Slashdot Mirror
LHC Reaches Record Energy
toruonu writes "Yesterday evening the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the first time accelerated protons in both directions of the ring to 1.18 TeV. Even though the 1 TeV barrier per beam was first broken a week ago, this marks the first time that the beam was in the machine in both directions at the same time, allowing possibly for collisions at a center of mass energy of 2.36 TeV. Although the test lasted mere minutes, it was enough to have detectors record the very first events at 2.36 TeV. LHC passes Tevatron (the particle collider at Fermilab that operates at 1.96 TeV) and becomes the highest energy particle collider in the world (so far it was effectively just the highest energy storage ring...)"
Doom, I tell you. It's coming for all of us.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Is this related to the wormhole that opened up above Norway yesterday?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1234430/Mystery-spiral-blue-light-display-hovers-Norway.html
http://angryhosting.mirror.waffleimages.com/files/92/92a406b3d33f96b6953bab7efdf4541c1f130c27.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/d0718b906d187ca53b2e5a919c0e50dc2bb920d2/Fenomen_over_Borras_340148c.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/c3c879e75fc8f28b8867e8e678300ab6550dddfb/Fenomen_over_Borras_340149c.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/37f2e96dcb20b8b968af81799df40f72a36e73e1/1260346061961_198.jpg
http://www.vgtv.no/?id=27553
http://img.waffleimages.com/294526ec517df78cb7535993b41d3cc0dafa0f05/DSC00020_340153b.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/1ff7bad9b6542532a8cdc63bf02b386f891861d0/8fb0b14e0b4c7123618a8783dc35c964.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/9094e12c8e6320a3238bbf7e833c3cf6e36ed3c3/Fenomen_over_Borras_340147c.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/e07e495a8589dd769b7640ac21be295f738c1c04/f8ec04b52d3ffb2558f3256fd8f11d0a.jpg
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
How many homes exactly and how much of a "significantly longer period of time?"
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
So I says, "Super collider? I just met her!" And then they built the super collider. Thank you, you've been a great audience. - Humorbot 5.0
... do they see the higgs bosons now?
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/401/
A greater understanding of physics may well be worth the excessive use of energy, as it may lead to better sources of energy tomorrow.
Lately I've been wondering how worthwhile attempts to e.g. stop climate change are when, if Kurzweil is right, we'll hit the Singularity in only a couple of decades and then all of humanity's environmental and technological problems may well be solved.
The application potential for new science is open-ended. Anyway. Out of my way luddite. Im first in line for a portable black hole garbage compactor on ThinkGeek.
------
beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
The most optimistic scenario for Higgs discovery would take a few years of running. But there are plenty of other theories to test that can show their first signs already after a few months of running in physics configuration (7 TeV or 10 TeV energy that'll probably be around in January/February). Things like supersymmetry, lepton flavor violation etc.
Those Atlas collision displays would make an awesome computer desktop gadget if you could get timely updates from a central server. Maybe add in some sound effects like "boing-oing-oing!" on each update.
The LHC becomes the first particle accelerator to collide protons at energies twice the speed of the tevatron!
A herd of Lamas have escaped a local zoo and nibbled on the Christmas lights at CERN. The short caused the cooling system to go off line and the LHC will be off line for five months.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... for certain values of "solved"
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Yes, but are we any closer to using it to shoot pigeons?
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
You only need about 0.5mA to send a DeLorian back in time!
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Dammit Slashdot, at least learn to use Jiggawatts instead of TeV or whichever crazy measure Europeans have, don't forget about your American audience!
I've been following the LHC's progress fairly closely because I find the project absolutely fascinating. On the other hand, I think /. might be overdoing it a bit regarding news on the subject. Half the summary was devoted to explaining what exactly was different from the last posting. As all of the previous posting have explained, it will be a few months before anything truly exciting happens and years after that before the first really valuable scientific discoveries start occurring. Much of the discussion has become: "Are we there yet?" "No." "How about now?" "No." "And now?" "Still no."
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
.
Recently enjoyed the "Angels and Demons" movie. It had some rocket-takeoff-countdown-esq video sequences of the supposed(realistic???) powerup of CERN. Interesting q&a on antimatter at: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
We've been warned.
It's called "minimizing downside risk".
Which is a fancy way of saying "well, and what if the Singularity does NOT occur on schedule?"
Personally, I don't think anyone is taking the whole "global warming" thing seriously yet - they're just posturing with another unenforceable (and largely meaningless) Treaty meant to placate the global warming lobby while otherwise doing not very much at all.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The amount of power they used in mere minutes during this experiment could have powered millions of homes and businesses for a significantly longer period of time.
About a minute worth of googling shows that the site draws a peak load of about 180 MW when it's running, of which about 120 MW is for the LHC itself. And it doesn't run all the time.
Typical homes are about 2 kW or so, give or take, so that's hardly enough to power "millions of homes and businesses".
Population of Europe is abour 830 million, by the way, so LHC represents approximately zero percent of the energy consumption of Europe (to two significant figures).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This is factually incorrect. At peak (experiment running, all detectors running, all computers processing), the LHC will consume 180 MW of energy. This includes all the energy used to heat offices, etc... The actual experiment uses ~22MW of power. It's not "sneeze-at" power consumption, but considering an average household uses ~1kW of power, and the fact the LHC is planned on being shutdown a significant fraction of the year, the assertion that you could power "millions of homes and businesses for a significantly longer period of time" is bogus.
-Bucky
The reason to collide particles coming in from opposite directions is from kinematics. If you shoot a 1 TeV beam at a fixed target you only get roughly 50 or GeV as the center of mass energy (if I remember right it's ca sqrt(2*m_proton*1000)). That square root is a bitch there. If you shoot them head on to each other at equal energy, then you have the full energy at your disposal. Any other configuration will only reduce the effective energy. If I remember right the LHC dipole magnets are created in such a way that they automatically accelerate particles in parallel beamlines in opposite directions if the particles are of the same charge so it's a nice feat allowing for best efficiency. However you have to understand that the particles are effectively for your local observation traveling at the speed of light. They make ca 11500 circuits every second and you have to keep them in orbit. At the same time the bunch is made up of same charge particles that all want to get away from each other. So the technical difficulty is controlling the magnets in sync with the beams to keep them going and if you have two beams going in opposite directions it just become tougher. Hence the slow testing in baby steps (though they are in general huge steps I'd say). In general I hope some accelerator engineer can chime in and explain the precise background.
... get a life. It's Norway! It's just a Rave dance party.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
The LHC uses 120MW, but if you really want to slant the numbers in your favor we can go with the 180MW consumed by the entire CERN complex.
If you wanted to power millions (we'll say 2M, since that's the lowest number that can be called "millions") of homes and businesses, you could only give each one 90W. My modest-sized, well-insulated, gas-heated, largely-flourescent-lighted house consumes roughly 1kW (1000W).
So now that we have the hyperbole out of the way, certainly LHC consumes a lot of power. If you hadn't been greedy, you could've said "could power thousands of homes and businesses" (and left off the assertion that there was some time multiplier involved), and that's true.
However, willingness to spend energy on physics is only in conflict with wanting to conserve energy if either (1) the value of the physics fails to outweigh the value of the power consumed, or (2) there is a more energy-efficient way to do the physics.
Perhaps you think the physics isn't worth doing; those funding it disagree. That does not make them hypocrits.
If you have a more efficient design for the LHC, I'm sure many people would love to see it.
Oh, and there's only one LHC whereas there are millions of homes, millions of vehicles, millions of offices in the world. In other words, millions of opportunities to make incremental energy improvemnts that would cumulatively offset far more power than all of the particle accelerators in the world consume, without the need to sacrifice scientific progress (or much of anything, really).
... LHC also broke the record for working for the longest uninterrupted time.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
Nobody agrees on when the singularity is coming. We're nowhere near producing an innovative AI, let alone anything genuinely intelligent in software, so technological progress is stuck going through human systems for a while yet. I am more inclined to believe the predictions that technological advances will start coming too fast for humans to follow in centuries to come, not decades. Our job is to make sure that civilisation doesn't fall apart in a mess of overpopulation and resource shortage before then. Global warming carries with it a huge risk of reducing food supplies below that that we'll need in order to ever reach the point of singularity.
Yesterday evening the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the first time accelerated protons in both directions of the ring to 1.18 TeV
640GeV ought to be enough for anybody.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
in standard media units
- Two female mosquitos colliding at 1.652 km/h? http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/lhc_glossary.htm
- An unladen African swallow falling off a grain of sand?
- The calorific value of 1 cornflake unleashed over the space of a fortnight?
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
did you mean llama?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llama
or perhaps lamia, a child-eating female demon? that would be sexy but would certainly mess up cern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(mythology)
they were attacked by hawaiian trees?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diospyros_sandwicensis
they were attacked by a ukranian pop band?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lama_(band)
ohhh, you meant tibetan religious leaders! why won't those damn buddhist fundamentalists leave science alone!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lama
unfortunately, they may know lama, so they'll certainly kick your ass after knocking out cern with a tibetan white crane style kick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lama_(martial_art)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's right, Citizen, don't worry about your problems. Just go be a good consumer and enjoy life; everything will be taken care of for you by the Great Tin God. As if by magic Technology will sweep in and save the day, with no need for you to change or contribute in any way.
Oh, and don't worry; mere mortals cannot dig a hole so deep that Technology can't solve it. You can't do so much damage in the next 20 or 30 years, give or take, to face catastrophy before the coming of the Great Tin God. Your folly certainly can't interfere with His coming - and have faith, He is coming!
Give. Me. A. Break.
If not for humans striving to solve significant problems, there would be no technological advancement, and any Singularity that we might imagine coming would never be. That's if the whole Singularity idea isn't crap to start with (of which I am not convinced).
Perhaps an aphorism will help: Have faith, but row toward shore.
To accelerate particles in opposite directions using the same magnetic field, you'd need to accelerate both positive and negative charged particles (positives go one way, negatives go the other), The Tevatron does this (protons one way, antiprotons the other). You only have to build one ring to contain the particles, but it's a tradeoff because you have to generate the anti-particles, which is an expensive process (basically, take regular particles, slam them into a fixed target and you get some % out the other side as antiparticles.).
-Bucky
Wake me up when it's "over nine thousaand" teraelectronvolts.
Yes but they also "may well be solved" when 2012 hits, but I say we go ahead and research climate change just in case neither of those likely events take place.
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
Can the Singularity enlarge certain parts of the masculine anatomy too?
the 1 TeV barrier per beam was first broken a week ago
That is not a barrier, that is a record.
A barrier is something that provides actual resistance. The speed of sound is a barrier. The speed of light is a barrier. AFAIK, there is no barrier at 1 TeV.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
http://gfx.nrk.no/YOYD2X1CgNBSeaPse9LjVwT6ymkkphv7Q7x0aibAWJwg.jpg
as evidenced by the trail from over the horizon. Note the wind shear... Sorry, Russia. Denial denied!
No it wouldn't. You are *seriously* underestimating the cost of large scale solar. The Desertec project estimates 400 billion euros to provide 15% of Europe's electricity.
You guys aren't comparing apples to apples - the website [http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/faq/lhc-energy-consumption.htm] indicates that in terms of energy, the LHC consumes about 130 Giga-watt hours (GWh) per month when it is fully online. Your residential electric bill is on the order of kilo-watt hours. On average, the typical US household used 920 KWh per month in 2006 [http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html], that is equivalent to 0.00092 GWh. 130 GWh / 0.00092 GWh = 141304 average US residences able to be powered off the energy consumed by the LHC during a regular usage month. Hardly millions, but definitely a few decent size towns worth of residences. I'm not making an argument for or against the energy use of LHC, just want to clarify the facts...
Isn't the entirety of the whole singularity concept the eventuality of creating a machine intelligence capable of refining the design of technology for greater capability/efficiency at a much greater speed than any human is able, including itself, and accordingly creating a sort of spiraling out of control where machine intelligence creates ever greater forms of itself which in turn solve ever greater problems growing farther and farther beyond the range of man to comprehend within a lifetime?
Effectively an inventor inventing a better inventor who can do the same ad nauseum?
Once you've generated the particles you need, can't you keep them in the recycler (like we have at the Tevatron) until you need them? True, you've got the cost of creating them, but I'd think that being able to recycle them until needed is better than not using anti-particles in the experiments.
Your repetitions of "Great Tin God" are ridiculous. I said that a Singularity would solve technological and environmental problems, and that's pretty believable. I said nothing about the many other problems (moral, philosophical, existential) that humanity faces.
Just tell us when you find the Higgs Boson. We don't care about every .1 increase in TeV
...Global warming carries with it a huge risk of reducing food supplies....
That is completely and utterly false. Most plants, including most crops grow better when it's warmer and moister. If every last bit of ice on earth melted, it might raise the ocean level a few feet, but there would be vast areas of earth that would then be agriculturally productive, whereas now they are frozen wasteland or desert. Greenland would be once again a green land, covered with forests similar to what is on the east coast of North America today.
If such warming did happen, which the data in the last 10 years refutes, it would be generally good for humanity as a whole. This is especially true if the warming happened over a century or more, so that coastal areas and others could adapt.
It is nonsensical how almost everybody automatically assumes that global warming, even if it were happening, is universally bad. There are very few things on this earth that are either all good or all bad, but it is always a mixture of the two.
All theory is gray
Acceleration is done by RF power : the magnetic fields bends the particles round the ring, and focusses the beams (yes, that is an acceleration, but ramping up to the TeVs is RF)
Down with categorical imperatives
..or so the theory goes. Norway's largest newspapers all did stories on this earlier today. Here is from one of them: Vg.no, and here is another dagbladet.no.
The first image from vg is taken with a long shutter time (or long exposure, or what the english expression is) on a tripod.
americans might consider these newspapers NSFW. Most norwegian ads contain a fair amount of tits and ass. just sayin'.
"he, who has quotes in his signature, is a douche" - unknown.
Even if the Singularity did happen, who's to say a pain-free energy source actually exists? What if the new super computer brain comes back with, "nuclear fission is your best bet"? Or, "a lot of problems would be solved within 100 years if you just quit making babies"?
Ecept Kurswell is a loon that doesn't deserve the attention he is getting.
And singularity makes wild and unfounded assumptions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Someone goes to all the effort to make a perfectly reasonable Back to the Future joke and you have to kill it with your infernal logic. Great Scott, how dare you! This is so heavy.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"You guys aren't comparing apples to apples "
Wrong. Comparing average power consumption is just as valid is comparing energy over a fixed time frame.
"141304 average US residences able to be powered off the energy consumed by the LHC"
Very similar to the result I posted, which should have tipped you off that your numbers are no better than mine. You used different estimates given in different units, but otherwise you're merely repeating the calcualtion that a number of us already did.
The reason the numbers are slightly different (you actually estimated slightly less homes than I did, btw) is that I used different starting estimaets and rounded a bit more. Why did I do this? Because it was sufficient to disprove the original claim of 'millions of homes and businesses' and was a lot less work.
In other words, you spent more effort to reach the same conclusion. In a discussion on efficiency. And then had the balls to claim the rest of us were doing it wrong.
"during a regular usage month"
And here you are factually wrong. Those estimates were for a peak utilization month.
Thanks! I've got 40K in student loads and 1K on my credit card and 300K in mortgage on my home (which is now worth half that).
So if you want me to send you -341K dollars, I'll be happy to obligue. :-)
That's nice. I stand by the idea that taking any specific, significant problem and delegating it to unspecified "Technology of the Future" to take care of, amounts to technology worship. If you don't like that assertion, you're free to disagree.
Since your only objection is to my wording, I gather you agree to the various points that discredit the validitty of waiting for the Singularity to solve this problem? If not, perhaps you should address them.
...this experiment could have powered millions of homes and businesses...
oldspewey
How many homes exactly and how much of a "significantly longer period of time?"
It's a Catch 22. AC's calculations involve keeping the LHC operational so future power consumed by the LHC can be brought back in time to power the millions of homes and businesses now. Of course, the only way to get the power from a future LHC ( that needs to be running ), is to use that future LHC to get power from a future future LHC...
It's an infinite recursion that will cause the universe to implode. So thanks AC for destroying the universe. Way to go.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
That's the start-up cost. After that's paid, what is the ongoing cost per kWh of solar compared to fossil energy?
Also keep in mind that 400 billion euros is about 20% of the cost of the war in Iraq.
I'm very skeptical that there's going to be an AI singularity at all.
There are physical constraints on computation density. There's going to be an upper limit on how much computation you can do within a given volume within a given amount of time without it's own waste heat destroying it.
And just increasing the volume doesn't fix everything. Just as the ratio of surface area to volume makes very large single celled organisms less efficient, I/O is limited by the same relationship.
Furthermore, there's no evidence that an artificial genius will be any less temperamental than a human genius. The price of leaps of insight is the possibility of false inferences and even very intelligent people can find ways to continue to believe in mistaken ideas.
And I don't think you can sidestep the problems with human intelligence by just making machines that think in a different way. The problems with human intelligence result from the inherent difficulty in predicting future events based on historical data. Essentially, there are a lot of problem types which you can only ever estimate answers for and the inherent trade offs between, for example, computation time and the level of accuracy of the solution are inescapable.
I don't think that we should sell short the value of human ingenuity in general purpose problem solving. I think that the human brain may be closer to the limits of having to make those difficult inherent trade offs between accuracy and computation time than we might hope.
I will say that there is some hope for enhanced progress through machine-human integration. Our strength in general purpose computation can definitely be supplemented by the computer's more narrow skills in number crunching and communications. I know that at my job that I spend most of my day dicking around with spreadsheets and a calculator and a neural interface to those things could greatly enhance my performance.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
You may not, but I do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
....LHC dipole magnets are created in such a way that they automatically accelerate particles....
In a particle accelerator, including the LHC, magnets don't accelerate anything. Magnets are used purely for focusing and guiding the beams. The acceleration of the beams takes place in RF cavities, which are fed energy generated by klystrons. Klystrons are high-power vacuum tubes especially designed to generate/amplify high-frequency radio waves. Klystrons are also commonly used in powerful radar systems.
All theory is gray
except that isn't what we do, we throw pretty large bunches of particles and some of them collide.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Do numbers still add up like normal at relativistic speeds?
The summary makes it sound like there's some immense wall that must be climed or broken in order to pass 1 TeV. There is no barrier at 1 TeV, but rather an arbitrary threshold put there by humans because the numeric representation of that energy level has a lot of zeros in the scale we happen to use. LHC did not pass a barrier, but a threshold.
This is science, and important science, so it's critical to get it right. Especially so for the non-scientific public.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Plus they collided last night ... just a small detail, but ...
What makes you think that increasing temperatures will help to reverse desertification? Increased evaporation of water isn't going to change the lack of regular pressure changes over the equator that could cause more regular rainfall. What it is far more likely to do is cause heavier intermittent storm rain, of the type that overwhelms the land's ability to retain water and mostly just flows away. Colder regions nearer the poles may gain in agricultural productivity, but at the cost of farmland nearer the equator, and the equator covers far more land area.
You might also want to look up ocean acidification by increased uptake of CO2, which is causing loss of coral reefs and threatening stability of fish as a food source.
Well, yes, of course a few degrees might not be unwelcome in most place on earth, but I believe the concern is that we would spiral towards becoming like the planet Venus, since there is no way to stop the changes once started.
It is also kind of meaningless when the Tevatron has still a much higher luminosity and thus total power.
If we were to adopt this attitude, the "Singularity" would never occur; it comes as a result of our own innovation and progress.
Lately I've been wondering how worthwhile attempts to e.g. stop climate change are when, if the Bible is right, we'll hit Armageddon in only a couple of decades and then all of humanity's environmental and technological problems may well be moot.
Hey, it makes about as much sense as depending on "the Singularity"!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The world can survive having co2 levels as high as this, and higher. It has happened in the past, just not recently enough for us to be able to get any detailed information on how that related to climate.
The danger is not to life in general, only to species that aren't going to be able to make it through a period of relatively rapid change.
Make sure to keep us updated about every 0.2 TeV increment.
sic transit gloria mundi
Yes, your adam's-apple will swell up like a pregnant camel. Stock up on soup.
Table-ized A.I.
Just a side note: the LHC uses to separate beams that collide at 4 points along a single tunnel. Which is required since they're using proton-proton or larger nuclei (particularly lead) in the experiments. The Tevatron uses proton-antiproton allowing them to use the same beam equipment. Unfortunately, the cost of creating antilead nuclei is too high right now, so they opted for 2 beams instead.
"It's intelligent design for the IQ 140 people." - Mitch Kapor on Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity.
Rather more likely to be some bug or glitch than actually have a beam at that energy. I doubt they'll be bold enough to ramp up the magnets to full strength just yet.
Or to summarize, whether or not something is efficient is often simply a matter of time.
To some extent I agree. However, the title of this was somewhat misleading. If you dig into it, they were only running the beam one direction at 1TeV before. This time, they're running it both ways, so there could actually be 2.36 TeV collisions. That's the important part.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Rising sea levels, which you already acknowledge, would displace a whole lot people. 40% of the world's population lives in coastal zones. We can't turn all those places into Venice.
As a /. reader, I'm super happy that several ( presumably very capable ) people did the math, using slightly different techniques, and came to similar answers, it assures me that these are pretty good numbers given the sources, and I love that this would be the answer to someone casually proclaiming a 'millions' figure.
It's a shame that this is diluted by oversensitive bitchiness, but thank you anyway.
The LHC is designed to have a higher brightness, so a hypothetical recycler would be emptied much faster than it could be refilled.
Also, proton-proton collisions have different backgrounds, so they make some signals easier to detect.
Simon's Rock College
"Comparing average power consumption is just as valid is comparing energy over a fixed time frame."
Not really. I'm sure your energy usage at 1am differs from that at 8am and 2pm. The only way you can arrive at a reasonable per hour estimate of your energy usage is by at least averaging out a day's usage. If you want to get an even better estimate, you would average out usage over the course of a week, because your usage on a Thursday when you are at work all day is probably a lot different than Saturday when you're home. Your "energy over a fixed time frame" is in fact an hourly AVERAGE consumption rate. An estimate (average) which takes into account a larger data sample (takes more days into account) is going to result in a number that is closer to the actual usage were it to be measured daily and added up. So, using monthly estimates actually yields a result that is more accurate than comparing raw hourly usage, it is not as you state, extra work with nothing to show for it. I would think that, in a discussion of efficiency, you would want to talk about results that are as accurate as possible.
Oh yeah, regular usage month == month when the LHC is on and in use. I am not factually wrong, unless you want to consider months when it is running not regular. Weren't the usage numbers from when it is running the whole point of this discussion?
Thank you. I get so sick and tired of hearing the flat-earth, no growthers telling everyone to do without while they fly around in their private jets for their circus^Wconvention in Copenhagen. I just saw in the news yesterday that some schmuck in the British government wants to tax Brits who take too many flights because it allegedly is destroying the planet. Give me a break!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Webcam from the LHC is here
Open Source Alternatives
What makes you think that increasing temperatures will help to reverse desertification?
Same thing that makes him think the solar wind is a current caused by the sun's electric field... abject ignorance, combined with a willingness to believe anything so long as it purports to contradict what the Scientific Clergy believe.
The enemies of Democracy are
Yes, possibly ending in some kind of apotheosis of the AI.
<weird_rant_mode>
What I'm amazed about is, should we be able to create such an intelligence, why would anyone believe that it will then desire to sort out all our current problems. It all seems very childish to me: a bit like "after we've destroyed this our only, beautiful blue world through our lazyness and wastefullness, don't worry, we'll create a God who will then give us a new one to play with because we took such good care of the old one".
Who's to say that such a God wouldn't do the equivalent of locking us up in our room until we've sorted out our mess -- and no cake for dessert!
Even if such a God would be benevolent doesn't mean it would give in to its puny-brained creators' every whim; after all if you see someone who is not very smart eating themselves sick on cake, the wisest thing might be to take it out of their hands and tell 'em off: "don't eat so much, you'll get sick, and you won't have any cake left tomorrow".
Replace "room" by "planet" and "cake" by "petroleum" if you like.
</weird_rant_mode>
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Um, no. There's nothing magic about 1 TeV. It's not a barrier.
Mach 1 was a barrier, because the aerodynamics is very different for a plane flying faster than the speed of sound. This means that new design principles had to be worked out. But nothing magic happens when you ramp up from 0.999 TeV to 1 TeV other than the flying champagne corks.
Likewise, new principles (optical proximity correction and phase shift masking) had to be invented so that we can manufacture ICs whose feature size is smaller than the wavelength of light (UV actually) used to expose the masks. That's an example of a barrier being broken.
But Slashdot should disallow the use of the word "barrier" just because a round performance number has been bettered. Alternatively, we can all just mock the editors every time they do it; you decide.
From your quote of my previous post:
"Comparing average power consumption is just as valid is comparing energy over a fixed time frame."
From your response:
"The only way you can arrive at a reasonable per hour estimate of your energy usage is by at least averaging out a day's usage"
Perhaps you should learn to read a post before replying to it.
I used monthly averages. This was evident from the material I posted, and while I could guess at how you missed that fact it wouldn't be a very charitable assessment.
"Weren't the usage numbers from when it is running the whole point of this discussion?"
No, the relative environmental impact of LHC vs. consumer power use was the point of this discussion. Those homes don't stop existing for half the year just because the LHC powers down. If you want to average home power consumption for peak and non-peak time, then you need to do the same for LHC to arrive at a meaningful, apples-to-apples number.
In other words, take your "monthly averages are better than weekly averages which are better than daily averages" argument to its logical conclusion, and you'll realize we should be using annual averages (since that is the longest-period peak cycle in consideration).
The LHC has regular cycles of some months on, others off. Neither of those alone represnts a "regular" usage figure. Times when it's at full power are peak.
The user you replied to is not even human. I can tell you without looking that the post was made at 30 minutes past the hour, of some hour. They always are... check its posting history.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
If you can outrun the tide you can outrun globally rising waters. It will devalue some property. Oh nooooooo.
The singularity is coming in 20 years. Of course next year the singularity will still be 20 years off, just like it was in 1980, 1981, 1982, etc.
Quite frankly, after studying AI a long time ago, I am not surprised. The Technology singularity seems to be a moving goal. Today data mining techniques, search engines and data analysis/feedback systems would be considered AI back around 20 years ago.
"I think that the human brain may be closer to the limits of having to make those difficult inherent trade offs between accuracy and computation time than we might hope."
I'm glad you THINK, now try looking up some facts before assuming that the people who've spent their lives looking into these things weren't able to address your points:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann's_limit
"2.56 × 10^47 bits per second per gram."
http://www.merkle.com/brainLimits.html
"It seems reasonable to conclude that the human brain has a raw computational power between 10^13 and 10^16 operations per second."
News for nerds, actually a place for assholes to spout off. There are less than 5 comments relating to the actual event in the summary. Go somewhere else to talk shit, and preferably stay there. You are adding nothing to this discussion.
This is the premier science experiment on the planet and you lot would rather make shit up and talk about star trek. Fucking idiots. I'm ashamed to be associated with you.
(I understand the parent was a joke, and this is not directed at parent.) It always surprises me when people drag out some book written thousands of years ago, and state with absolute belief that the things written in it not only were the case and are the case, but also explain the events that will happen in the future!
No other book that I know of purports to distort the space-time continuum in this fashion. Well, perhaps Nostradamus, and other religious texts.
Depending on "the Singularity" is completely different; this is an understood event that is likely a few decades away, if that. ("Understood" in the sense that we know how to get there; not in the sense that we know what the world will look like after the event happens. It's difficult to imagine that future; one thing I know is that we'll be able to make backups, and I fully intend to play the same existential games Bill Murray's character played in Groundhog Day. But, perhaps those games will be passe, and we'll instead play the "extract energy from other universes" games...)
And to the OP, it does make sense to conserve at this juncture because another Bush might emerge and delay the singularity another decade or more.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
That limit ignores all practical computational concerns.
For example, a machine with a high level of computation density will be highly susceptible to outside interference. The slightest molestation of a single molecule will alter the results.
As such, to get close to that limit you would have to spend a vast amount of energy protecting and repairing the structure of your computer.
I'll admit that your point has made me think a bit more about what I've said and so I'll rephrase it. I think that the human brain is cost-effective in terms of providing a robust computation infrastructure with a system for self-maintenance for a reasonable energy cost. In general, the more sophisticated you become, the more you have to spend on maintenance and organizational problems.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
A one-L-lama is a priest, and a two-L-llama is a beast, but a three-L-lama is a major fire in Boston.
[say it out loud]
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
by acceleration, I meant centripetal acceleration to bend the particles in a circle. You're right, the acceleration to boost the energies is linear RF cavities
-Bucky
yeah, you certainly can, and in fact, the particles in modern accelerators each particle makes many many many rotations whizzing by the counterrotating particles, which is the only way we get any collisions since the probability per crossing of an interaction is so low. Problem is, we're not perfect at containing the beams, and they bleed off little by little by collisions with the walls, etc.. so take an already rare process of antiparticle production and shave off a big amount of that due to losses, and you see where a lot of difficulty producing luminosity (brightness) comes from.
-Bucky
Wow, that's such a perfect post!
...increasing temperatures will help to reverse desertification?....
Because a warmer atmosphere will hold a LOT more water which then can precipitate out in places that get little or no rain today. Warmer, moist air also distributes temperature variations more efficiency because it holds more heat. This means that rather than more violent weather, the weather will calm down because there is less difference between the hot places and the cool places on earth. This applies vertically in the atmosphere as well, reducing the temperature differences that drive violent storms such as hurricanes and tornadoes.
When the fossil fuels were formed, the earth was uniformly tropical and life was much more prolific because of that.
(...farmland nearer the equator, and the equator covers far more land area...)
Maybe that is true of farmland, but not land as a whole. The vast areas of northern Russia and China as well as northern Canada would once again be usable by humans. This tremendous increase in usable land area would far outstrip a possible small loss of land in coastal areas. There is also evidence that the areas now known as continental shelves were once free of water. A warmer atmosphere, say 10 C. warmer on the entire earth would hold a tremendous amount of water in suspension. Water vapor is lighter than either oxygen or nitrogen. This means that pure water vapor could accumulate above the oxygen nitrogen atmosphere. Water vapor is orders of magnitude more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2.
All that presupposes that global warming is actually taking place. In the last 10 years at least, there has been no evidence of this. That is why, in one of the hacked e-mails, one of the so-called global warming scientists called it a "travesty" that the data doesn't support their foregone conclusions.
All theory is gray
Since I happen to think nuclear fission is our best bet, that wouldn't bother me.
On that subject, I noticed in the news today that Taiwan now has a birthrate of 1.0 babies per woman. Which is about 1.2 babies per woman below replacement rate....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
...*IF* you have serious data for this I'll believe it.....
Is oil in Alaska and coal in Antarctica good enough? These are fossil fuels produced by dead plants and animals. All fossil fuels represent carbon that was once were? Oh yeah, in the atmosphere were plants and sunshine could turn them into hydrocarbons which we now burn in our SUVs.
(...More hurricanes is the problem,...)
All weather on earth, including hurricanes, tornadoes and nasty blizzards, such as the Midwest is experiencing as I write this, are the result of temperature DIFFERENCES both vertically and horizontally in the atmosphere. If it were true that the earth is getting warmer overall, these differences would be reduced, because the atmosphere would hold more water and carry more heat that would be distributed more evenly. It is just too bad, that the wishful thinking of climate scientists is not happening. It would be rather nice to have a more uniformly warm earth. It would mean we would burn fewer fossil fuels to heat our houses. The vast iced over land areas of Siberia, northern Canada and Greenland would be habitable.
All theory is gray
.... but I believe the concern is that we would spiral towards becoming like the planet Venus....
If that were true, it would have already happened. All the carbon we have already burned and all the carbon that is still in the ground in the form of fossil fuels was once in the atmosphere of the earth. The earth was uniformly warm from pole to pole and orders of magnitude more productive of living things, especially plants.
The Emperor of global warming is naked and the high priests of global warming know that. The hacked e-mails give strong evidence that they know that it is a "travesty" that their socialistic agenda is not supported by the data.
All theory is gray
....Rising sea levels, which you already acknowledge, would displace a whole lot people.....
It would certainly be rather traumatic if this happened suddenly, say over a decade or two. However, even if global warming were real, it is projected to happen over a century or more. Humans as well as other lifeforms are pretty adaptable. There are many areas for example, around New Orleans, that should never be built on. It is too bad that global warming is fake, because it would be nice to live on a uniformly warmer planet. There is plenty of land in northern Canada, Siberia and Greenland and other places that are now literally ice cold.
All theory is gray
"... and the fact the LHC is planned on being shutdown a significant fraction of the year..."
Planned on? Or just "kinda working out that way"? :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Fine. Persuade US to stop engaging in needless wars before proposing the diversion of costs from such wasteful and harm0inucing projects as LHC.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Today data mining techniques, search engines and data analysis/feedback systems would be considered AI back around 20 years ago.
Actually...who says that they aren't? We have a very limited image of what we consider an AI, mirrored very good in "the question whether a machine can think is no more interesting then whether a submarine can swim".
Singularity will probably take us by surprise. Heck, we might hardly notice it long time after it happens; not realizing that, for example, as a humanity we operate in hive-mind manner. Which is already true to some degree...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Kurzweil speculates that if computer development keeps following Moores law, we'll have sufficiently fast computers to simulated an entire human brain in a few decades. This is pretty much a brute force methode to get an AI. No need for AI-researchers, just a fast computer, extremely accurated brain scanner and a good programmer with experience in simulation software.
That is true, the amount of statistics currently available at LHC is negligible. The main good thing higher energy does is open up channels that were kinematically impossible at Tevatron. But that's also negligible considering the increase of ca 400 GeV only. Once we go to 7 TeV collisions in January or so the statistics might not mean THAT much anymore. As far as I know some channels (like ttbar production) go up in cross section with the energy so many orders of magnitude that LHC should best Tevatron already in the first year, but then again there will be plenty of other channels that will need years of running to match Tevatron :) So I hope they don't shut Tevatron down the moment LHC passes them in some channels, but do let the two compete for a while :)