Slashdot Mirror

Here ya'll go.

http://people.ucsc.edu/~twilly/tea-with-stallman.h tml

The Golden Path. Jim Kent rools!

Massively slashdotted by the scientific community; try a mirror in a month or so.

The Tentative PicoBSD FAQ has useful information on how to built a PicoBSD build out of the current source tree and therefore isn't anywhere near two years old, nor does it build to two floppies, there are three differnet versions of it with a fourth in psuedo permanent beta testing

miniBSD has a different aim of not so much tweaking, for example in PicoBSD SSH daemon and client are just two aspects of one program instead of two sperate programs because of all the shared code between them, it's more meant to run on compact flash and is easier to update since PicoBSD is a compressed bootable image

Quit it with the anti-California rhetoric already.

The majority of US states regulate their geologists (Washington isn't on this list, but Washington hardly regulates anything).

Do any states register geologists?

Yes. Twenty-six states now have registration or certification laws: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Puerto Rico also has passed a registration law.

California has more geologic activity in it's little pinky then most states have in their whole territory. Regulation and strict building standards is why over 30-million Californians can survive in Earthquake, flood & landslide country. The potential for fraud is enormous. As a homeowner, I'm glad for the regulation.

In 1989, a 7.1 earthquake in the SF Bay Area killed 62 people.

By contrast, in 1999 a 7.4 earthquake hit Turkey, killing over 30,000 people. Turkey has regulation, but doesn't enforce it.

Yes, their are many factors involved in these two numbers, but regulation saved many lives in 1989.

Huh? How exactly would you grow hair with dental enamelin?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

and

http://genome.ucsc.edu/

Also. The mouse genome is still a draft stage. You can browse it here. The big news is the enormous mouse issue of Nature is about to hit the newsstands. This is a similar situation to the human genome. The Nature paper was published a few years ago, but the actual finished sequence isn't due until April, 2003.

There's a few reasons for this.

• Standard shotgun sequencing uses bacterial or yeast plasmids, cosmids. Whatever. The problem is that sometimes the sequenced DNA can get contaminated with bacterial and then show up in the assembled sequence.
• Sequencing telomeres and centromeres of chromosomes is more difficult.
• As the level of coverage goes up in each draft (how many times a contiguous region of a chromosome has been sequenced "covered") the likelihood that that region is correct goes up. I think what they want is 4X coverage usually genome-wide, so in the mean time they still have a "draft" good enough to work with.

In any case, it is still exciting news. In many ways the mouse genome is more valuable than human, because ethics aren't really put into question when genetically engineering mice or throwing them into a blender.

Andy

He's been at UC Santa Cruz since the early '80s. He teaches "The history of the American Folk Musical", IIRC.

Hey, I just checked the entangled version of the Microsoft.com site, and all the entry and exist links seem to go to Slashdot, Free Software Foundation, or other places that Microsoft stands against. Looks like Slashdot has done its job. Pretty funny.

You should be using this (http://zip.cse.ucsc.edu:8080/request?inform_about _proxy=&link_from_page_title=&link_from_page_url=h ttp://slashdot.org/&link_to_page_url=http://www.gn u.org/ for those who don't trust me) link instead so the referrer will be Slashdot, so the referrer will be correct.

--j

Click this link to associate the GNU hippies with Goatse :-)

Click on this link to associate the GNU hippies with Goatse :-)

FARC kidnaps and kills Columbian civilians, has bombed public places, burned down villages, and killed American activists who were working with the U'wa indiginous people to prevent large Oil Companies from drilling on U'wa land.

FARC is one of the most disgusting revolutionary groups in S. America.

Unfortunately, the Columbian Government has also kidnapped and killed civilians, and has bombed public places ... so by what defination is the Columbian Government not a terrorist group...

You can download from here to:

sluglug ftp

cl

I believe that students should be taught a standarized form of English in the classroom. It's simply the best way to ensure effective communication with a wide range of people(assuming they too have learned this standard). That said, I think that the methods and methodologies of American educators need serious rethinking.

I wonder if anyone reading Slashdot remembers the snafu over "Ebonics" from a number of years ago. Sometime in the 90's a school board in Oakland decided that it might be a good idea to recognize African American English(AAE)as a language spoken by a large percentage of its student body, and to educate teachers on how to effectively communicate with students. The Media(tm) had an uproar over it, and assailed them for trying to teach "Ebonics" as a foreign language. Much like Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders was trying to "teach children Masturbation", but I digress. I don't remember much about the incident as a teen, but I do remember the overbearing attitudes of my white peers and neighbors, which seemed to center around something like

"Why can't those damn black kids speak proper english like us?"

Linguistically speaking, AAE is a structurally and intellectually valid language, featuring complex syntax, pronunciation and grammar rules just like any other. I don't have the time or the resources to go into it, so I'll point you here. The truth of the matter is that the culturally and economically elite have been using standardized language to assert their hegemony over society for years, and the same true in America as it was in the initial triangle between Oxford, Cambridge and London. Students in America are teased, ridiculed and insulted for the use of valid dialects in ordinary speech. If you're a white American reader, chances are spectacular that you grew up speaking standard English in the home. Well, how convenient for you. The real point of an English class is not to get students speaking standard English natively or ordinarily, but simply to afford them the ability to use it when necessary (Higher education, job interviews, etc etc). The Oakland schoolboard's original idea was to make it easier for this to occur; teachers would be able to show comparisons between AAE and standard English, and help students learn what they need to change where and when.

Instead our educators(and much of the slashdot readership)assert their supposed superiority by scoffing at the "idiocy" and "childishness" of non standard language features. So while I'm not going to make any claims that l33t is a full featured language, perhaps teachers should try teaching children what it is, why it exists, and how it differs from standard English. Encourage kids to learn and use a standard dialect for specific skills, but don't simply punish them as though their deliberately trying to pollute the language. Sometimes I think gradeschool needs basic linguistics classes just so kids can learn why their English teachers are being such assholes to them.

In part it's a history of physics from World War II onward, in part it's a look into one physicists love of the subject.

I found it inspiring.

I have a B.A. in Physics from UC Santa Cruz.

I also recommend the Feynman Lectures if you want to actually understand the material. I think they're very readable. You will need to know some differential and integral calculus to be able to understand them, but you will need those for any real physics textbook - Newton invented calculus in order to study physics.

Finally, Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb is just an astounding book. It's a history of physics from the 20's or so up through the 50's. It really communicates the feelings of the times.

After reading it I found myself saying "I could do that" and finally got it together to go back to school and finish my Physics degree - I should have graduated in '86 but didn't graduate until '93.

http://arts.ucsc.edu/ems/music/tech_background/TE- 19/teces_19.html contains basic information on how the LP record works. I think the most important thing for the experimenter is called RIAA equalization, in order to limit the physical motion of the recording stylus that cut the record, bass was reduced and treble increased in a very precise way, in order to reproduce the original sound, the opposite must be done.

The RIAA equalization curve is a plot of amplitude boost/cut vs. frequency. Apply its inverse to the raw analog signal(s) that come out of your signal processing.

You can find it at http://www.tanker.se/lidstrom/riaa.htm.

Oh, and CLEAN THE RECORD BEFORE DOING THIS. The info in Part 14 of the rec.audio.* FAQ is as good a place to start to find out how as any.

Have fun and feel free to let me know if you get anywhere.

You might also want a look at my other post to this thread.

Yes, this is the Eudaemonic Pie referred to in the story post.

Well, I forgot everything about GPL for a while. Sorry.
Here is a reference to the original work... sigh.

For those of you that find PDF a Pain In The Ass, you can grab an HTML version of this chapter from here.

So far I've read a poem that, while interesting, a quick search on google shows that the person who presented it is also the translator. Right. Can someone please find the original so we can verify this for ourselves? Thank you.

I've seen police, fire fighters, and medical personnel compared with researchers in the social science and humanities. I've seen proposals for information to be on a "need to know" basis, with the only people who "need to know" being the government and (of course) researchers. I love it when someone welcomes a loss of freedom provided it doesn't include them.

If you want some good music to listen to this to, I reccomend Love Me, I'm a Liberal by Phil Ochs unless you're too young, in which case you might as well listen to the Jello Biafra version

Hello, same anonymous coward here replying to self to tell all you knee-jerk reactionaries out there to put down the pitchforks. And whatever you do, don't invest in this company.

First, the patent talks about 2 encoding schemes and applying them to various scenarios.

A) Run-length encoding the amplitude of digitally sampled signal. An idea older than time, but not used in JPEG, so who cares.

B) Huffman encoding the amplitude of a digitally sampled signal. David Huffman (at latest) came up with the encoding scheme in 1953 (basing off him being in grad school when making it and age at death), so I think we can establish prior art.

But the real issue is JPEG, which is the lossy end of the coding scheme. This involves (excuse my math) a Discrete Cosine Transformation to translate the amplitues into the coefficients of the frequencies being encoded.

Huffman encoding doesn't come in until the lossless compression stage, which is technically not JPEG, but JFIF, the file system wrapped around the JPEG encoding scheme that makes JPEG encodning into a JPEG file we all know and love... a minor distinction, but again, any monkey can show prior art.

On the recently developed UCSC Student Portal, I added an easter egg into the site search that automatically changed the search context to the "Jargon File" if someone typed "Jargon: " before thier search string. Pretty hard to find, but I mostly wanted there as a way for me (and other C.S. majors) to search the Jargon File without having to add it as an option in the drop down list and have the heads breathing down my neck for it.

At least 1997

Calculations made by Greg Laughlin of the University of California at Santa Cruz show that an Earth-sized planet could survive in a stable orbit between the two gas giants.

Planet only 40 times more massive than earth... orbiting at 1/20th the radius of Earth's orbit... I imagine lying on my back, getting a brief and fatal sunburn... It's ok, though, because the gravity has already stopped all respiration, etc.

I've seen several posts on the Linux-Aironet mailing list of people using stuff with Linux on handhelds. http://csl.cse.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/aironet

Given how the current trend in a lot of scientific fields is to borrow good ideas from mother nature, I'll betcha this is on somebody's drawing board somewhere.

See Robert Morris's presentation (6+MB PDF) from the USENIX File and Storage Technologies conference. The videos of the invited talks are also worth watching (if you can afford the b/width to get them).

http://genome.ucsc.edu/

It might use a technology known as MEMS which is probe based storage. Probe-based storage system supports probe-based reading and writing of bits, is based on non-rotating media and initially
expected to support storage densities on the order of 100 to 300 Gbit/inch2. The storage
devices are envisioned as two rectangular sleds, one with storage media and the other
with a sparse array of very small read-write heads, in the range of thousands to millions.
Seeks will require x and y motion of one of the sleds relative to the other. These devices
are intrinsically highly parallel because some or all of the heads will be able to operate
simultaneously. [MEMS Modeling]

Check this out.

This will happen, it's just a matter of time. All the research in the networking industry is in wireless. The logic end for that research is fast, functional, multihop wireless networks that trade data via P2P type operations. Not just Palm pilots, but everything. The reason that this is not possible right now is that it is NOWHERE AS EASY AS IT SOUNDS.

There is a major problem with wireless networks in a multihop Ad-hoc setting and it is called Hidden Terminals. Essentially, due to the medium and the hardware, you can't (cheaply) implement Collision Detection or more specifically Carrier Sensing like CSMA/CD protocols such as Ethernet. A terminal between two other terminals can hear both of them, but the terminals on the edges don't know what each other is doing and they may both try to send data to the center node at the same time, resulting in interference and a collision. Here are some research papers if you're really interested but be warned, they are heavy on the math.

CCRG Research at UCSC Publications

And more specifically,
C. L. Fullmer and J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, "Solutions to Hidden Terminal Problems in Wireless Networks", Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 97, Cannes, France, September 14-18, 1997. - There is also a pdf version on the CCRG page.

Enjoy!

This will happen, it's just a matter of time. All the research in the networking industry is in wireless. The logic end for that research is fast, functional, multihop wireless networks that trade data via P2P type operations. Not just Palm pilots, but everything. The reason that this is not possible right now is that it is NOWHERE AS EASY AS IT SOUNDS.

There is a major problem with wireless networks in a multihop Ad-hoc setting and it is called Hidden Terminals. Essentially, due to the medium and the hardware, you can't (cheaply) implement Collision Detection or more specifically Carrier Sensing like CSMA/CD protocols such as Ethernet. A terminal between two other terminals can hear both of them, but the terminals on the edges don't know what each other is doing and they may both try to send data to the center node at the same time, resulting in interference and a collision. Here are some research papers if you're really interested but be warned, they are heavy on the math.

CCRG Research at UCSC Publications

And more specifically,
C. L. Fullmer and J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, "Solutions to Hidden Terminal Problems in Wireless Networks", Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 97, Cannes, France, September 14-18, 1997. - There is also a pdf version on the CCRG page.

Enjoy!

... on the research, not the fire. If you look at the Professor's homepage, you can see that he was working on:

Our work centers on the mechanisms and regulation of splicing. Splicing is required to remove intron sequences from pre-mRNA and create coding sequences for translation. Yeast has been our organism of choice for these studies because it offers simple, powerful genetic approaches and has a splicing machinery similar to that in mammalian cells. In addition the yeast genome is completely sequenced, the location of nearly every intron is known and genes for most splicing factors have been identified. This provides unique advantages for the study of splicing.

Kinda puts some perspective on what was lost as opposed to "data related to the Human Genome Project."

The original story was off base enough, but Slashdot managed to blow it far more out of proportion. Yes, the human genome sequence is backed up, securely and globally.

The LZW algorithm, which is used to encode GIF images, is patented, and the patent owner (Unisys) tries to get people to pay if they sell software with a GIF encoder in it.

IIRC, LZW is only used for the compression of GIF images, not the actual encoding. There has been a GIF library alternative, libungif, available for some time now. It lets you programatically work with GIF images sans LZW. If you have to work with GIFs, check it out. Otherwise, like you said, PNGs are much better.

(*googles*) Ah.

Yes, Prime Minister: A Conflict of Interest -- see this page for details.

Disclaimer: This post is either a parody or a bunch of opinions, whichever the author chooses it to be at any given time. It is a work of pure fiction and as such must not be taken as statements of fact, slander or libel. All persons, places or things mentioned herein are objects of the author's imagination. Any similarities to persons, places or things in the real world are coincidental and unintentional.

There are tons of GameCubes in the stores, but you'll have to kill for an Xbox, eh? Well let me tell you something: Xbox is a Microsoft product, and as such, I believe it sucks. For the uninitiated, I'm a biased, zealous, and most of all, sworn by blood oath Microsoft hater... who cares though? I got 50 Karma! Of course, this is because of some of my better posts, which ironically don't include any anti-Microsoft stuff. Well at least not excessive amounts of anti-Microsoft stuff. And I do admit that one of my computers has Windows 98 on it, but only because:

• It came preinstalled, which means I payed for it anyway. I never buy computers prebuilt but this one is a laptop. I haven't found a way to build my own laptop yet. For everything else, I first decide what purpose the thing is supposed to fulfill and then plan, buy and configure accordingly. I believe that knowing how things work, configuring them correctly, constantly increasing your knowledge and experience, improving the system, and above all, maintaining it often and properly... results in systems that work efficiently and without problems during operation. Except, of course, when running Windows. <bias off>I really, honestly do have a lot of problems with Windows locking up and crashing, when none of my other systems do. Yes, I admit that I've had problems with my other systems. They're made by humans and as such are not perfect, but when it comes down to it, I never worry about, for example, FreeBSD crashing. It just doesn't, unless I'm really pushing the system to the max and doing about 3,000 things that I really shouldn't be doing at the same time! FreeBSD has never crashed under normal circumstances by any stretch of the imagination. It really takes heavy duty abuse to bring that down. But I always worry about Windows crashing, even during "normal" operation (especially during normal operation!) and guess what? It does. Very annoying, but true.<bias on> Now where was I? Oh yeah, the reasons I actually have Windows 98 on my of my computers (and hate every time I have to boot into that defective system).
• I need to run several programs, which currently have no non-Windows replacement that I know of. Therefore, these programs run on my poor laptop... poor because it is forced to execute Microsoft code sometimes.

So where was I? Oh yeah, I was talking about how the Xbox sucks but went off on a big tangent. The Xbox sucks because it's a Microsoft product. Unless it will run Linux and NetBSD, in which case, it's quite possibly an adequate device when used as a cheap computer. Perhaps it could even serve as a good platform for graphics, as a "poor-man's SGI" (phrase shamelessly jacked--Be made that one up back in the days of their "one processor per person is not enough" days when they were still a cool company) of sorts. Anyone know how to cluster these things? (Or, even better, does anybody know how to take an Xbox, GameCube and PS2 and make one big graphics computer out of them? That would be a cool hack. Don't laugh--I know a guy who buys disposable cameras and uses the parts in real systems because it costs far less than buying the parts individually.)

Well, here I done gone off on a tangent again. Anyway, I don't quite think that I want to support Microsoft by purchasing an Xbox. It's bad enough that I sometimes cause some of their code to be executed by allowing my laptop to boot that virus.

Oh yeah, but there was an opposing viewpoint that I wish to include here, just so you folks don't say i'm a biased, zealous, and most of all, sworn by blood oath Microsoft hater, because that's what I am anyway. :-) Someone commented in another story that Microsoft actually loses money on each Xbox, in the hopes of making big bucks from video game sales. So even after everything else I said above, about not wanting to support them, etc., if it's true that they lose money, then I could buy an Xbox to run Linux and NetBSD and just not buy any games for it. Then, I'd actually unsupport them! I mean, hey, I might build a 10,000 Xbox cluster someday!!!

Now let's see, I have to say something that's actually on topic, right? Hmmm, I'm at the Karma cap, so I must be doing something right, right? Well, for anybody who might be thinking of moderating this Offtopic, here's the ontopic stuff: The GameCube looks like a great toy.

This post is Copyright 2001, rice_burners_suck. All rights reserved.

Oh well.

seletz, upon further research into your point, I happened across this document on the UCSC site. It discusses the "slippage" behavior of the West Antarctic ice sheet in particular. I'm not certain what region specifically the proposed neutrino study site lies in (hopefully the Eastern sheet???), but this definitely lends weight to your inquiry into the changing nature of the ice.

Here's an excerpt concerning this region:

"The ice streams can be seen in satellite images as large features within the ice sheet about 500 kilometers (300 miles) long and 20 to 100 kilometers (10 to 60 miles) wide. They move at a rate of 1 to 2 meters per day, sliding over a bed of sediment saturated with liquid water. But if the bed becomes cold enough for the water in it to start freezing, the loss of lubrication causes the ice stream to slow and eventually stop moving, Tulaczyk said."

Now, that is definitely some significant movement in the ice sheet. One can only presume that the researchers on this project have very carefully chosen the coordinates for the "telescope" placement to avoid this kind of nasty possibility. However, even the general settling and compacting of ice layers will inevitably produce some movement, even in an area limited to 1^3K.

As per my earlier reply, I guess that close monitoring of and allowances for such shifts have been incorporated into the project design specifications. At least, for $15M USD I'd certainly hope so! :).

It remains to be seen, however, if our species can manage to mess up the climate in the chosen region enough over 10 years to irreparably skew the results...

LAME is free, and currently legal.

Yes, but not in the United States of America.

Of course those scumbags at Thomson claim it's not legal.

The patents encumber the way MPEG audio layer 3 itself works (polyphase filter, then mdct, then bit allocation, then huffman coding; reverse the process for decoding), not just the techniques used in Fraunhofer's encoder. Of course, it may be possible to create a conforming MP3 file without stepping on patents in theory, but like the "uncompressed GIF," it's probably highly not worth it.

Of course, Thomson isn't the final say in what's legal and what isn't

Unless they have enough money to pay lawyers to filibuster the trial long enough that the defendant runs out of money to pay its lawyers. This situation constitutes still more evidence of a flawed legal system.

securityfocus (a.k.a bugtraq) is collecting infected IP addresses with timestamps. send them to aris-report@securityfocus.com. i have been keeping track of the hits to my system at debussy.ucsc.edu.

1- Most databases are publicly available.
2- Many bioinformatics groups DO cooperate
"Many and most" is not all. Is Celera really cooperating with the HGP? I know Celera has a Consensus Human Genome site, but that is that everything they know? How does that compare with the UCSC data? Is the patenting of gene sequences and techniques inhibiting research? I'm not asking these to troll, but simply because I'd like to know the answers. Unfortunately, everybody has a different view of what is a gene and how to find them. Probably in part because we don't know as much yet about genetics as we'd like to think. Is "junk DNA" just that? Or some subtle part of the design that we have yet to understand?

Having attended the University of Califonia Santa Cruz for the last 3 years, I have had a lot of my programs scanned for cheating. In fact one of my professors wrote a program that checks for cheating called CheatChecker. -Chris

Nothing against java, but it doesn't seem to be the easiest language for beginners to pick up. To even write "hello world" there's a lot of apparently meaninless, arbitrary voodoo stuff. And with it's painfully limited (compared to C/C++) console handling.

Actually, Java's a very good introductory language. It's a typed language that doesn't make you worry about pointer syntax and arithmatic. It's an easy framework for learning the difference between pass-by-copy vs. pass-by-reference. It has string data types and very simple string manipulation features. It's OO system is very, very smooth and easy to learn compared to languages like C++ or Perl. It has a great library that allows for easy, care-free introduction to event-driven GUI programming. It also provides the beginnings of a smooth transition into C/C++ later in life. Finally, the console handling (that an introductory class would do) is equivalent to C, only it has a slightly simpler syntax. Of course, I'm biased. It's what I first started with.

Oh, and "Hello world" is no worse in Java than in C. (I had an example, but the stupid lameness filter wouldn't let it pass. Here's a good simple example.)

So, after the students have gone through the trudgery of learning Java as their first language, why would you switch over to another? I see two ways for this to turn out : students are either forced to go out unprepared to program in the language, and learn as they go/on their own time, or covering of the basics of the language will take up the first half of the class...

So, what's so great about Eifel that it's worth throwing away the student's familiarity w/ Java?

Well, at any good program, this should only take a week or two to introduce how the syntax for doing a task works in this language with a few classes thrown in later to introduce new concepts, such as contracts in Eiffel.

A lot of programs go over a few of the necessary basics of OO when teaching Java, but they need to teach a full OOA/OOD class later. When this happens, it's good to get a clean break with your old bad inexperience programmer habits by forcing you to learn a new language. Later, when they come back to the old language, they will see their coding flaws much easier than if they had been entangled in them the whole time.

Plus, any good program needs to have as many languages as possible in their curriculum. The more languages you are exposed to, the easier it is to pick up new languages. In fact, such a program should have a whole class dedicated to the evolution of programming languages. Any program that teaches a language as the subject of a class is robbing their students. A program that teaches programming concepts should create students who can pick up any new language in less than two weeks, while those that spend all their time on a language will produce weak programmers who don't understand how to think at a higher level beyond their basic language. This is the difference between an institution of higher learning and a glorified trade school.

A good program should expose students to OO, functional, and low-level procedural code. If you can't think in more than one toolset, then you are limited by what those tools can do.

You see, it's not that Eiffel is such a great language that it's "worth throwing away the student's familiarity w/ Java." Learning Eiffel will actually help these students to be better Java programmers by exposing them to ways of thought beyond what they learned in their very first programming class.

Contrary to what the headlines say, the genome has not yet been decoded. It might never be, as the genome now does not appear to be a code at all in the conventional sense. It turns out that genes are not simple "strings," each one encoding for one message, but are combinations of separated segments along the genome. Between them lie intervening segments which can be cut out by the cell, as it translates DNA into proteins, and the relevant or coding parts (called exons, as opposed to the intervening parts, which are called introns) can be put together in numerous different ways. Gene therepy send different messages and make a variety of proteins as the occasion demands.

While I was there I noticed that the CERN neutrino beam went right down the main street of the nearby town of St. Genis in France and on into the Jura Mountains. I wonder if the townspeople in St. Genis would feel comfortable knowing they were being irradiated, even if they understood the particles wouldn't interact.

You see, while the detector that's the subject of this story detects neutrinos of cosmic origin, you can also make them artificially, and with controlled energies and other desirable characteristics, by shooting a high energy particle beam into one end of a long pile of dirt.

The particles shower but are then absorbed by the dirt - except for the neutrinos produced by the showers. Enough dirt, and whatever comes out the other end is pretty much pure neutrino beam.

If you put in an intermediate amount of shielding, you get a mix of muons and neutrinos.

The way you detect these artificial particle beams is typically with packs filled with photographic film sealed in a dark chamber. Just beam it for a while and every zillionth particle will leave a little speck on some of the film.

Ever heard of neutrino oscillations? They proposed the theory to explain the lack of expected neutrino flux in one of the earlier underground neutrino detectors. It takes 10,000 years for heat from the center of the Sun to convect to the surface before it can shine directly on the earth, but neutrinos radiate from the core to the earth in 8 minutes because they don't interact.

Only problem is, we weren't getting many neutrinos. The first suspicion was that the Sun had begun to die but the cooling part of the interior hadn't reach the surface yet - that is, we hadn't visibly received the bad news but had found out ahead of time with the neutrino detector.

If neutrinos change identities into types that a given sensor is not sensitive to, though, it would explain this. But for this to be the case, the neutrino would have to have a very small, but non-zero mass. It's been the work of decades to try to measure this mass.

In the particle beam at CERN they would measure the neutrino flux at different points along the beam to see if they got more and less intense as they oscillated between electron, muon and tau neutrinos.

Enjoy!

Mike

I take that back. I think http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~kent/src/jksrc382.zip might have the source within the hg directory. If you decide to download it, be careful when unzipping as it creates about 20 directories in the current directory.

http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~kent/
is this one the right one?