result leaves open the possibility that cosmic rays could also influence climate. However, it is premature to conclude that cosmic rays have a significant influence on climate until the additional nucleating vapours have been identified, their ion enhancement measured, and the ultimate effects on clouds have been confirmed."

Emphasis added.

If he doesn't like the account from Discover Magazine/Phil Plait, there's also this one from PhysOrg.com. Maybe with these sources he can manage to find one that isn't as liberally biased as he seems to think most of reality is.

Mr. Rucker (har) may also want to read the actual paper in Nature. You'll need to view it through a library that has a subscription, though. The citation is:

Kirby, J. et al. 2011. Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation, Nature 476, 429–433 (25 August 2011)

It is strange that the "climate-change/global-warming religion" didn't prevent its publication. I also don't see much evidence that "CERN is not offering much press on this", given that the paper is in Nature, a rather well-known scientific journal, and CERN itself has a press release about it, where this statement is made:

"The CLOUD results show that a few kilometres up in the atmosphere sulphuric acid and water vapour can rapidly form clusters, and that cosmic rays enhance the formation rate by up to ten-fold or more. However, in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, within about a kilometre of Earth's surface, the CLOUD results show that additional vapours such as ammonia are required. Crucially, however, the CLOUD results show that sulphuric acid, water and ammonia alone – even with the enhancement of cosmic rays - are not sufficient to explain atmospheric observations of aerosol formation. Additional vapours must therefore be involved, and finding out their identity will be the next step for CLOUD."

There are more details on that page, such as this PDF, which states:

"This result leaves open the possibility that cosmic rays could also influence climate. However, it is premature to conclude that cosmic rays have a significant influence on climate until the additional nucleating vapours have been identified, their ion enhancement measured, and the ultimate effects on clouds have been confirmed."

Emphasis added.

If he doesn't like the account from Discover Magazine/Phil Plait, there's also this one from PhysOrg.com. Maybe with these sources he can manage to find one that isn't as liberally biased as he seems to think most of reality is.

You don't really find particles in a bubble chamber. You just see the track they took through the the medium.

The Higgs isn't the only particle that "disappears" in a collision then "reappears" as a spray of decay products.

Here's an example of a Kaon taking us on a short trip into mystery before turning into counter-curving Pions.

So I grok you.

I already had VirtualBox 4.1.0 installed, so I installed the Boinc client, attached to http://boinc01.cern.ch/test4theory and created an account without problem - I haven't done any @home projects since some SETI units about 10 years ago.

The Boinc client spent several minutes downloading a linux virtual machine (boinc_vm) for VirtualBox, which booted automagically. Then boinc_vm started "..fetching input files for job..." for a minute, "started a child process", downloaded some more data, and started burning CPU. The Boinc client takes up ~13M and the VM around 45M. Not bad. The work unit will take 1mil GFLOPS of processing, and my machine does 2.28GFLOP/sec, so it will be about 5 days of CPU time. It updates progress in 1% increments, so I am at 1.000% done.

I went to my webpage account and set my pref to 100% CPU, otherwise the VM pauses a lot.

How about "light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes"? Answer: all antimatter CERN ever made (plus how its production has 10^-10 energy efficiency; a bit less than storing energy in Li-Ion batteries)

Care to provide a citation, since this states otherwise RhelSlSlcDifferences ?

No, actually, it's not patently (i.e., obviously on its face) false. It may well be true, or false, depending on, as you say, actual statistical findings.

And there is a large subset of users who couldn't care less about exact binary compatibility, though yes, for some users it is critical. You don't even specify exactly what you mean by binary compatibility. As far as I am aware[*], Scientific Linux (and presumably PUIAS) is binary compatible at the userspace level, which is the only level most users should be caring about.

Ubuntu is hardly CentOS' competition. Ubuntu's idea of long term support is as little as 3 years. Try Scientific Linux or even PUIAS. Or Debian stable.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

[*] See, for example, RhelSlSlcDifferences

I am not an expert, but I think the big difference with Physics is that there is a lot of money involved (patents for new drugs, etc). In Physics, CERN and others had the vision of Open Access http://library.web.cern.ch/library/OpenAccess/ for scientific publications, a mode in which the editing expenses are paid by the authors so that readers can access freely. This was possible because the big publishers were not really given an option: if they said no, physicists would publish on already-existing free places like arxiv.org which give comparable (if not better) visibility. Since there are rarely any immediate money-making applications for Physics papers, an atmosphere of openness could develop and once Physicists got used to it there is no way back.

The Demaine father (Martin) and son (Erik) are a very impressive couple.

I congratulate both of them.

Let me suggest that they tackle "The current status of work on the origin of life" http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=137302

"Work on the Origin of Life is poised to converge onto a fourth phase and, many of us hope, success. The first phase concerned prebiotic synthesis of the small molecules, amino acids, nucleotides, lipids and others, essential for life and spanned some forty years. The second overlapping phase was inspired by the symmetric of the DNA or RNA double helix, presumed that life must necessarily be based on some form of template replication of one strand by ligation of free nucleotides to create the second strand, melting of the two strands and cycling again. Spearheaded by L. Orgel, but with many others, this effort has, to date, failed. The third phase begins with the discovery that RNA molecules can act as enzymes, and posited the RNA world, in which RNA molecules dominated. This has led to slightly successful efforts to evolve an RNA sequence able to template replicate itself. Current success is an evolved ribozyme able to do so for 14 nucleotides."

How can the Demaines not do better than those CERN guys, where "The author has gathered some 17 scientists from around the world to collaborate and compete with one another, CERN/LHC experiments style, in a generative scientific environment."? It was after all a folding competition, wasn't it...

Apologies in advance, but some knowledge of particle physics is required. Just as it's hard to describe a breakthrough in computer technology to someone who has little understanding of computers....

These two links (given further down in responses to this article) are much better technical explanations than I could write:

http://bit.ly/NuBlogT2KNuE1

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/electron_neutrinos_muon_neutrinos-80012

(a) I believe this is the first direct observation. Previous experiments have looked at neutrinos produced by the sun and have addressed the solar neutrino deficit, that is, the observation that the sun doesn't produce nearly as many electron neutrinos as the standard solar model predicts. The ones that are missing have oscillated (converted) into mu (and a small portion tau) neutrinos. This is why they seem to "disappear."

(b) You are wrong in stating that the cause is unknown. When the effects of neutrinos were first observed, physicists believed they had zero rest mass, like the photon. I can't recall what the argument for this designation was at the time (been a while since physics classes), but it simply may have been something like, "electrons and positrons are the lightest elementary particles, so these new thingies that invisibly carry away momentum from reactions like beta (and muon) decay, which we have shown have far less mass than the electron, are zero mass particles like a photon." (I dearly hope I'm not way off base on my history of particle physics here.)

In the 80's and 90's the possibility of non-zero rest mass neutrinos was first entertained, as it would explain a few things. This idea was received skeptically, though not with hostility, at first (as I well remember). Theoreticians immediately demonstrated that non-zero rest mass neutrinos would convert, or oscillate, between flavors as a direct result of their having mass. Because they have mass, it is the mass eigenstates of the neutrinos that don't vary with time. This means that the flavor eigenstates *do* vary with time. Therefore, an electron neutrino will have increasing probability of being measured as a muon neutrino with increasing time. (In their flavor eigenstates, the neutrinos have unmixed flavor and are (I believe) massless. In their mass eigenstates (the ones we can measure), the neutrinos have mass and are flavor-mixed. This mixing is what allows them to fluctuate back and forth between electron and muon neutrinos (with a bit of tau mixing thrown in).)

I'm sure this makes it all clear as mud. Here's a sub-link on eigenstates and neutrino mixing from CERN:

http://choruswww.cern.ch/Public/textes/english/node4.html

and here is Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino

HTH.