Anyone about in the Fulham area during daytime who would like to help us with some user testing on our new software version?
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Oh dear, and that last entry sounded rather more melancholy than I had intended – it was intended as a reflection on how things have changed in the last year, not a discussion of the exit that wasn’t.
Thursday was the Fields of the Nephilim gig at the Astoria. Its been many years since I’ve seen them, last time was before they had turned into The Nefilim, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from them. I turned up during the support act, a mostly girl band who had a nice chunky sound but were let down somewhat by their vocalist wailing a little too much. The scary thing is that I walked in and saw the singer and thought immediately ‘thats Katie, shes really gone places’ – followed by ‘who the hell was Katie?’. And I couldn’t place her, I remember she went to Wales to go to university, but I don’t remember where she left from. After watching for a while I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t Katie, just someone who looked a bit like the sort of person she would have turned into.
After a break the Fields came on stage – I had thought I was standing at a reasonable distance back but by the time they hit the stage it was getting rather more crowded. Somehow a guy managed to appear in front of me, he was tall and sulky, looked like he’d never been to a gig before and didn’t really know what to do, I kept standing on his toes and having to move to see around him.
The show itself was energetic, with a nice mix of new and old tracks. The new tracks being met with ‘boo’s from the old-goth contingent at the back by the sounddesk, which seemed to me to be rather unfair since they fitted nicely into the overall feel of the music. Poor Carl McCoy seemed to be rather greyer around the edges than I remember, not that I actually remember seeing him that close before.
The highlight, of course, was ‘Last exit for the lost’, which turned into an epic starting really slow reaching a crescendo after what seemed tens of minutes (hence the time to think for the last entry), how had I forgotten how good this song is?
I close my eyes and i’m back at my last exit. I’m walking along pressing myself against the wall away from the platforms edge. I hear the sound of a train approaching, its getting closer, louder, closer. An exit.
But i decide its stupid and wasteful, so i stay close to the wall to save it feeling easy. Besides, no one would know why, even if they did they wouldn’t understand.
That was a year ago, but it is still vivid in my memory. I’m glad i’m still here, its been a hell of a year.
“i know that porridge isn’t usually a direction but the figure shows what i mean”
I’ve just uploaded a bunch of old photos. Let me know if theres any of you that you thoroughly disapprove of and I’ll hide them….and pass on the URL to anyone you think might be interested.
More to come – I haven’t started tackling those from Japan yet.
Linkblast
INT13 still alive and kicking
We could wander in the garden of Eden baby
Saturday we were Peters guests at Diamond Light Source. It was a fascinating tour with plenty of information about what we were seeing. It is a new particle accelerator they have recently built in the contryside south of Oxford, with the main holding ring running at 3GeV – enough to be twice as bright as the sun.
(ETA: BC “…said the beam was twice as bright as the sun but realized later that was a _logarithmic_ scale. The sun is 10^10 photons per square mm, that baby is 10^20. About a trillion times brighter than the sun!”)
The accelerator consists of three main parts, the accelerator, the holding ring and the beamlines. It is housed in a large donut shaped building in Harwell. The accelerator, or synchrotron, is fed low powered electrons by something a bit like a CRT television, it accelerates them to 3GeV for storage in the holding ring.
The most interesting part is the beamlines, because thats where all of the experiments happen, there are places for 48 beamlines although I suspect infrastructure limits will mean that not all of those can be used. There are three or four currently functional with about the same in various stages of construction. These are arranged as a fan around the holding ring such that there are 48 junction points and exits. When the beam exits the holding ring it travels in a straight line through the beamline lead experiment hutch where the experimental equipment is housed.
This is all very boring so far. Either you’re a physicist and you know all this already or you were never a physicist and don’t care. More interesting is the atmosphere of the place.
The engineering involved in creating and running such a machine is incredible, there are cranes everywhere, there has to be because there is lead everwhere and it needs moving around from time to time. All of the yellow things you see in the pictures (see link above) are made of lead, those are the experimental hutches. They look a bit like this on the inside…well, before they’ve got an experiment in them. The beam entrance is behind Eugenes head, with the optics and experiment equipment being placed where we are standing. Each of these hutches has a controlled atmosphere, with any vents being chicanes such that any radiation cannot escape in a straight line. There are also a number of nitrogen vents around steaming coldness into the atmosphere.
Infrastructure was the focus for the day, with that being the bulk of Peters interest there, there is an incredible amount of sensors in each experiment, with each sensor being a source for various amounts of data which all has to be collected, processed and stored. So there is considerable computing power in each of the experimental hutches, and significant network infrastructure pulling the data off to storage systems elsewhere in the building. And of course a lot of power is needed to get electrons up to their holding speed, the hum of stepdown transformers inside the space in the middle of the donut, theres a bank of ten or so (not that I actually counted them) transformers the size of those that power a small village.
Another thing that struck me was the sheer amount of equipment lying around, there is a lot of work in progress with parts being put aside for later assembly, diagnosis or disposal. A lot of this is precision engineering to a degree you wouldn’t find in many places, an electron beam straying a couple of millimetres off course would unsettle the whole thing and cause no end of damage.
The holding ring looks impressive, in its own tunnel bathed in spooky blue light which says that the area is dangerous to enter.
There were no experiments actually in progress while we were there, they were doing some calibration of the holding ring or something, so we could take a closer look at a number of the experiments. None of which really made much sense but they were built in a style that would feel at home to the steam pioneers, but with small D9 serial sockets all over, feeding sensor information to control and monitor systems.
Our planned one hour ‘quick scoot around’ turned into a rather epic four hour grand tour. Quite enjoyable but lunch beforehand would have been a good idea.
I would recommend a visit if you get a chance – they have open days on a reasonably regular basis, or, if we are lucky, Peter might be able to arrange another days tour if we can gather an appropriate set of interested sorts.
get in the ring
SMS from unknown number: “OK send me a pick fitcop”
How should I respond?
Todays meeting wasn’t quite the horrorshow I was expecting – it was a lecture by a consultant about best practices in the industry. Most of which I’ve heard before, but which was frightening because of its apparent novelty to some of my co-workers. So, although there was a minor joke about ditching my part of the project there was no immediate changes forthcoming. So saturday nights paranoia was just that, paranoia.