Archive for October, 2009
New/Redone songs
I just uploaded 2 more songs from the Alice in Wonderland collection.
I’ve been experimenting with open tunings recently, so these two are recorded in CGCFGE tuning, which sounds pretty nice!
I’ll also re-record a few more of the songs in CGCGAE in the coming weeks.
Have a listen!
Wow, COOL!
After the ’slight setback’ last year, that pushed the schedule back by about a year, the LHC is back to being one of the coolest places on Earth.
The magnets of the LHC, during operation, must be cooled to around 1.9 Kelvin, which is around -271.25 Celcius. COOL!
Now that the whole collider is cooled and the new quench system installed (a failsafe mechanism), the first beams can be brought back into the LHC.
At first, the energy of each proton beam will only be a fraction of their design intensity, around 450GeV.
The first collisions should happen in late November, followed by a step up in energy to a few TeV, where the next lot of collisions will happen. This is still less than half of the design intensity, but at this energy, there may still be some new physics to do. It breaks Tevatron’s record of the highest energy particle accelerator lab at least.
At the moment, it’s looking like the LHC will stay with collisions at this lower energy for quite some time, before the final push towards 7 TeV per beam.
After all, it broke once, why risk doing it again when you can get perfectly good data first!?
Another Game
I seem to get bored a lot.
When that happens I usually traipse across the internet searching for things to do.
This is one game I came across which helps to pass the time.
The Album Art Game.
Step 1. Go to Wikipedia and click the Random Article button. The title of the article will be your band name.
Step 2. Go here. The last few (<6) words of the last quote on the page will be your album title.
Step 3. Go to flickr and explore the last 7 days. The third picture is your album cover.
Now put it together in Photoshop or similar.
Here’s a few I’ve come up with.
The last one is my favourite.
Credit to original artists for their flickr pictures.
NEW STUFF
I’ve done a few new recordings.
Firstly, I rerecorded Down The Rabbit Hole. It’s slightly different. Capo 4 makes it better.
Second, I’ve recorded A Mad Tea Party. Marking chapter 7 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, documenting the often fine line that can exist between two extremes. Genius and madness being the obvious example. The opening of the song is a bit sketchy, missed notes aplenty, just bear with it. Also, beware of the clipping in the chorus. My mic was up too high… I promise I’ll record this again soon!
Lastly, I wrote a new song called 100.
ANTLERS – A Note on parTicLE physics acRonymS
Since starting my PhD with the ATLAS project, I’ve learned about various acronyms used to name detectors, software, and other related projects in the particle physics community. A simple example would be LHC – Large Hadron Collider. Nothing funny going on there, it does exactly what it says on the tin. It collides hadrons (protons and lead ions in this case) and it is rather large.
Not all acronyms are quite as nice and to the point, however. I will list just a few of the more contrived ones (throughout, bold type is used to denote the letters used in the acronym).
Firstly ATLAS – A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS.
Since when did the final letters of a word count to appear in an acronym? Fair enough if you take the first two or three letters of a word, but taking the first and last letters. Come on! At least think of another word beginning with S!
Second, DEGREE – Dissemination and Exploitation of GRids in Earth sciencE.
Now we are just being stupid. Taking the last letter and not even the first letter. Of the word SCIENCE, no less.
GENIUS – Grid Enabled web eNvironment for site Independent User job Submission.
This one leaves whole words out. Important words like web and job. Which are pretty much the point of the environment. To submit jobs through the web… I can ALMOST forgive the use of ‘N for environment’, but not when you omit such crucial words!
BaBar – B-Bbar detector. Now this is just adding letters to make it sound like cartoon elephants!
Finally, ATLANTIS – ATLAS eveNT dISplay.
Do I need to say anymore?
In the world of High Energy Physics, there is definately a trend of ‘pick your acronym first’ going on. What words the represent is entirely arbitrary as long as the Acronym sounds nice. If the words have relevence to the project, it’s just a bonus.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS (for comedy value):
GIGGLE – GIGascale Global Location Engine.
LEMON – LHC Era MONitoring.
PASTA – Processors, memory, Architectures, STorage and TApes.
and for the Twin Peaks fans:
DIANE – DIstributed ANalysis Environment.
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