It seems the frequency of - 'Vendor 'X' IT hardware installed at CERN's large hadron collider' press releases has cooled somewhat over the months since Sneak last reported - rather like the superconducting circuits being used to deliver the magnetic fields needed for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to dig out that rare beastie, the Higgs Boson or 'God Particle' as it has become known.

Anybody reading about LHC will usually be only a sentence away from a superlative - as in - "The LHC is the world's largest cryogenic facility". Any mention of cryogenics nowadays means superconducting circuitry, which means using a lot of liquid helium to cool said circuitry. At LHC, 96 tonnes of liquid helium is needed to maintain the 1.9K temperature required for superconductors, to - well, superconduct, and provide those important magnetic fields for the LHC to collide exotic particles together in CERN's search for glory.

That temperature of 1.9K, on the centigrade scale, is -271 degrees C, quite nippy - in fact another two degrees gets you to the ultimate in nippiness - absolute zero. You can see how cool the experiments at LHC are - online - here ...

One of the problems with liquid helium is that the damned stuff keeps evaporating, and the levels have to be topped up now and again. In fact there are scenarios where the helium evaporates on a lot quicker timescale than normal. This happens when the superconducting wires loose those superconducting properties and effectively become resistors, rapidly heating up, causing the helium to expand explosively, in what's known as a 'catastrophic quench.'

Sneak originally envisaged staff at the LHC suffocating helplessly after a 'quench', whilst shouting, "Help!", in Mickey Mouse-like high pitched voices. However, LHC has quench detection and protection schemes, besides which magnets like these are manually 'quenched' just to check the cryogenic gas venting systems work properly. Of course if the venting fails ..... well, even then it looks highly unlikely that mass Mickey Mouse impersonations would be taking place, although there have been suggestions that a big enough quench in large superconducting magnets like these, could cause the air to liquefy and 'rain out'. Nice - well, I suppose it's less dangerous than a mini-black hole turning up anyway.

July 24, 2008 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, High Performance Computing (HPC) has a new focus - cocoa quality, and it looks like the US agriculture boffins, confectioneer Mars and HPC titan IBM will be digging through the protein sequence they'll get from a complete mapping of cocoa DNA, to be able to pinpoint factors they'd like to retain to improve the crop.

HPC has undergone quite a change since Seymour Cray started manufacturing his liquid refrigerant cooled X-MP systems, and today's clustered computing systems have taken over number crunching the jobs Sneak used to queue on the mighty Cray's Inbox for it to chomp through. Even financial services firms seem to deploying these systems to calculate exactly where they went wrong - selling over-priced houses to people who couldn't afford them.

Will the power of HPC result in chocolate tasting so exquisite, they'll have to actually reduce the size of said Mars Bars. Sneak supposes that anything could be possible, once the genetic engineers are let loose on cocoa DNA with their molecular spanners - a tweak here and a nudge there, and before you know it, something - 'Not of this Earth', could appear.

Now that the Government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is wafting round the Houses of Parliament, Sneak wonders how long it will be before the first Human-Cocoa hybrid, launches on an unsuspecting world. Of course, the bill says that no hybrid would be allowed to develop after 14 days, but two weeks in the life of such a beast - could well be enough to grow something quite spectacular.

Sneak will leave that to your fertile imagination - but is trying hard to stop thinking of a giant Smartie with Tony Blair's face on it.

HPC - it's not all good news.

June 26, 2008 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

BSc. (Hons) Philosophy exam question number one : Satellite navigation has a positive effect on driving safety - discuss.

Sneak was amazed to be the recipient of a survey from self-proclaimed leading 'navigations solution provider' TomTom recently, which had him gnashing his teeth in denial at its findings.

For instance, one of the questions was, "The use of satellite navigation devices heightens awareness and reduces the stress levels of the driver."

Well, Sneak supposes it does when the device 'does what it says on the tin', but there wasn't a question in the survey like this one - "The use of satellite navigation gets you to your destination the majority of the time."

Constantly checking a Sat Nav device on the dashboard must detract from your awareness of what's going down on the road - doesn't it? What's wrong with letting your partner navigate using a roadmap ... ermm ... but then again.

June 23, 2008 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak as been pondering the IT infrastructure at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and is warning PR firms whose clients have kit installed there to get those press releases in quick, before the avalanche that is bound to occur just before the apparatus fires up in July occurs.

The reason being that there are prophets of doom out there predicting that when LHC fires up, it will create a ‘strangelet’ – a mini-black hole if you will – that will quickly devour all human life forms on earth – and Boris Johnson. Ironic really, considering all those stories about black holes in UK science funding – who’d have thought that we were actually funding black hole creation – literally. Still, it might answer the age old question of whether there are other intelligent life forms in the universe. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) project may be drawing a blank because when the unknowing extraterrestrials get to the evolutionary stage where they can transmit their presence to the rest of the universe, firing up their LHC equivalents quickly turns off their broadcasts.

One can imagine the Omnipresent Being responsible for the creation of the universe chalking off the civilisations firing up LHCs, on his/her/its map of the universe – with the dulcet tones of Freddie Mercury hammering out Queen’s ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ in the background.

April 25, 2008 Science | Permalink | Comments (7)

Way back when Sneak was at college, studying Engineering and Applied Science (EAP), the students used to complain of “EAP syndrome”. This was a psycho-social malady caused by the insane profusion of three-letter acronyms that pocked the coursework.

The major symptom was crossed mental wires. Where arts students might think an invitation to “punt on the Cam” involved a jolly afternoon in a boat, an EAP-infected student would wonder why anyone would place a bet on computer-aided manufacturing. (Not that Sneak went to Cambridge - delusions of grandeur were another side effect.)

The affliction was never fully cured, because Sneak still suffers from mental misfires when presented with acronyms. For example, the Retail Solutions 2007 show starts shortly and Sneak is inundated with press releases about PoS printers, PoS solutions and PoS software.

“Point of sale” is a common enough term in retail, but not to Sneak’s addled brain, which keeps leaping to an alternative expansion of PoS. So Sneak keeps involuntarily reading about piece of sh*t printers, piece of sh*t solutions, and thoroughly crappy software. Not quite what was intended, presumably.

May 23, 2007 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak was alarmed to hear that boffins from the Center for Neural Science at New York University are hard at work trying to turn the stuff of terrible Hollywood movies into quivering reality. The white-coat wearers have made the premise of Total Recall or Johnny Mnemonic seem credible by developing a technique for selectively wiping out an individual memory - while leaving similar or related memories intact. They’ve done this not by experimenting on Keanu Reeves’ skull with six-inch nails and a hammer, sadly, but with unfortunate lab rats, drugs and electric shocks. It sounds horrific but can’t be all bad. Sneak for one would certainly be willing to undergo a course of electro convulsive therapy if it could be guaranteed to wipe out any and all recollection of Keanu trying to act.

March 12, 2007 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak was horrified to learn that school science lessons might be sullied by talk of intelligent design. Supporters of the creationist viewpoint argue that biological life in all its complexity could not have arisen without a guiding hand. Sneak, however, would point as counter-evidence to Microsoft software, which is highly complex but shows all the hallmarks of having self-assembled from primordial ooze without any guidance at all. On a deeper level, Sneak is uncomfortable with the whole notion of intelligent design. Just look around at the world today. It might have been designed, but where's the intelligence?

November 28, 2006 Religion, Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

Boffins from Google have been taking top honours in the tricky field of translation from one human language to another - even languages that the eggheads don’t understand themselves. Google’s trick is to use the internet as a vast Rosetta stone, reasoning that the millions of documents that are already available in multiple languages provide sufficient statistical evidence for mapping, say, Arabic to Chinese without any trace of comprehension along the way. Apparently the results are highly impressive, as long as you steer clear of the kind of loose, informal, freewheeling, jargon-laden chatter to be found in blogs and newsgroups. Alas, if Arab or Chinese speakers want a proper grasp of talking crap, they’ll have to learn English.

November 13, 2006 Science, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of weeks ago Sneak talked about the potential for harvesting wasted energy - using piezoelectric crystals to recoup the energy expended when pounding fists in frustration at shoddy software, for example. This clearly set reader Jonathan McColl thinking... “Dr Wilhelm Reich in the 1930s proposed harvesting 'orgone' energy released during orgasms. I notice that Googling for 'orgone energy' hauls up lots of articles on this jolly interesting subject including the sale of orgone-accumulator blankets. I'm not sure whether to wire up people in series or parallel, but finding out sounds more interesting than studying windmills.”

November 13, 2006 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak read an interesting article in The Guardian recently, about harvesting otherwise wasted energy. For example, the 34,000 pairs of feet that pound across the concourse at Victoria Station every rush hour could generate a burst of many kilowatts if the floor were tiled with piezoelectric crystals, allegedly. Of course it’s not obvious what to do with this brief surge of the sparky stuff - perhaps it could be fed into cattle prods to clear a path for busy people like Sneak? Apparently many other human activities could also be tapped to generate juice, ranging from fingers pounding keyboards to the flexing of elbows. Sneak suggests mounting piezoelectrics on the top of monitors in time for the launch of Windows Vista - and an expected upturn in the pounding of fists.

October 18, 2006 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)