001 = First black hole created by LHC.
Some people are afraid the LHC-001 is going to destroy the Earth. Presumably you're not one of them, what with your three digit black hole serial numbers...
A whopping 45Mbit/s... Sure, that wouldn't be bad for a home internet connection, but in the grand scheme of the FBI connecting to comms companies, surely this counts as comparable to wet string?
Worse is the number of people driving pickup trucks around in the state you describe. Chances are, you and your bike are going to come off worse than them and thier truck when they make that connection with you without even seeing you.
Actually, it'll be in orbit round the L2 point, but now I'm just getting picky.
I think you'll find that the French physicist Lissajous had very little to do with orbital dynamics, and much more to do with fascinating sqiggly loop patterns that provide endless entertainment for thost supposed to be learning how to use an oscilloscope.
Disclaimer: I'm the instrument scientist for WFCAM.
We did actually submit the story to slashdot, thinging they might want to scoop the BBC and The Register for a change. Got rejected, but anyway. I thought Slashdot types might be interested in some of the techy background to the instrument:
WFCAM generates about 200GB of data per night. The data is handled (recorded then processed) by a cluster of 8 PCs (Ahem, why yes, they do run Linux), each of which has a ~650GB RAID array.
An interesting point to note is that in total, the WFCAM system contains a total of about 60 hard disks. No commercial hard disk is rated for use above 10,000 feet, and UKIRT is at almost 14,000. Hard disks rely on atmospheric air pressure to keep the heads seperated from the disk surface, so we've even found keeping the RAIDs running had at times presented quite a challenge.
Also, of course the PCs are fan cooled. Fan cooling doesn't work too well when there's only 60% of the air they're used to (atmospheric pressure on the summit of Mauna Kea is about 60% that at sea level), and with the combination of 2.8GHz Xeons and half a dozen disks in each 3U rackmount machine, we had to fairly seriosuly beef up the case fans to keep the machines at a sane temperature.
Actually, a couple of corrections:
WFCAM uses HAWAII-II arrays, not HAWAII-IIRGs, and VISTA is using arrays from Rayethon, they're not Rockwell Hawaii arrays at all.
Actually, there's a fairly solid definition of 'how powerful' a survey camera is. They point is that we're using WFCAM to survey large areas of sky - they "power" of a survey camera in this sense is basically how long it takes to image a certain area of sky down to a certain sensitivity.
WFCAM is so good because it provides both the huge field of view and also pritty good sensitivity. Certainly, a camera on a bigger telescope could be morse sensitive, but if its field of view is so much smaller that it ends up taking longer to map a big area of sky to the same sensitivity (by virtue of having to take many many seperate images in sucession then stitch them all together), then you've lost out in the long term.
(Disclaimer: I'm the instrument scientist for WFCAM)
No need to wait for the sun tomorrow - look at the "Challenging Times" article right next to the linux=mydoom article on the BBC web page... Swap the terms back again and you've got a BBC correspondant training article...
As pointed out in this comment
Slashdot Mirror
A whopping 45Mbit/s... Sure, that wouldn't be bad for a home internet connection, but in the grand scheme of the FBI connecting to comms companies, surely this counts as comparable to wet string?
Worse is the number of people driving pickup trucks around in the state you describe. Chances are, you and your bike are going to come off worse than them and thier truck when they make that connection with you without even seeing you.
Err, I think you mean it will be at the second Lagrange point (L2)..
Actually, it'll be in orbit round the L2 point, but now I'm just getting picky.
I think you'll find that the French physicist Lissajous had very little to do with orbital dynamics, and much more to do with fascinating sqiggly loop patterns that provide endless entertainment for thost supposed to be learning how to use an oscilloscope.
Disclaimer: I'm the instrument scientist for WFCAM.
We did actually submit the story to slashdot, thinging they might want to scoop the BBC and The Register for a change. Got rejected, but anyway. I thought Slashdot types might be interested in some of the techy background to the instrument:
WFCAM generates about 200GB of data per night. The data is handled (recorded then processed) by a cluster of 8 PCs (Ahem, why yes, they do run Linux), each of which has a ~650GB RAID array.
An interesting point to note is that in total, the WFCAM system contains a total of about 60 hard disks. No commercial hard disk is rated for use above 10,000 feet, and UKIRT is at almost 14,000. Hard disks rely on atmospheric air pressure to keep the heads seperated from the disk surface, so we've even found keeping the RAIDs running had at times presented quite a challenge.
Also, of course the PCs are fan cooled. Fan cooling doesn't work too well when there's only 60% of the air they're used to (atmospheric pressure on the summit of Mauna Kea is about 60% that at sea level), and with the combination of 2.8GHz Xeons and half a dozen disks in each 3U rackmount machine, we had to fairly seriosuly beef up the case fans to keep the machines at a sane temperature.
Thanks! :)
Actually, a couple of corrections: WFCAM uses HAWAII-II arrays, not HAWAII-IIRGs, and VISTA is using arrays from Rayethon, they're not Rockwell Hawaii arrays at all.
Actually, there's a fairly solid definition of 'how powerful' a survey camera is. They point is that we're using WFCAM to survey large areas of sky - they "power" of a survey camera in this sense is basically how long it takes to image a certain area of sky down to a certain sensitivity.
WFCAM is so good because it provides both the huge field of view and also pritty good sensitivity. Certainly, a camera on a bigger telescope could be morse sensitive, but if its field of view is so much smaller that it ends up taking longer to map a big area of sky to the same sensitivity (by virtue of having to take many many seperate images in sucession then stitch them all together), then you've lost out in the long term.
(Disclaimer: I'm the instrument scientist for WFCAM)
No need to wait for the sun tomorrow - look at the "Challenging Times" article right next to the linux=mydoom article on the BBC web page... Swap the terms back again and you've got a BBC correspondant training article... As pointed out in this comment
They put the linux article (quote):
next to an article on tolerance training that includes the quote: Sigh...