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CERN, the Big Bang and Impact On the IT Industry
whencanistop writes "ComputerWeekly have put together a nice short guide (with lots of links) of what is going on at CERN. They've got a nice slant though on what this big bang experiment is going to mean for the IT Industry. Interesting slant on the world's largest grid and the database clustering technology that they are using. They have also picked up on the amusing rap video by CERN's scientists that has been wandering around YouTube."
I guess he isn't the second-coming of Jesus after all. Chicago mayor Richard Daley's little puppet is going to bring change? The guy who sat in Jeremiah Wright's pew for 20 yrs listening to Black Revenge Theology is going to bring healing? The guy who knocked on William Ayers the self-admitted terrorist's door to seek his permission to run for office in Chicago is going to bring peace? Obama - the guy who's been campaigning nonstop for President since the day he set foot in the U.S. Senate. I'll bet you Kum Ba Yah motherfuckers are having some serious buyer's remorse right now and were wishing that Hillary was on the ticket instead of Joe Biden, the guy who called Obama clean and well-spoken for a negro as if he were surprised by that.
Oh dear, another trumped up admin that thinks he owns the company. You are there to provide services to the business / research people. You are supposed to facilitate their needs, however dumb.
If you don't like taxes, move to a country where there aren't any.
Let's Godwin that argument, shall we? "Hey, Jew, if you don't like being worked to death, escape from the camp and flee to Allied territory." Go on, knee-jerk dismiss me! Because the argument, "If you have nowhere to run, then the status quo must be OK," is a sound argument, right?
I think we're all agreed that it's high priced, yes?Absolutely not. Where do you get your metric from?
You actually want me to answer why I think £34 million/year (from the UK, in which I pay taxes, to the LHC alone) is a lot of money? Well, since it will be more than the income tax bill for my entire lifetime, that means that I could have paid no income tax whatsoever all my life if the LHC hadn't been built. And ditto for several dozen other above-average wage earners. Each year. We could all then choose to invest that money in projects we consider of greater value than the LHC.
But let me guess - you're using a metric which considers proportion of total government spending, conveniently forgetting that "government spending" is "collection of individuals' income" spending?
It's an amusing and educational video. No-one is suggesting that video is worth billions of dollars.
In the UK quite a few higher education institutions are throttling their physics departments due to lack of undergraduate intake. If I was a budding scientist and I saw something like this video from what I would have heard as the scientists with the best access to resources in all of Europe then I would certainly reconsider my view of what science has become.
There was a time when science was about, well, doing science. You were allowed to be quirky, absent-minded, a loner, as long as you published good science. Your chief tools were imagination and mathematics. Today, science's chief weapons are:
(1) the good communicator - because there's so much noise between scientist and scientist, and between scientists and the public. The real science geek is sidelined;
(2) the grant, because science has gone from being chiefly analytical to chiefly numerical. Got a problem? Buy a cluster and simulate it. Need to test a theory? Collect petabytes of data about it.
The papers picked up a story about the end of the world, which is what sells newspapers, and suddenly the LHC is in the news.
Feel an air of superiority much? The papers picked up a story about a potentially dangerous experiment which, thanks to the elite nature of science, no-one outside the scientific world understands much about. Ignorance breeds fear, yes, but you seem to be blaming *the people who funded the experiment* rather than *the people doing it*, when the latter have a duty to inform the former.
You're a mathematician -- I wouldn't expect you to understand.
Hm, confirms my previous paragraph then.
The reason you can't, as a mathematician, command budgets like these is that you don't need to.
Given £36 million/year I could do great things for mathematics education in the UK, so I "need" £36 million/year.
I assume that when I take, say, a £1 contribution from your wallet you'll not try to stop me. It's only £1, not much by any metric, right :-).