pure roon

This summer is looking to see one of the biggest forward jumps in science and technology since our early ancestors discovered that using a rock to smash something could be effective.

Scientists from all over the world are combining state-of-the-art science and engineering in one of the largest scientific experiments ever conducted. Essentially, they are going back to basics, this time on a monumental scale. So what am I talking about?

The Large Hadron Collider

We know that the universe started with a phoenomenal explosion and that all the material in our universe appears to have originated from a single point, but we still have a very poor understanding of what happened at the moment the Universe exploded into existance. The Large Hadron Collider will allow us to see what happened in the Universe moments after it’s creation. I should explain at this point that when I meant the scientists were going back to basics, they are actually just going to be smashing things together, primative in concept but definately not in practice.

The Large Hadron Collider is a large ring 27km in diameter, 100m underground at the CERN Laboratory near Geneva.

By smashing together Hadron Particles (Any particle that reacts to the strong nuclear force) the collider will be able to take ‘photographs’ of the resulting formation of hundreds of new particles. The aim is to find the elusive Higgs Boson which in turn will take scientists a step closer to unifiying the 3 fundamental forces of Strong Nuclear, Weak Nuclear and Electromagnetic (The Grand Unified Theory) and maybe even towards Einstein’s elusive goal of ‘The Theory of Everything‘.

The collider will not only be able to simulate the universe moments after the Big Bang, but can also be used to create very small Black Holes, allowing the scientists to further understand what happens at the Event Horizon of a Black Hole

There are many naysayers to this project, least of all religeous groups, who claim scientists are playing God; In my opinion, if there were a God and something like this would offend that God, then they shouldn’t have made us clever enough to work out what they were thinking. God’s own fault really…

Objections with a little more grounding include people who beleive that there is a posibility that a new Big Bang could be triggered thus wiping out our own Universe in an instant, or we could create a black hole that was big enough to start gobbling up everything around it. Both of which we wouldn’t even notice as the whole world would either cease to exist or be reduced to a singularity in an instant. Anyway the Large Hadron Collider doesn’t create anywhere near enough energy for either of those to be a posibility. (Oooo have you played Half Life?)

This video might explain things a little better than I have. It does however come with a warning, ‘All Creationists will be offended by this material’ - And so they should, idiots…

For the latest scruffy look you need to get yourself a sawn off USB drive.

To the average onlooker this handy gadget will make your laptop look like you have just fled from your desk, without a care for your connections, however hidden inside is a nifty 1Gb Flash Drive!

You can find out just how to make you own over at Evil Mad Scientist where you will be provided with a full step by step guide.

Quote

In using Apple Software Update to slip his Safari browser onto millions of Windows PCs, Steve Jobs didn’t just undermine “the security of the whole Web”. He’s made a mockery of end user licensing agreements.

As spotted by our Italian friends at setteB.IT, Apple’s Safari license says that users are permitted to install the browser on no more than “a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.” This means that if you install Safari for Windows on a Windows PC, you’re violating the license.

Yeah I noticed this little Apple update poping up every time I turn my machine on asking me to install Safari. I don’t want Safari and I wish the popup would leave me alone, but no matter how many times I say no it keeps coming back to bother me…

Nice one Apple!

In 1981 the BBC started the BBC Computer Literacy Project, and needed a computer to front the project with, and approached some of the computer makers of the time, Sinclair, Dragon and Acorn.

Acorn stood up to the challenge and put forward their Proton Computer which the BBC re branded as the BBC Microcomputer and handed over a contract for 12,000 machines. The first models sported a blisteringly fast 2 MHz 6502 CPU and came with a choice of RAM; Model A: 16KB and Model B: 32KB

Wow in just 25 years I have a phone in my pocket that would eat the BBC micro for breakfast, and it is just unfair to compare this kind of computing power to what we have these days!

Anyway, the purpose of this post was because I noticed that a new exhibition at the London Science Museum has just been announced, and my first experience of computing was with an Acorn BBC Micro!

My Dad brought home a BBC Micro when I was a kid and somehow he managed to find a whole box full of games, and I mean hundreds of them! If you had a BBC Micro, Sinclair, Amstrad or Commadore 64 then you will probably remember Elite which made a reappearance a few years ago with a graphically jazzed up version Elite II. I used to play this quite a lot, but I didn’t have the patience my Dad had. He built himself up a little empire in the game and would even invite my friends round to play with!

The BBC Micro featured the BBC BASIC Operating System and programming language and opened up the world of computer programming to everybody. Well you had to have a basic knowledge of programming just get the thing working in the first place. Whilst most programming generally involved writing small scripts that would say ‘Hello’ to you I managed to write a whole scientific calculator program that could even do trigonometry for you. Wow I would have only been about 9 or 10 at the time (Yeah trigonometry isn’t taught in our primary schools any more…) .

GOTO 10

The fun of the GOTO command, if you wanted to add in another line of code you had to remember to go through everything you had done already and update all the GOTO lines!

Please raise your glasses to the BBC micro, the computer that redefined my future!

Oh I just remembered something:

Please read the full article here.

I am incredibly saddened to hear that Arthur C. Clarke has died. He had been ill for sometime, and finally succumbed earlier today.

It is no exaggeration at all to say we owe the world to Clarke. He is most famous for having written the book and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, of course. But he also was the first person to conceive of a geostationary orbit; one in which a satellite orbits the Earth once every 24 hours, giving it a view that always shows the same face of the Earth. This is (mostly) where we put weather and communication satellites today.

When I was a kid, a borrowed a lot of his books from my Dad. His stories sparked my interest in Science and understanding the world around me, which eventually led me into Physics and finally Computing where I am currently. His books still show a fantastic imagination fifty years after some of them were originally written and some of his fantasies are now reality.