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The visitor's center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a nice shelf display of this glass, seen in the picture at the bottom of the page. The uranium atoms fluoresce under UV light, giving a distinctive although kitschy look to the pieces.

In the same case (on the lower shelves) are common objects found to be radioactive, with the radiation sources identified and radiation levels listed. A pair of glasses contaminated with Thorium from early A-bomb tests, a chunk of "yellow-cake" from Canadian deposits, a piece of granite from Denver, etc. Kind of cool, in a geeky sort of way ...

He's a co-worker of mine. We both work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the DOE labs where these machines keep appearing. Computer scientists here program on them all the time.

unless you have one of these babies" that the Sandia labs has.

Amazing (and very pretty) work.

ASCII building 451 Construction Scrapbook

Dammit, I want one of those, droool.

LLNL has been researching micropower impulse radar to 'image' the vocal chords, mainly for speech recogonition. The main site seems down, but you can get to it with google cache. Also check out ucdavis

LLNL has been researching micropower impulse radar to 'image' the vocal chords, mainly for speech recogonition. The main site seems down, but you can get to it with google cache. Also check out ucdavis

I can't believe someone modded this up. Which volcano? Which eruption? Where's the study? Do you have reference to any study or article suggesting this?

Pinatubo did release large amounts of sulfer dioxide, but sulfer dioxide is not a greenhouse gas. In fact, it's believed that Mount Pinatubo masked global warming in the years following the eruption.

-Bruce

when I was in the laser club at community college we had a guy designing a ruby neon laser - when finished it could punch holes in paper and razor blades - and if you shot it at someone it felt like being hit by a rather nasty rubber band - even had a power supply you use with it to run it off 12 volts. Funny thing is it might be cheaper (today) to build a ruby optical laser then to buy this rubberband gun. We were famous for pointing those read neon lasers (siemens tube) at computer screens in the lab across the courtyard :) - never did see anyone use the ruby laser against them though.

Read more about them - here

For more info on this program, check out: LLNL ASCI Site especially the "Platforms" link at the top of the page.

FWIF, the open systems are used to simulate all sorts of things, not just nuclear weapons. For example, I've been running materials science simulations on ASCI Frost.

Other interesting facts:

Asci Q is currently being developed by Compaq (uses thousands of Alphas). Expected performance: 30 TerraOPS

The final ASCI computer, currently under bid, will be ASCI Purple. Expected performance: 100TerraOPS. From the RFP: "6MW power max."

Sonoluminescence: an Introduction

Single Bubble Sonoluminescence HOWTO

Since sonoluminescence dosent seem to scale up (to my knowledge) this seems like a moot point. It is sort of cool to have a cheap way to study micro-fusion though.

Stop spreading myths.

I saw a system that was an ultra-high-speed signal capture device, kindof like a digital oscilliscope. The circuit board had two promient traces -- one straight, and one wavy. One was a clock, the other was the sampled data (I don't really remember which one was which). Both had feeds off of them to small circuits that would hold a sample. In the case of the wavy trace, it was one tap per wave. The resulting data stored had a time resolution determined by the diference in lengths between the taps on the wavy trace and the taps on the straight trace.

I refer you to this excellent paper talking about that very problem: Practical Lessons in Supporting Large-Scale Computational Science (in pdf). The gist of it is the tradeoffs between RDBMS's and custom flat files. It seems that (and I've dealt with this myself, competing in KDD Cup 2001) while a naive set of code does far worse than a database+olap, a indexed and paged data format (memory mapped) does far better, with less overhead. Of course, it's harder to apply your favorite Machine Learning or AI algorithm to stuff that's in a database. I've found that, even when I put it into a database, I pull it back out to perform real computation on it.

There are two big unsolved problems with "extreme ultraviolet" lithography, which is really X-ray lithography. First, you need a coherent X-ray source. The proposed options are a synchrotron, which is big (house-sized) and expensive, or an X-ray laser, which nobody has yet made work. Sandia has claimed a laser-pumped "plasma" source, but it doesn't yet have enough power to do the job.

The other problem is that the masks have to be almost perfect down to the atomic level. Surprisingly, there are ways to do this. It looks like that problem will be solved.

However, the whole technology is nowhere near working. The major web pages on the subject haven't been updated for a year or so, which is a bad sign. Much of the work is being done at the old A-bomb labs (LLNL and Sandia), which today are sort of senior activity centers for old physicists. All the articles seem to come from there. We're not seeing much in the way of EUV articles from semiconductor-fab equipment manufacturers yet.

There's considerable speculation in the industry that there might be a hiatus of a few years around 2004-2006, during which there won't be much progress in line width. This happened once before in the semiconductor industry, in the 1970s. But it's not the end; EUV should eventually work.

Sometime around 2014 or so, we reach the End of Silicon, or at least the end of improvements to lithography on flat silicon, because atoms are too big. Further progress will require a new technology.

so they drew it in, right? i can do that too! look, planets!

It is not quite that bad. This link here is really nice. I'm putting in a plug for my old alma-mater (go slugs.)

Yeah, the pictures are pretty (awesome, if real) but I'm going to wait for pictures from the Hubble (which had better be forthcoming!) before I'm totally persuaded.

That said - 58 light years? That's a long trip, but totally possible.

Not really, but there is an element of truth to that mantra

One word: SISAL.

Many engineering programs use a combination of languages. For example, C++ is used for the high level programming and FORTRAN for low level the numeric kernels. Of course, you can write low level numeric kernels in C++ because it supports both OO and procedural programming. Often FORTRAN is used because

• the code has already been written and tested
• FORTRAN compilers can be optimized better due to simpler loops and different aliasing rules (note C may improve with the introduction of the restrict keyword in the C ISO 99 standard).
• numerical methods gurus are more comfortable with FORTRAN
• C++ is still not considered as portable as C or F77

My present employer, the Center for Applied Scientific Computing, has Overture and SAMRAI written in C++.

Many engineering programs use a combination of languages. For example, C++ is used for the high level programming and FORTRAN for low level the numeric kernels. Of course, you can write low level numeric kernels in C++ because it supports both OO and procedural programming. Often FORTRAN is used because

• the code has already been written and tested
• FORTRAN compilers can be optimized better due to simpler loops and different aliasing rules (note C may improve with the introduction of the restrict keyword in the C ISO 99 standard).
• numerical methods gurus are more comfortable with FORTRAN
• C++ is still not considered as portable as C or F77

My present employer, the Center for Applied Scientific Computing, has Overture and SAMRAI written in C++.

Many engineering programs use a combination of languages. For example, C++ is used for the high level programming and FORTRAN for low level the numeric kernels. Of course, you can write low level numeric kernels in C++ because it supports both OO and procedural programming. Often FORTRAN is used because

• the code has already been written and tested
• FORTRAN compilers can be optimized better due to simpler loops and different aliasing rules (note C may improve with the introduction of the restrict keyword in the C ISO 99 standard).
• numerical methods gurus are more comfortable with FORTRAN
• C++ is still not considered as portable as C or F77

My present employer, the Center for Applied Scientific Computing, has Overture and SAMRAI written in C++.

A CFD Framework in C++

A Multiphysics Simulation Framework in C++

and many more. I have more to say but I must leave for work to get back to hacking my own OOP engineering code.

Flat5

A CFD Framework in C++

A Multiphysics Simulation Framework in C++

and many more. I have more to say but I must leave for work to get back to hacking my own OOP engineering code.

Flat5

Ugh, if you ask me Canadians are even more nauseatingly patriotic than us Americans. We've been doing nuclear astrophysics experiments for decades already and with cooler looking instruments too! ha! take that Canada!

http://lasers.llnl.gov/lst/helstf.html

How about holding various companies whose products are exploited the most (re: MS) liable for their lack of security?

There was a recent security seminar sponsored by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center by Gene Spafford who is the director of the Purdue CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security), where he mentioned the problems with security and the software industry. One of his slides in his presentation showed that Windows NT and Windows 2000 (combined), RedHat Linux and Solaris are respectively the first, second and third on the lists of OSes that have had vulnerabilities discovered in the past five years.

Legislation that aims to punish companies for writing insecure software would harm almost every company that writes any software that is aimed at being used in a server/multi-user environment since security is an absolute that most non-trivial software does not reach.

Secondly, who will be forced to pay when it comes to Open Source vulnerabilities? wu-ftp is notoriously broken , as is telnetd , sendmail, BIND and some would consider recent bugs in the Linux kernel as OS vulnerabilities. Opening the door to lawsuits to software developers for writing software would probably kill a number of projects rather quickly.

I'd rather that we let capitalism take its course. If customers want secure products then they should stop buying insecure products or they should communicate to the vendors that security is of importance to them. As long as consumers (both individuals and corporate entities) continue to accept the status quo then no change will be made but I don't believe that lawsuits will solve anything except make some lawyers rich and significantly increase the cost of software as the effects of the lawsuits are passed on to consumers.

Actually, check out this link

Rechargeable (via DC current) fuel cell. Cool. Probably horribly inefficient, but you trade that for huge battery life.

I like the potential of long-term battery life, say for remote scientific expeditions and the like.

Another thought is that fuel cells can be made to work in reverse. Heisenberg's theroem comes to mind; it goes basically that any electronic device can be reversed, such that it's inputs become it's outputs and visa-versa. An example is microphones and speakers. The two are interchangeable, except speakers have been optimized in physical design to emit sound and microphones to collect sound. Heisenberg's thereom has been disproved... it doesn't apply to semiconductor technology.

But, it does work for fuel cells... see this page for an example of someone doing it. So, you don't need to buy methanol. You can generate it electrically. In this sense, it would be similar to a sealed lead-acid battery. The material it works on is liquid and degrades through use, but as long as the system is sealed (and thus no transfer of fluids with the outside world goes on), it's rechargeable.

curing cancer with your spare CPU cycles!!!


While structural methods certainly have application in cancer treatment, the link is indirect, at best. It is HIV treatment where the really stunning successes for applied structure studies have been made (not a rigorous scientific judgement, of course.)

Before you go and commit your (precious, after all you could give it to Kazaa) bandwidth and CPU cycles to some project, you should take a critical look at how successful it really is, aside from how wonderful any potential successes might be. Certainly, if there were alien transmissions out there (hah) SETI would be, quite frankly, more important than this, and I work in proteomics.

Anyway, check out CASP4 (Critical Assessment of techniques for Structure Prediction, the one that ended Sep of last year) and make your own judgements about how feasable these techniques really are, and about the successes of the stanford team in particular.

There is a lot of visualization research happening at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that's using Linux. A lot of the boxes that we do our day-to-day work on are boxes running RedHat 7.1. We're researching how to best use the latest nVidia drivers with GeForce 3 cards.

I've personally been working on scalable parallel rendering. We have a couple Linux clusters that we're working with. The one that I work on is a 32-node cluster with a Myrinet interconnect. Each box has hardware graphics in it. That cluster is hooked up to several displays so that we can explore very large tiled displays. I'm working on a project called Chromium that's hosted at SourceForge.

So I think you could say that the researchers in the DOE are very interested in what Linux can do.

There is a lot of visualization research happening at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that's using Linux. A lot of the boxes that we do our day-to-day work on are boxes running RedHat 7.1. We're researching how to best use the latest nVidia drivers with GeForce 3 cards.

I've personally been working on scalable parallel rendering. We have a couple Linux clusters that we're working with. The one that I work on is a 32-node cluster with a Myrinet interconnect. Each box has hardware graphics in it. That cluster is hooked up to several displays so that we can explore very large tiled displays. I'm working on a project called Chromium that's hosted at SourceForge.

So I think you could say that the researchers in the DOE are very interested in what Linux can do.

There is a lot of visualization research happening at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that's using Linux. A lot of the boxes that we do our day-to-day work on are boxes running RedHat 7.1. We're researching how to best use the latest nVidia drivers with GeForce 3 cards.

I've personally been working on scalable parallel rendering. We have a couple Linux clusters that we're working with. The one that I work on is a 32-node cluster with a Myrinet interconnect. Each box has hardware graphics in it. That cluster is hooked up to several displays so that we can explore very large tiled displays. I'm working on a project called Chromium that's hosted at SourceForge.

So I think you could say that the researchers in the DOE are very interested in what Linux can do.

There is a lot of visualization research happening at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that's using Linux. A lot of the boxes that we do our day-to-day work on are boxes running RedHat 7.1. We're researching how to best use the latest nVidia drivers with GeForce 3 cards.

I've personally been working on scalable parallel rendering. We have a couple Linux clusters that we're working with. The one that I work on is a 32-node cluster with a Myrinet interconnect. Each box has hardware graphics in it. That cluster is hooked up to several displays so that we can explore very large tiled displays. I'm working on a project called Chromium that's hosted at SourceForge.

So I think you could say that the researchers in the DOE are very interested in what Linux can do.

It did take a number of years for LLNL to become open to linux as an option. Mostly out of security concerns and support issues.

To find out more about computing at LLNL, check out:
LLNL SCCD

Excuse me if this comes across as a flame, but you only seem to want to look at arguments that LP is a boondogle. Did you even look at the link I provided before? Or have you seen these proposals?

None of which means I care for all the "Star Wars" nonsense that seems to be associated with alternative propulsion technologies. Weapons of mass destruction can't be handled by some fancy technofix. But perhaps thats what really has hurt oddball systems like laser propulsion: they have an unfortunate association with folks motivated by nationalistic ideology or military career-building -- not a geninuine interest in space exploration.

But this association shouldn't prejudice us against the very idea of finding alternatives to rockets. As the guy who started this thread pointed out, it's a damned inefficient means of propulsion. A serious return to space just isn't going to happen until we find an alternative.

Me too.

Some minor tidbits:

• Yes, LLNL does have at least one of the ``big bertha'' displays.
• We also have a lot of computing power (including the number 1 and number 4 machines on the current Top500 supercomputers list.

[Disclaimer: I'm a sysadmin with VIEWS (and we have an open sysadmin position).]

Me too.

Some minor tidbits:

• Yes, LLNL does have at least one of the ``big bertha'' displays.
• We also have a lot of computing power (including the number 1 and number 4 machines on the current Top500 supercomputers list.

[Disclaimer: I'm a sysadmin with VIEWS (and we have an open sysadmin position).]

Plut is not recyclable (except in bombs), has a horrendous half-life, and is completely lethal.

Really! Horrendous half-life and completely lethal. Too bad those two statements are contradictory. The longer the half-life the less radiation emitted over a given period of time.

Plutonium emits alpha particles, which outside the body cannot even penetrate the skin. The half-life of PU-239 created in nuclear reactors is 24,000 year. PU-238 used in RTGs is 86 years. But, again alpha particles cannot penetrate skin.

So, what about ingestion or respiration. Well, this site has a very good analysis of the cancer risk of ingesting and/or inhaling plutonium. http://www.llnl.gov/csts/publications/sutcliffe/

Basically, it is really hard to inhale enough plutonium to cause a significant increase in cancer risk. Ingestion is the risk you mention of plutonium leaking into a water table, as it turns out that isn't terribly lethal either. Plutonium doesn't disolve or suspend readily in water, it settles out. And, even what does get suspended or dissolved is not absorbed easily by the digestive tract.

So, basically plutonium isn't terribly difficult to deal with, and not terribly deadly. Pick something else to scare people with.

Datardly

It's rather interesting watching slashbots make smug comments about "Microsoft worms" and "Outlook viruses" when the two most damaging worms that have occured this year could have appeared on any platform.

Code Red
The Code Red worm is a typical worm that exploits a buffer overflow just like the Morris Internet Worm and the Ramen worm before it. Either of the aformentioned worms could have done what code red did once they had 0wn3d the boxen, they just happened not to.

Heck, I've toyed with writing a proof of concept *nix verison of Code Red using wu-ftp vulnerabilities, rpc.statd vulnerabilities, telnetd vulnerabilities, sendmail vulnerabilities and even BIND vulnerabilities. Of course, I haven't gone much further than deciding what exploits to use and glancing at some source since I'm busy with school at the moment and more importantly I don't want to go to jail.

Sircam
The Sircam worm spread either through social engineering or across unprotected network shares. Neither of these requires Outlook. It didn't grab addresses out of the address book and instead grabbed them from the user's web cache. Sircam also didn't use the client mailer to mail itself out but instead included it's own mail program.
Thus all Sircam needed to spread was clueless users. This only thing Microsoft-y about this worm is that it ran on Windows.

All the above said, it is truly sad that on almost all popular platforms we are stil dealing with a 30 year old security problem whose causes and solutions have been known from probably before a sizable number of the slashdot population was born.

"So do we get to see this computer beat another chess champion?"

no you get to see it do something useful. go to "MPEG Movies"

Interesting that they've gone for a cheaper, more conventional construction. They used conventional reinforced concrete and a rectangular building, over the more blast-efficient spherical shape using layered concrete. They are using mild steel over armour plate to halve the cost, yet maintain 85% penetration resistance.

Also, the "of the various blast attenuation systems studied, the least expensive one, a rubber doormat-type material, proved to be the only acceptable option."

Now, do they accept on-line ordering?

For an antidote to Michio Kaku, read this appraisal of the actual dangers of the deliberate injection of plutonium into the air or water of a city. Kaku is waaaay overstating the dangers.
--

That was Project Pluto, which was, as you note, a hell of a lot more "dirty" than what NASA is proposing. The project started in 1957, and was canceled in 1964, after the USAF had determined that there was no need for such a missile, as well as the political fallout (sometimes puns are actually appropriate) considerations. As for the radioactivity, part of the plan was to have the missile drop its bombs where needed, then fly patterns over the target country (fUSSR, primarily) to irradiate it. Nasty stuff, that.

National Air and Space Magazine had an article on the project, but for the life of me I can't remember when it was published, other than over a decade ago. Their online site doesn't have a way of searching back copies for specific articles, and I don't presently have access to a library for more traditional research.

There's not too much of actual use on the web, from a "quick and dirty" Google search. I did, however find this, about the history of Lawrence Livermore National Labratory, which was involved with just about every nuclear program the US had.
--

If American sites are liable in Austrailian courts what can be done about a site more informative than this one? Would my link of this site where one can chose to download KOH for their MSDOS 3.1 machine or one of the other less friendly viruses be a no no? Who gets the 10 years, me or CmdTaco? Is hyperbole the primary cause of a receeding hair line?

But enough about viruses. What about trojans? Back Orifice has features similar to carbon copy and pcAnywhere. The primary difference being that the creators gave both the source and program away for free. Not to mention that it uses less resources, and can typically do more (for good or ill). Is it illegal because it doesn't cost $50 dollars and come in a non-returnable shrinkwrapped box? To say nothing of spyware.

Personally, I think the world could use a few more good viruses. I think a nice macro virus that effectivly muted spam could be a wonderful gift to all those outlook express users.

If American sites are liable in Austrailian courts what can be done about a site more informative than this one? Would my link of this site where one can chose to download KOH for their MSDOS 3.1 machine or one of the other less friendly viruses be a no no? Who gets the 10 years, me or CmdTaco? Is hyperbole the primary cause of a receeding hair line?

But enough about viruses. What about trojans? Back Orifice has features similar to carbon copy and pcAnywhere. The primary difference being that the creators gave both the source and program away for free. Not to mention that it uses less resources, and can typically do more (for good or ill). Is it illegal because it doesn't cost $50 dollars and come in a non-returnable shrinkwrapped box? To say nothing of spyware.

Personally, I think the world could use a few more good viruses. I think a nice macro virus that effectivly muted spam could be a wonderful gift to all those outlook express users.

Rather than tell you everything you may or may not already know, I'll just give you a link to the main LLNL NIF(National Ignition Facility) website. Believe me, working at a DOE lab is pretty cool, especially since you get to see most of the neat gadgets first hand (Like the 10m diameter target chamber, and the tiny target cylinder).

So, for the latest in inertial confinement fusion: www.llnl.gov/nif/

If what you want to learn about isn't there, you're not allowed to know :).


Boycott .sigs!
ahh dammit, I blew it

Rather than tell you everything you may or may not already know, I'll just give you a link to the main LLNL NIF(National Ignition Facility) website. Believe me, working at a DOE lab is pretty cool, especially since you get to see most of the neat gadgets first hand (Like the 10m diameter target chamber, and the tiny target cylinder).

So, for the latest in inertial confinement fusion: www.llnl.gov/nif/

If what you want to learn about isn't there, you're not allowed to know :).


Boycott .sigs!
ahh dammit, I blew it

Rather than tell you everything you may or may not already know, I'll just give you a link to the main LLNL NIF(National Ignition Facility) website. Believe me, working at a DOE lab is pretty cool, especially since you get to see most of the neat gadgets first hand (Like the 10m diameter target chamber, and the tiny target cylinder).

So, for the latest in inertial confinement fusion: www.llnl.gov/nif/

If what you want to learn about isn't there, you're not allowed to know :).


Boycott .sigs!
ahh dammit, I blew it

Article says this implies that the same might work to create solid metallic hydrogen at normal pressures. If so, it would be an extremely high-energy rocket fuel. An earlier experiment with metallic hydrogen is described in this article, which mentions the rocket-fuel possibility.

Hell, yes! This PDF paper was written by some Russian scientists. It's maybe too technical but it serves as an example as to the types of studies that have been carried out. There are probably more examples but this one popped up first on the Google search.

It is worthy to note that virtually all the work done up until now has happened in the United States.

I've been watching this subject for a couple of years now... The first link I found was at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's MIR site, where they have a very similar setup.

Here are a couple of applications:
Cheap radar. These things, since they are spread spectrum, don't interfere with each other and are ideal for watching reflected signals (since you are the sender and know the chirping pattern you used to transmit with)
Complicated imaging. They had some pictures of a larynx -- instead of doing speech recogintion on sound waves, they were doing it by watching the actual parts of the body that move to form the sounds!
Even more complicated imaging. They had a 3-d radar system to detect reinforcement rods in concrete. Pretty neat

The above site also has the FCC rules regulating the transmission (since these are single pulses, not repetitive waves, the FCC isn't sure what to do with them) and LLNL's response. One curious thing about ultra-wide radar is that the frequency response of the antennas themselves are the limiting factor on what frequencies actually get transmitted -- so aftermarket antennas might not be so easy to use since they are a vital part of the circuit.