Re:Fixing the Terminal Scroll bar and other hints
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A CIO's View of Ubuntu
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Ah this looks most useful, thank you. I'll give it a shot when I next meet my student (who has the mac) and see if I can get a more usable terminal when I'm helping her with it. You could well be right about it accidentally being disabled, I've seen this problem before on another persons mac but in both cases the users are (and I mean this in the nicest possible way) a little clueless about computers:)
As for the mouse, unfortunately its a laptop so while I can use an external mouse its not always an option:(
Well they are all fiddly little minor things that you probably can fix if you have the time and the expertise (or rudementary google skills). Example is that for some reason on several of the macs I've used there didnt seem to be a scroll bar on the terminal window and try as I might I couldnt get one. Oh and on the mac I was helping somebody with yesterday there was xwindow issues, why I dont know but I've never had similar problems in exceed (although usually it works fine in the other macs I've seen so maybe just that mac had a problem).
Other things are that its hard to press the middle mouse button on a 1 button mouse:) and theres a few other unix/max design philosophy differences to work around. Mainly its little things with the terminal like the scroll bar and I dont doubt they're fixable but it kinda goes against the just works selling point. You should be fine doing what you want to do and even despite these minor things everybody I know loves them (just I dont see the big deal).
Also as researcher (high energy particle physics, so very heavy on the computation and stats) I noticed that 50% - 80% of my colleagues own a mac laptop of some variety and that this is common though out the field. However they are used primary as an interface to our linux servers which are actually used to do the stats/computation. Apparently they are unixy enough having X windows and a terminal to be able to do this (unlike windows which always feels like a hack) while having that "It Just Works" ease of use. Although to be honest I often find that when interfacing with linux the mac is more like "It Just Works (well almost works, apart from a few fiddly things that you can probably learn to live without)" so I tend to avoid them myself.
Actually Batavia isnt that hoity-toity, certainly a lot less than nearby Naperville. However one really interesting thing about Batavia is that it is one of the few towns that has a lot of people that are a) highly technical and b) use linux because it hosts Fermilab, home of the highest energy particle accelerator in the world. Fermilab is an all linux shop (although you *can* find the odd windows box around) and hosts a lot of research into distributed computing using linux systems. In fact it even has its own Linux distribution (Fermi Linux, based off Red Hat) although these days its effort is now behind scientific linux which is mainly developed at CERN. So its interesting that Batavia would do this as a) it has probably the highest percentage of linux desktop users in the state and b) actually has a linux distribution developed there:)
Well most the games I bought recently came with quite a few transistors and had plenty of silicon. Check them out, they're for this little obscure system made by that former card manufacturer Nin-something called the DS. Also I'm not sure about this but somebody told me that the more transistors you can fit on a silicon wafer (which I've been noticing for a while seems to double every 24 months, wonder if anybody else has) the cheaper you can make a given amount of storage.
As a physicist who works at a Fermilab experiment, may I just say those reports were utter crap. A lot of excitement over nothing. It was completely unconvincing. Basically it was one guy with a blog making claims he really shouldnt have.
Something interesting to note, as an experiment winds down, it tends to "discover" something, recently this tends to be the Higgs. Compare this to 2000 when LEP at CERN was shutting down, passing the torch to the Tevatron at Fermilab, and there was all the commotion about the "Higgs discovery" there by ALEPH.
Anyway at the moment we have lots of bumps in our mass spectra which is how we find particles. However its a statistical process so bumps can naturally form just by chance alone. Factor in that we are looking in hundreds of places and all of a sudden a few bumps that have a probability of one in a few hundred of occurring dont seem so exciting yet. Not saying theres nothing there but we've seen this so many times before and it turns out to be nothing, people just tend to get to excited when they see them.
However Fermilab has a good chance of getting the Higgs (if its the Standard Model Higgs) because it has to be relatively light to make other measurements consistent which means its in the easiest spot for the Tevatron to see it but the hardest spot for the LHC to see it. It'll be well past 2009 before the LHC has a hope of seeing the Higgs at a low mass but it could see a high mass Higgs pretty quickly after turning on.
There are 3 reasons why they are deep underground, the main reason is to protect IT not us. There may be some others somebody else can point out but these are the three that spring to mind
1) to minimize environmental impact CERN is next to the alps in a very beautiful area. They didnt want a huge particle accelerator making it look ugly
2) shielding Cosmic rays from space hit us all the time. Having our delicate accelerator (and seriously this thing is a pain to keep running) on the surface would mean we would get hit more often by them and it could cause a problem, if only due to increasing the background in the detectors. Also we want to shield it from outside vibrations and heat (its superconducting) to keep it running. Note that this didnt entirely work at LEP (the accelerator before the LHC and for which the tunnel was built), you could work out the local bus time table and the phases of the moon using the collected data but that was more a testament to how precise the LEP guys did their analyses.
3) radiation its mildly radioactive when the beam is running so having a good bit of solid rock between it and the rest of us can only be a good thing. However once the beam is off its fine (after a few days).
However its not because particle accelerators can go bang, if you drive a truck too fast near the fermilab Tevatron, it breaks, this things are not self sustaining and actually require a hell of a lot of effort to keep running. Its not like a nuclear reactor. There is nothing that can go wrong that putting it in a tunnel can effect.
you joke but thats pretty much what you do when you want to minimise cosmic ray interference. To be honest your second best bet due to the natural radioactivity you mention is the stick it in a tunnel under a moutain .
Seriously its actually really surprising how many cosmic rays are hitting you right now. They are also extremely penetrating, often being muons (by the time they reach us). Basically its already got through 120km of atmosphere which although isnt that dense, it sure is thick so you're going to need a lot of shielding. And in 5 minutes at least one has hit you. Over 30 years that builds up. To really drive it home, it you are ever never CERN, stop in and see their microcosmin, look at the cosmic ray detector there and be amazed at how often it goes off.
Yes he completely stuffed the maths on this one. Really really badly, its kinda weird. He makes a good point but his mathematical example is laughable and incorrect and shows some serious misunderstanding of the effect he is trying to describe although maybe it was just a passing mental block on it.
Anyway what he wanted to do was weight the subtraction factor so that if you have no knowledge and just guess everything you should get on average a score of zero. For true or false this subtraction factor is 1.
Therefore in his example: Person A with twice knowledge of person B knows 4, guesses 96, gets 48 right, 48 wrong so 4+48-48=4 Person B knows 2, guesses 98 so score is 2+49-49=2
and we have the test showing person A has twice the knowledge (gets tricky with his example of person B knowing only 1 question). The easier the test is the more accurate it will become to tell who has the most knowledge until the point where person B starts to know more than half the questions at which point the test saturates as person A knows more than the test is probing. So there is an optimum test difficulty.
Actually I have seen lions attacking an elephant on planet earth (sorry couldnt find a better link). Sometimes if you sneak up when the conditions are favourable and the target is distracted, the risk/reward ratio becomes worth it.
Actually I think it is for general purpose code. In fact I think its main purpose is for running general code on the grid and giving each process its own virtual sandbox, isolating it from the underlining hardware. This means that some random grid user wont be able to hose the machine they happen to be using which should make things easier from a grid admins point of view. Its the only reason I can possibly think of why they made it.
Incidently when I first heard about this today, I thought it would be the comp sci dept but it turns out its particle physics, which surprised me as I'm a member of the oxford group but on a different experiment. I am still reasonably baffled why they have done this, will have to ask them on monday. This probably explains the current sad state of the ATLAS software as they are all too busy getting Commander Keen to run on their mobile phones:)
Whisky : used for Whiskies distilled in Scotland (and also Wales, Canada and Japan but I tend to forget about those ones)
Whiskey : used for ones distilled in Ireland and the US
You are right that the official US spelling is whisky but its traditional to spell it whiskey and almost all do, so much that the commonly accepted spelling is whiskey. So while the offical name is whisky in the US, in practice its whiskey and when you see it spelt whiskey, you take it to mean a US or Irish one while whisky is Scottish with Japan, Canada and Wales largely being forgotten about.
The other really odd thing about the English tea drinking is that the tea in England is terrible. Its absolutely disgusting, it need to be smothered in milk and sugar to drown out the horrible bitter taste of it. I love tea (I'm British) but I'm one of the few people I know who actually appreciate nice tea. Actually I find it easier to get nice tea in the US (well, in principle nice, at a restaurant, when I ask for a cup of tea, I get a lovely box with a fantastic selection of really nice looking teas and a pot of water which used to be hot, arrggh).
Also Whisky is how the Scottish spell it (I'm also a Whisky buff). If its spelt with an 'e' then its not Scottish. The Americans and Irish spell it with a 'e' although I've seen the occasional 'Whisky' spelling over there. As far as I'm concerned, both spelling are correct Whisky is the fine Scottish dram while Whiskey is the related Irish and American spirits. However occasionally North American whiskeys misspell their name as whisky. Btw the way I like it in a article "What Breakfast Gets You Going", we're already talking about whisky:)
We havent had any surprises. Nobody was particularly surprised by neutrino masses. Note I define a surprise by something which is not compatible with the Standard Model that you can point to in your experiment, ie a measured parameter or a new particle. When the Standard Model was first formulated, we knew that the neutrinos had very small masses so they were set to zero. It wasnt a prediction. You can within the framework of the Standard Model produce neutrino masses, its not pretty but most of the Standard Model isnt pretty. However it was really exciting to find this out because it can help in constraining theories.
Dark matter and energy is a challenge, true. And plus we dont have a working theory of quantum gravity. Which is why we think theres something beyond the Standard Model, be it string theory or whatever. But the problem is (and this was my slightly obscure point) that although we know there is probably something beyond the Standard Model we havent any information to point us in the right direction (its really really easy to make a dark matter candidate in a theory, most ones have them). If we could make a dark matter particle in our colliders and could measure its properties then we could give the theorists a bit of a clue what to do next . But we cant right now so currently the theorists are bored, inventing theories with absolutely zero experimental evidence because all currently available experimental evidence can be explained by the Standard Model. The only thing theorists have to constrain their theories is the fact that it might be a good idea to slap in a dark matter candidate into it.
Basically we've reached the point where everything we can test right now is tested and understood
Sorry this is my particle physicist bias coming in. I should have been a bit clearer in my post. Basically everything we can test today that involves a collider has been tested and its all in amazing agreement with the Standard Model. So the theorists are getting a bit bored because there isnt really any clues right now for what to do next. Things like gravity waves and Bs mixing and even the top quark discovery were nice but they only confirmed previous, completely theorically worked out theories which doesnt leave theorists much to do. Hence string theory and to a lesser extend SUSY. You are completely correct that there are non collider based things out there that really do help with things like understanding gravity and that might be the way we find the next new thing if the LHC doesnt find anything.
With regards to the more we learn about our Universe, the more questions are raised, you are completely right. The Standard Model asks more questions than it solves and its really an adhoc cludge. Why are there 4 seeming unrelated forces? Why are there 3 generations? Why is gravity so weak? The electroweak sector and qcd are completely unrelated in the Standard Model but if quarks dont have 3 colours, electroweak theory doesnt work. However my point was that we havnt had a new theory for a long time and we havent needed one to explain every particle physics observation. Sure we have a few discrepant things like dark matter which is telling us that our current theories probably arent fundamental. But untill we have some dark matter to study, its going to be very hard to use this information to construct a new theory (its really easy to make a dark matter candidate in a theory). The Standard Model is more than 30 years old, general relativity is obviously old. All the theory was worked out ages ago and we still dont require anything more than them. And we havent found an smoking gun to tell us what lies beyond these theories so the theorists are bored and waiting for the experimentalists to point them in the right direction.
Also as a particle physicist, I also believe that if we dont find something at the LHC (okay two years is harsh, lets say five) to give us a clue or even worse we just find the Higgs and nothing else, its going to be very hard to get funding for experiment beyond the LHC (the linear collider will be a bit pointless if we dont have anything to study with it). And we are going to have to wait many decades before we would be able to build a collider with enough energy to make it worthwhile given that we didnt find anything last time. So particle physics in its current collider based form will die. However as you said, there are other things which are fringe particle physics things which we would probably do instead.
Because theres not a lot else in fundamental theoretical particle physics to spend it on. Basically we've reached the point where everything we can test right now is tested and understood and there hasnt been any significant surprises in the last 30 years. Basically the cludge that is the Standard Model works far too well and its completely theoretically worked out. And the theorists are just screwing around with silly things now because they are waiting for experiment to catch up with theory. We hope that this will happen when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) turns on and that we will find something unexpected. This will give us the clue what to try next theoretically. And as soon as that happens, the theorists interest in string theory will disappear as they will (hopefully) have something new to work on to explain (hopefully) very strange experimental results. Particle physics is either about to go through a golden age in two years time or its going to wither and die.
Scientists that have to deal with US engineered apparatus. Its bloody annoying. That said its easy to convert it into my preferred unit for measuring distances : the inverse of the energy gained by an electron as it passes through a potential of one volt times the speed of light times the Planck constant divided by two pi. We dont all use SI:)
Given that I pay 25 cents a song (actually it might have gone up for new people now) and get it legit and DRM free, 11.7 for an illegal copy with the added hassle of doing it yourself doesnt seem that good a deal. Even more so because none of my 25 cents goes to the RIAA (I assume, all the labels are indy). Plus I would have to find 15 friends, cue sad slashdoter joke:)
I'm with you on this, I used to think Blu-ray was the much cooler and better name and was annoyed HD-DVD had such a lame name. Part of the reason was I thought HD-DVD sounded too antiquated, implied (to me atleast) that it was still using the red laser of dvd (I know it uses blue) while blu-ray made it clear it was using a lower wavelength blue laser and therefore more capacity. When this came up in a conversation with my non-techy friends it went as follows
Me : I think blu-ray has a better chance because it makes it clear its using a blue (ish) laser to the public and therefore is a next generation storage tech while HD-DVD doesnt and sounds decidely last gen
Them: What the hell are you talking about blue lasers for? I think HD-DVD will prevail because everything is pretty much everything HD these days while I havent seen any blu-ray tvs.
After that conversation, I suddenly became convinced that to the general public HD-DVD is such a better name. See we understand why its called blu-ray and think its a cool and descriptive name, however nobody else does.
No, not in this case (good try but you're thinking clasically). This may be true at low speeds but the particles detected in these experiments that are of interest are relativistic and are moving at signficant fractions of the speed of light (about 0.999c or there abouts) and as such for all intents and purposes have zero mass. These particles are often the decay products of more massive particles. The reason we want to bend them is to measure their momentum (or spectifically their transverse momentum) NOT their mass. We can then add together the momentum of these particles to obtain the momentum of the orginal particle from which we can get its mass using special relativity.
Just your friendly neighbourhood particle physicist.
We need to bend the particles path so we can measure its momentum. A charged particle in an magnetic field will have a radius of curvature inversely proportional to the magnetic field and proportional to its momentum, with opposite charged particles curving in different ways. The radius of curvature decreases as the magnetic field increases and increases as the momentum of the particle increases. So for very high momentum particles, the radius of curvature is very large so the particle travels in almost a straight line which makes it very difficult to measure the radius of curvature. Hence you increase the magnetic field to force the particle to "bend" more and make it easier to measure the amount of "bending". So you want as big as magnetic field as possible and at the moment superconducting magnets give the most powerfull fields.
Here, have a look at this picture of a particle physics event (not from ATLAS but CDF at the Tevatron but the idea is the same). Lines in the circle are particle tracks, the two pink ones are very high momentum charged particles (in this case electrons). Notice how they are straight. As such we dont have a very good measurement of their momentum. The other grey lines are low momentum particles as they bend a lot since the radius of curvature is small.
Why do we want to measure the momentum of a particle? Well the Higgs boson (if it exists) will decay to 4 muons (basically heavy electrons) (nb: the Higgs can decay to other stuff but for a heavy higgs this is the cleanest signature and will be how its discovered). You want to measure the momentum of these muons and from that you can measure the mass of the particle that produced them. If you get a lot of events at a certain mass above what you expect from background, you've just discovered a new particle, likely to be the Higgs.
Mildly amusing, I read the article. Incidently it states that 0000 (actually 000000) occurs at position 1,699,927 (and no this wasnt added in the last hour as a joke).
Niggingly point, Chaos theory isnt random. Things falling under Chaos theory, like the weather, are completely deterministic, that is you for a give set of initial conditions, you can exactly predict the solution for all time.
The nub is that things falling under Chaos theory have extreme senstivity to initial conditions, that is the solution for two almost identical set of initial conditions will rapidly diverge as time goes on. Therefore, unless you exactly know what everything that can effect the weather system at is doing at a given point, the initial conditions you put into your weather predicting formula are slightly off and past a few days the solution has diverged so far from the solution of the true initial conditions that your predictions are worthless.
Anyway you might have known this but it wasnt clear in your post
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Ah this looks most useful, thank you. I'll give it a shot when I next meet my student (who has the mac) and see if I can get a more usable terminal when I'm helping her with it. You could well be right about it accidentally being disabled, I've seen this problem before on another persons mac but in both cases the users are (and I mean this in the nicest possible way) a little clueless about computers :)
:(
As for the mouse, unfortunately its a laptop so while I can use an external mouse its not always an option
Well they are all fiddly little minor things that you probably can fix if you have the time and the expertise (or rudementary google skills). Example is that for some reason on several of the macs I've used there didnt seem to be a scroll bar on the terminal window and try as I might I couldnt get one. Oh and on the mac I was helping somebody with yesterday there was xwindow issues, why I dont know but I've never had similar problems in exceed (although usually it works fine in the other macs I've seen so maybe just that mac had a problem).
:) and theres a few other unix/max design philosophy differences to work around. Mainly its little things with the terminal like the scroll bar and I dont doubt they're fixable but it kinda goes against the just works selling point. You should be fine doing what you want to do and even despite these minor things everybody I know loves them (just I dont see the big deal).
Other things are that its hard to press the middle mouse button on a 1 button mouse
Also as researcher (high energy particle physics, so very heavy on the computation and stats) I noticed that 50% - 80% of my colleagues own a mac laptop of some variety and that this is common though out the field. However they are used primary as an interface to our linux servers which are actually used to do the stats/computation. Apparently they are unixy enough having X windows and a terminal to be able to do this (unlike windows which always feels like a hack) while having that "It Just Works" ease of use. Although to be honest I often find that when interfacing with linux the mac is more like "It Just Works (well almost works, apart from a few fiddly things that you can probably learn to live without)" so I tend to avoid them myself.
Actually Batavia isnt that hoity-toity, certainly a lot less than nearby Naperville. However one really interesting thing about Batavia is that it is one of the few towns that has a lot of people that are a) highly technical and b) use linux because it hosts Fermilab, home of the highest energy particle accelerator in the world. Fermilab is an all linux shop (although you *can* find the odd windows box around) and hosts a lot of research into distributed computing using linux systems. In fact it even has its own Linux distribution (Fermi Linux, based off Red Hat) although these days its effort is now behind scientific linux which is mainly developed at CERN. So its interesting that Batavia would do this as a) it has probably the highest percentage of linux desktop users in the state and b) actually has a linux distribution developed there :)
Well most the games I bought recently came with quite a few transistors and had plenty of silicon. Check them out, they're for this little obscure system made by that former card manufacturer Nin-something called the DS. Also I'm not sure about this but somebody told me that the more transistors you can fit on a silicon wafer (which I've been noticing for a while seems to double every 24 months, wonder if anybody else has) the cheaper you can make a given amount of storage.
As a physicist who works at a Fermilab experiment, may I just say those reports were utter crap. A lot of excitement over nothing. It was completely unconvincing. Basically it was one guy with a blog making claims he really shouldnt have.
Something interesting to note, as an experiment winds down, it tends to "discover" something, recently this tends to be the Higgs. Compare this to 2000 when LEP at CERN was shutting down, passing the torch to the Tevatron at Fermilab, and there was all the commotion about the "Higgs discovery" there by ALEPH.
Anyway at the moment we have lots of bumps in our mass spectra which is how we find particles. However its a statistical process so bumps can naturally form just by chance alone. Factor in that we are looking in hundreds of places and all of a sudden a few bumps that have a probability of one in a few hundred of occurring dont seem so exciting yet. Not saying theres nothing there but we've seen this so many times before and it turns out to be nothing, people just tend to get to excited when they see them.
However Fermilab has a good chance of getting the Higgs (if its the Standard Model Higgs) because it has to be relatively light to make other measurements consistent which means its in the easiest spot for the Tevatron to see it but the hardest spot for the LHC to see it. It'll be well past 2009 before the LHC has a hope of seeing the Higgs at a low mass but it could see a high mass Higgs pretty quickly after turning on.
No
There are 3 reasons why they are deep underground, the main reason is to protect IT not us. There may be some others somebody else can point out but these are the three that spring to mind
1) to minimize environmental impact
CERN is next to the alps in a very beautiful area. They didnt want a huge particle accelerator making it look ugly
2) shielding
Cosmic rays from space hit us all the time. Having our delicate accelerator (and seriously this thing is a pain to keep running) on the surface would mean we would get hit more often by them and it could cause a problem, if only due to increasing the background in the detectors. Also we want to shield it from outside vibrations and heat (its superconducting) to keep it running. Note that this didnt entirely work at LEP (the accelerator before the LHC and for which the tunnel was built), you could work out the local bus time table and the phases of the moon using the collected data but that was more a testament to how precise the LEP guys did their analyses.
3) radiation
its mildly radioactive when the beam is running so having a good bit of solid rock between it and the rest of us can only be a good thing. However once the beam is off its fine (after a few days).
However its not because particle accelerators can go bang, if you drive a truck too fast near the fermilab Tevatron, it breaks, this things are not self sustaining and actually require a hell of a lot of effort to keep running. Its not like a nuclear reactor. There is nothing that can go wrong that putting it in a tunnel can effect.
you joke but thats pretty much what you do when you want to minimise cosmic ray interference. To be honest your second best bet due to the natural radioactivity you mention is the stick it in a tunnel under a moutain .
Seriously its actually really surprising how many cosmic rays are hitting you right now. They are also extremely penetrating, often being muons (by the time they reach us). Basically its already got through 120km of atmosphere which although isnt that dense, it sure is thick so you're going to need a lot of shielding. And in 5 minutes at least one has hit you. Over 30 years that builds up. To really drive it home, it you are ever never CERN, stop in and see their microcosmin, look at the cosmic ray detector there and be amazed at how often it goes off.
Yes he completely stuffed the maths on this one. Really really badly, its kinda weird. He makes a good point but his mathematical example is laughable and incorrect and shows some serious misunderstanding of the effect he is trying to describe although maybe it was just a passing mental block on it.
Anyway what he wanted to do was weight the subtraction factor so that if you have no knowledge and just guess everything you should get on average a score of zero. For true or false this subtraction factor is 1.
Therefore in his example:
Person A with twice knowledge of person B knows 4, guesses 96, gets 48 right, 48 wrong so 4+48-48=4
Person B knows 2, guesses 98 so score is 2+49-49=2
and we have the test showing person A has twice the knowledge (gets tricky with his example of person B knowing only 1 question). The easier the test is the more accurate it will become to tell who has the most knowledge until the point where person B starts to know more than half the questions at which point the test saturates as person A knows more than the test is probing. So there is an optimum test difficulty.
Actually I have seen lions attacking an elephant on planet earth (sorry couldnt find a better link). Sometimes if you sneak up when the conditions are favourable and the target is distracted, the risk/reward ratio becomes worth it.
Actually I think it is for general purpose code. In fact I think its main purpose is for running general code on the grid and giving each process its own virtual sandbox, isolating it from the underlining hardware. This means that some random grid user wont be able to hose the machine they happen to be using which should make things easier from a grid admins point of view. Its the only reason I can possibly think of why they made it.
:)
Incidently when I first heard about this today, I thought it would be the comp sci dept but it turns out its particle physics, which surprised me as I'm a member of the oxford group but on a different experiment. I am still reasonably baffled why they have done this, will have to ask them on monday. This probably explains the current sad state of the ATLAS software as they are all too busy getting Commander Keen to run on their mobile phones
Well the UK had two as well. Admittedly one in Scotland, one in England and these could be argued to be separate nations but still.
Good point, I wasnt being 100% accurate:
Whisky : used for Whiskies distilled in Scotland (and also Wales, Canada and Japan but I tend to forget about those ones)
Whiskey : used for ones distilled in Ireland and the US
You are right that the official US spelling is whisky but its traditional to spell it whiskey and almost all do, so much that the commonly accepted spelling is whiskey. So while the offical name is whisky in the US, in practice its whiskey and when you see it spelt whiskey, you take it to mean a US or Irish one while whisky is Scottish with Japan, Canada and Wales largely being forgotten about.
Confusing eh.
The other really odd thing about the English tea drinking is that the tea in England is terrible. Its absolutely disgusting, it need to be smothered in milk and sugar to drown out the horrible bitter taste of it. I love tea (I'm British) but I'm one of the few people I know who actually appreciate nice tea. Actually I find it easier to get nice tea in the US (well, in principle nice, at a restaurant, when I ask for a cup of tea, I get a lovely box with a fantastic selection of really nice looking teas and a pot of water which used to be hot, arrggh).
:)
Also Whisky is how the Scottish spell it (I'm also a Whisky buff). If its spelt with an 'e' then its not Scottish. The Americans and Irish spell it with a 'e' although I've seen the occasional 'Whisky' spelling over there. As far as I'm concerned, both spelling are correct Whisky is the fine Scottish dram while Whiskey is the related Irish and American spirits. However occasionally North American whiskeys misspell their name as whisky. Btw the way I like it in a article "What Breakfast Gets You Going", we're already talking about whisky
We havent had any surprises. Nobody was particularly surprised by neutrino masses. Note I define a surprise by something which is not compatible with the Standard Model that you can point to in your experiment, ie a measured parameter or a new particle. When the Standard Model was first formulated, we knew that the neutrinos had very small masses so they were set to zero. It wasnt a prediction. You can within the framework of the Standard Model produce neutrino masses, its not pretty but most of the Standard Model isnt pretty. However it was really exciting to find this out because it can help in constraining theories.
Dark matter and energy is a challenge, true. And plus we dont have a working theory of quantum gravity. Which is why we think theres something beyond the Standard Model, be it string theory or whatever. But the problem is (and this was my slightly obscure point) that although we know there is probably something beyond the Standard Model we havent any information to point us in the right direction (its really really easy to make a dark matter candidate in a theory, most ones have them). If we could make a dark matter particle in our colliders and could measure its properties then we could give the theorists a bit of a clue what to do next . But we cant right now so currently the theorists are bored, inventing theories with absolutely zero experimental evidence because all currently available experimental evidence can be explained by the Standard Model. The only thing theorists have to constrain their theories is the fact that it might be a good idea to slap in a dark matter candidate into it.
Basically we've reached the point where everything we can test right now is tested and understood
Sorry this is my particle physicist bias coming in. I should have been a bit clearer in my post. Basically everything we can test today that involves a collider has been tested and its all in amazing agreement with the Standard Model. So the theorists are getting a bit bored because there isnt really any clues right now for what to do next. Things like gravity waves and Bs mixing and even the top quark discovery were nice but they only confirmed previous, completely theorically worked out theories which doesnt leave theorists much to do. Hence string theory and to a lesser extend SUSY. You are completely correct that there are non collider based things out there that really do help with things like understanding gravity and that might be the way we find the next new thing if the LHC doesnt find anything.
With regards to the more we learn about our Universe, the more questions are raised, you are completely right. The Standard Model asks more questions than it solves and its really an adhoc cludge. Why are there 4 seeming unrelated forces? Why are there 3 generations? Why is gravity so weak? The electroweak sector and qcd are completely unrelated in the Standard Model but if quarks dont have 3 colours, electroweak theory doesnt work. However my point was that we havnt had a new theory for a long time and we havent needed one to explain every particle physics observation. Sure we have a few discrepant things like dark matter which is telling us that our current theories probably arent fundamental. But untill we have some dark matter to study, its going to be very hard to use this information to construct a new theory (its really easy to make a dark matter candidate in a theory). The Standard Model is more than 30 years old, general relativity is obviously old. All the theory was worked out ages ago and we still dont require anything more than them. And we havent found an smoking gun to tell us what lies beyond these theories so the theorists are bored and waiting for the experimentalists to point them in the right direction.
Also as a particle physicist, I also believe that if we dont find something at the LHC (okay two years is harsh, lets say five) to give us a clue or even worse we just find the Higgs and nothing else, its going to be very hard to get funding for experiment beyond the LHC (the linear collider will be a bit pointless if we dont have anything to study with it). And we are going to have to wait many decades before we would be able to build a collider with enough energy to make it worthwhile given that we didnt find anything last time. So particle physics in its current collider based form will die. However as you said, there are other things which are fringe particle physics things which we would probably do instead.
Because theres not a lot else in fundamental theoretical particle physics to spend it on. Basically we've reached the point where everything we can test right now is tested and understood and there hasnt been any significant surprises in the last 30 years. Basically the cludge that is the Standard Model works far too well and its completely theoretically worked out. And the theorists are just screwing around with silly things now because they are waiting for experiment to catch up with theory. We hope that this will happen when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) turns on and that we will find something unexpected. This will give us the clue what to try next theoretically. And as soon as that happens, the theorists interest in string theory will disappear as they will (hopefully) have something new to work on to explain (hopefully) very strange experimental results. Particle physics is either about to go through a golden age in two years time or its going to wither and die.
Scientists that have to deal with US engineered apparatus. Its bloody annoying. That said its easy to convert it into my preferred unit for measuring distances : the inverse of the energy gained by an electron as it passes through a potential of one volt times the speed of light times the Planck constant divided by two pi. We dont all use SI :)
Given that I pay 25 cents a song (actually it might have gone up for new people now) and get it legit and DRM free, 11.7 for an illegal copy with the added hassle of doing it yourself doesnt seem that good a deal. Even more so because none of my 25 cents goes to the RIAA (I assume, all the labels are indy). Plus I would have to find 15 friends, cue sad slashdoter joke :)
I'm with you on this, I used to think Blu-ray was the much cooler and better name and was annoyed HD-DVD had such a lame name. Part of the reason was I thought HD-DVD sounded too antiquated, implied (to me atleast) that it was still using the red laser of dvd (I know it uses blue) while blu-ray made it clear it was using a lower wavelength blue laser and therefore more capacity. When this came up in a conversation with my non-techy friends it went as follows
Me : I think blu-ray has a better chance because it makes it clear its using a blue (ish) laser to the public and therefore is a next generation storage tech while HD-DVD doesnt and sounds decidely last gen
Them: What the hell are you talking about blue lasers for? I think HD-DVD will prevail because everything is pretty much everything HD these days while I havent seen any blu-ray tvs.
After that conversation, I suddenly became convinced that to the general public HD-DVD is such a better name. See we understand why its called blu-ray and think its a cool and descriptive name, however nobody else does.
No, not in this case (good try but you're thinking clasically). This may be true at low speeds but the particles detected in these experiments that are of interest are relativistic and are moving at signficant fractions of the speed of light (about 0.999c or there abouts) and as such for all intents and purposes have zero mass. These particles are often the decay products of more massive particles. The reason we want to bend them is to measure their momentum (or spectifically their transverse momentum) NOT their mass. We can then add together the momentum of these particles to obtain the momentum of the orginal particle from which we can get its mass using special relativity.
Just your friendly neighbourhood particle physicist.
We need to bend the particles path so we can measure its momentum. A charged particle in an magnetic field will have a radius of curvature inversely proportional to the magnetic field and proportional to its momentum, with opposite charged particles curving in different ways. The radius of curvature decreases as the magnetic field increases and increases as the momentum of the particle increases. So for very high momentum particles, the radius of curvature is very large so the particle travels in almost a straight line which makes it very difficult to measure the radius of curvature. Hence you increase the magnetic field to force the particle to "bend" more and make it easier to measure the amount of "bending". So you want as big as magnetic field as possible and at the moment superconducting magnets give the most powerfull fields.
Here, have a look at this picture of a particle physics event (not from ATLAS but CDF at the Tevatron but the idea is the same). Lines in the circle are particle tracks, the two pink ones are very high momentum charged particles (in this case electrons). Notice how they are straight. As such we dont have a very good measurement of their momentum. The other grey lines are low momentum particles as they bend a lot since the radius of curvature is small.
Why do we want to measure the momentum of a particle? Well the Higgs boson (if it exists) will decay to 4 muons (basically heavy electrons) (nb: the Higgs can decay to other stuff but for a heavy higgs this is the cleanest signature and will be how its discovered). You want to measure the momentum of these muons and from that you can measure the mass of the particle that produced them. If you get a lot of events at a certain mass above what you expect from background, you've just discovered a new particle, likely to be the Higgs.
Ah I'm an idiot and cant read the article properly. Nevermind.
Mildly amusing, I read the article. Incidently it states that 0000 (actually 000000) occurs at position 1,699,927 (and no this wasnt added in the last hour as a joke).
Niggingly point, Chaos theory isnt random. Things falling under Chaos theory, like the weather, are completely deterministic, that is you for a give set of initial conditions, you can exactly predict the solution for all time.
The nub is that things falling under Chaos theory have extreme senstivity to initial conditions, that is the solution for two almost identical set of initial conditions will rapidly diverge as time goes on. Therefore, unless you exactly know what everything that can effect the weather system at is doing at a given point, the initial conditions you put into your weather predicting formula are slightly off and past a few days the solution has diverged so far from the solution of the true initial conditions that your predictions are worthless.
Anyway you might have known this but it wasnt clear in your post