September, 2008

News — 2 Comments
10
Sep 08

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider started – Success! – are we still here?

cern-webcast-chuck-norris

this is hilarious, are we still here?

Hello? Tap, tap, tap, this thing on? – Engadget

“It worked! The LHC was turned on this morning and has been shown to have worked. Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). (And we’re all still alive too!)”

My god… here the details:

09:49 — Confirmed, the first beam of protons has been fired! It took 48-seconds for the pulse to generate and then a tiny flash of light on a computer screen indicated a successful firing around the first 3-km of the 27-km ring — they will methodically extend the range throughout the day.

10:25 — The beam just completed the full ring (in stages) in less than an hour. Things are going much more quickly than expected. They are about to fire the beam around the complete ring, unimpeded.

First Beam Fired – http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4722261.ece

News — 1 Comment
9
Sep 08

The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on

startrek Here three news articles about the public reaction to the Large Hadron Collider or LHC.

LHC scientists get death threats

So it’s come to this: Death threats against physicists. About what? The earth-destroying Large Hadron Collider, of course. Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University… Read More


LHC and Faith-Based Science

Public reaction to the Large Hadron Collider is so ignorant and brain-dead we need a theory to explain what’s going on. I asked Charles King at Pund-IT for a theory. He offered this: I believe that much of the public reaction to the LHC is grounded in a kind of ignorance that might be called… Read More

Stephen Hawking: LHC vital, absolutely safe

Since the geniuses at CERN have failed to assuage amped-up (if entirely unfounded) fears that the Large Hadron Collider is actually a doomsday machine, they have reached up to the mountain to get Prof. Stephen Hawking himself to address the issue. He appeared on BBC 4, as the Telegraph reports.
Read More

For those new to what the LHC is check out the Large Hadron Rap:


CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

More… http://webcast.cern.ch/index.html

Business — No Comments
4
Sep 08

Internet Traffic Grows 53 Percent From Mid-2007

NEW YORK – International Internet traffic kept growing in the last year, but at a slower rate than before, and carriers more than kept pace by adding more capacity, a research firm said Wednesday.

The findings by TeleGeography Research are important because some U.S. Internet service providers say they are struggling with the expansion of online traffic, and are imposing monthly download limits on heavy users. The figures from TeleGeography don’t exactly correlate to average Internet usage by U.S. households, but give an indication of wider trends.

TeleGeography said traffic grew 53 percent from mid-2007 to mid-2008, down from a growth rate of 61 percent in the previous 12 months.

Growth on long-haul lines in the U.S. was even slower, at 47 percent. The big increase came in regions where the Internet is less mature. Traffic between the U.S. and Latin America more than doubled.

Meanwhile, international Internet capacity on ocean-spanning optical fibers increased 62 percent. On average, Internet traffic now uses just 29 percent of the available bandwidth.

TeleGeography research director Alan Mauldin noted that the number of new broadband subscribers has been falling since 2001, but that the overall increase in Internet traffic remains high because of the increasing demand for online video.

A service of the Associated Press(AP)