CERN brings hardware into the open

It good to see great minds think alike?:)

The Open Hardware Repository was inspired by the success of open-source software. (Image courtesy CERN.)

Hardware and software go hand in hand – one doesn’t work without the other. Despite being so closely linked, the two industries operate very differently. For the most part, hardware is produced in isolation and product designs are concealed by manufacturers, while software is created in a largely open and collaborative environment, available for anyone to use.

Javier Serrano, a hardware designer for accelerator systems at CERN, set out to change that. Three years ago, his software design colleagues were developing device drivers – the interface between a piece of hardware and software applications – with the Linux open-source operating system. Serrano noticed that they enjoyed being part of a community where they had access to high-quality products and could seek help whenever they needed it. CERN brings hardware into the open

See Also: My Hat's Off too: Open Hardware Movement

Take Note: Make sure you check out the labels to learn some history.


Kernel (Mar 09 2006 Wikipedia)

In computer science the kernel is the core of an operating system. It is a piece of software responsible for providing secure access to the machine's hardware and to various processes (computer programs in a state of execution).

It's good to see where such thoughts originated at Cern with regard to this subject. This issue is one which I had proposed sometime ago in terms of broad band development as a non profit in order to establish some competition to what has become monopolistic control over the internet in Canada.  It is with the full compliance of the CRTC which supposedly is to represent some fairness to the internet and consumers, which it does not.

Linux (Mar 09 2006 Wikipedia)

Linux is a computer operating system and its kernel. It is one of the most prominent examples of free software and of open-source development; unlike proprietary operating systems such as Windows, all of its underlying source code is available to the public for anyone to freely use, modify, improve, and redistribute.

I was able to detect product(Bell, Shaw, Telus,) development around internet usage according to UBB, while there were still methods that these companies were "fully aware of"  back tens years ago that allowed such easy connections in terms of wireless internet?

The Cathedral and the Bizarre by Jeff Lewis(through use of Wayback Machine)

The problem there is that the 'capitalist trench' problem is just as real in OpenSource as it is in commerical product: once a group buys into a specific solution, the cost of changing grows with time. That's true even if the software is 'free' because the maintenance costs and time to convert to another solution are not

Update:New link supplied

These thoughts for me go back to the ideas around Netscape and Microsoft when Microsoft was trying to be the based software on computers placed into the market.

Messier 8

Seen through small telescopes and binoculars as a fuzzy glow, M8 is a region of intense star formation with a characteristic pink hue from ionized hydrogen (Balmer H-α recombination line). While red is indeed the hydrogen emission in this image by the 8-m Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, the other colours are false. Ionized sulphur emission is coded in green and infrared starlight in blue.(Click on Image for larger viewing)

Thanks to Cern Courier for link to Picture of the Month

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The Lagoon Nebula (catalogued as Messier 8 or M8, and as NGC 6523) is a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius. It is classified as an emission nebula and as an H II region.
The Lagoon Nebula was discovered by Guillaume Le Gentil in 1747 and is one of only two star-forming nebulae faintly visible to the naked eye from mid-northern latitudes. Seen with binoculars, it appears as a distinct oval cloudlike patch with a definite core. A fragile star cluster appears superimposed on it.

Contents 1 Characteristics 2 Gallery 3 In fiction 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Characteristics

The Lagoon Nebula is estimated to be between 4,000-6,000 light years from the Earth. In the sky of Earth, it spans 90' by 40', translates to an actual dimension of 110 by 50 light years. Like many nebulas, it appears pink in time-exposure color photos but is gray to the eye peering through binoculars or a telescope, human vision having poor color sensitivity at low light levels. The nebula contains a number of Bok globules (dark, collapsing clouds of protostellar material), the most prominent of which have been catalogued by E. E. Barnard as B88, B89 and B296. It also includes a funnel-like or tornado-like structure caused by a hot O-type star that emanates ultraviolet light, heating and ionizing gases on the surface of the nebula. The Lagoon Nebula also contains at its centre a structure known as the Hourglass Nebula (so named by John Herschel), which should not be confused with the better known Hourglass Nebula in the constellation of Musca. In 2006 the first four Herbig-Haro objects were detected within the Hourglass, also including HH 870. This provides the first direct evidence of active star formation by accretion within it.^[2]

ALICE Enters New Territory

A computer screen in the ALICE control room shows an event display on the night of the first heavy-ion collisions in the LHC in November 2010.

A basic process in QCD is the energy loss of a fast parton in a medium composed of colour charges. This phenomenon, "jet quenching", is especially useful in the study of the QGP, using the naturally occurring products (jets) of the hard scattering of quarks and gluons from the incoming nuclei. A highly energetic parton (a colour charge) probes the coloured medium rather like an X-ray probes ordinary matter. The production of these partonic probes in hadronic collisions is well understood within perturbative QCD. The theory also shows that a parton traversing the medium will lose a fraction of its energy in emitting many soft (low energy) gluons. The amount of the radiated energy is proportional to the density of the medium and to the square of the path length travelled by the parton in the medium. Theory also predicts that the energy loss depends on the flavour of the parton.

Jet quenching was first observed at RHIC by measuring the yields of hadrons with high transverse momentum (p_T). These particles are produced via fragmentation of energetic partons. The yields of these high-p_T particles in central nucleus–nucleus collisions were found to be a factor of five lower than expected from the measurements in proton–proton reactions. ALICE has recently published the measurement of charged particles in central heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. As at RHIC, the production of high-p_T hadrons at the LHC is strongly suppressed. However, the observations at the LHC show qualitatively new features (see box). The observation from ALICE is consistent with reports from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations on direct evidence for parton energy loss within heavy-ion collisions using fully reconstructed back-to-back jets of particles associated with hard parton scatterings (CERN Courier January/February 2011 p6 and March 2011 p6). The latter two experiments have shown a strong energy imbalance between the jet and its recoiling partner (G Aad et al. 2010 and CMS collaboration 2011). This imbalance is thought to arise because one of the jets traversed the hot and dense matter, transferring a substantial fraction of its energy to the medium in a way that is not recovered by the reconstruction of the jets.See: ALICE enters new territory in heavy-ion collisions

Click no Image for larger viewing

My Hat's Off too: Open Hardware Movement

Sir Tim, creator of the World Wide Web, pointed to open data and linked data as exciting examples of the way that the Web is promoting transparency of information and looked forward to the time when the current 20 per cent of the world’s population who can access the Web grows to 80 per cent, with all the changes this will bring in terms of technological and social developments, and new possibilities of communication and cultural change.(bold added by me for emphasis)

Profiting from the Web has it's connotation here in this blog entry to mean, development of societies in regards to the knowledge based and development of individual to widen their boundaries of perspective.

Open Hardware Repository

"Designing in an open environment is definitely more fun than doing it in isolation, and we firmly believe that having fun results in better hardware." It is hard to deny that enthusiasm is inspiring and that it can be one of the factors in the success of any enterprise. The statement comes from the Manifesto of the Open Hardware Repository (OHR), which is defined by its creators as a place on the web where electronics designers can collaborate on open-hardware designs, much in the philosophy of the movement for open-source software. Of course, there is more to this than the importance of enthusiasm. Feedback from peers, design reuse and better collaboration with industry are also among the important advantages to working in an open environment.Hardware joins the open movement

Just have to legally read License application in order to see that it is actually a concerted effort to such establishment of an Open Internet agenda ? Why is this important?

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OHR Manifesto

The Open Hardware Repository is a place on the web for electronics designers to collaborate on open hardware designs, much in the philosophy of the free software movement. There are numerous advantages to working in a completely open environment:

• Peer review. If you are a designer in a somewhat small team, or even alone, you can get very useful feedback from others by exposing your ideas in an open space. Chances are somebody has similar interests to yours and more experience.
• Design reuse. The OHR has its origins (and initial scope) in the community of electronics designers working in experimental physics laboratories. One of its goals is to reduce the number of different teams working independently to solve the same problems, in order to make better systems with less time and effort.
• Better collaboration with industry. The current business model for most commercial design companies is to keep the details of design secret. While this might maximize the margins of some companies it has no advantage for the customers. We believe that a business model based on companies designing in the OHR and getting paid for it is perfectly feasible, and would result in better products and the possibility for the customer to improve them and debug them more effectively.
• Last but not least, designing in an open environment is definitely more fun than doing it in isolation, and we firmly believe that having fun results in better hardware.

There are two different areas in the OHR:

• Project pages are under the responsibility of a given project leader. There are two requirements for any project to qualify for OHR support:
  • Everything needed to review and modify the design and to produce the final hardware must be published. This includes schematics and PCB layout in some human-readable open format, bill of materials, mechanical drawings, manufacturing files, etc. Submitting the electronics CAD files in case someone uses the same design software and wants to modify the design is also requested. A project leader is free to use any licensing scheme for a given design, provided it is compatible with the OHR goals stated in this document. Two good candidates for open design are the TAPR Open Hardware License and the CERN Open Hardware License.
  • The project must present an interest to the community of electronics designers for experimental physics facilities. This community being very wide and diverse, we don’t think this is a very troublesome constraint.
• OHR Support is a specific project devoted to the OHR itself. It contains useful information for users and any issue on OHR usage can be reported there.

We hope that the OHR will be a worthy contribution to a change in design paradigms and practices towards more openness and quality. See: http://www.ohwr.org/

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CERN Open Hardware Licence

The CERN Open Hardware License was written for CERN designs hosted in the OHR and can also be used by any designer wishing to share design information using a license compliant with the OSHW definition criteria.

Access to the full text: CERN Open Hardware Licence.

It is important for "such distribution" to understand that the very development of internet through CERN and Sir Tim Berners-Lee as too, Cern being a birth place of internet. The origination of Internet Technologies as a development toward "advancing communication" other then corporate monopolistic control over the internet. Why,  non profit development detriment to not to consider it a  a right to all countries "access to information" with which to advance those societies?

To combat UBB and Vertical Integration. LHC development as a participation of many countries.

Cern must turn their views toward Canada and "current events" in order to understand the importance of such developments with regard to OHR Manifesto.If you can free the consumers/population in Canada then you can free the world to stopping advancing communications constraints and development toward a world population knowledge and developmental bottleneck..

Update: See Also: CERN brings hardware into the open

Make sure you check out the labels to learn some history

QGP Advances

Even the famous helium-3, which can flow out of a container via capillary forces, does not count as a perfect fluid.What black holes teach about strongly coupled particles by Clifford V. Johnson and Peter Steinberg....May of Last Year.

If helium-3 is used in cooling energy containment and was to be considered within LHC, wouldn't such example be applicable as to thinking about capillary routes as holes? Energy loss attributed too?

Layman wondering.

The notion of a perfect fluid arises in many fields of physics. The term can be applied to any system that is in local equilibrium and has negligible shear viscosity η. In everyday life, viscosity is a familiar property associated with the tendency of a substance to resist flow. From a microscopic perspective, it is a diagnostic of the strength of the interactions between a fluid’s constituents. The shear viscosity measures how disturbances in the system are transmitted to the rest of the system through interactions. If those interactions are strong, neighboring parts of the fluid more readily transmit the disturbances through the system (see figure 1). Thus low shear viscosities indicate significant interaction strength. The ideal gas represents the opposite extreme—it is a system with no interactions and infinite shear viscosity.


Perfect fluids are easy to describe, but few substances on Earth actually behave like them. Although often cited as a low-viscosity liquid, water in fact has a substantial viscosity, as evidenced by its tendency to form eddies and whorls when faced with an obstacle, rather than to flow smoothly as in ideal hydrodynamics. Even the famous helium-3, which can flow out of a container via capillary forces, does not count as a perfect fluid. What black holes teach about strongly coupled particles

The interesting thing for me as a layman  was about the theoretic in String Theory research is the idea of pushing perspective back in terms of the Microseconds. So for me it was about looking at collision processes and see how these may be applied to cosmological data as we look out amongst the stars.

At the recent seminar, the LHC’s dedicated heavy-ion experiment, ALICE, confirmed that QGP behaves like an ideal liquid, a phenomenon earlier observed at the US Brookhaven Laboratory’s RHIC facility. This question was indeed one of the main points of this first phase of data analysis, which also included the analysis of secondary particles produced in the lead-lead collisions. ALICE's results already rule out many of the existing theoretical models describing the physics of heavy-ions.

See: 2010 ion run: completed!

This is an important development in my view and I have been following for some time. The last contention in recognition for me was determinations of "the initial state" as to whether a Gas or a Fluid. How one get's there. This is phenomenologically correct as to understanding expressions of theoretic approach and application. Don't let anyone tell you different.

While we understand Microscopic blackholes quickly dissipate, it is of great interest that if such high energy collision processes are evident in our recognition of those natural processes, then we are faced with our own planet and signals of faster then light expressions through the mediums of earth?We have created many backdrops (Calorimeters) experimentally for comparisons of energy expressions. ICECUBE.

It is a really interesting story about the creation of our own universe in conjunction with experimental research a LHC

Our work is about comparing the data we collect in the STAR detector with modern calculations, so that we can write down equations on paper that exactly describe how the quark-gluon plasma behaves," says Jerome Lauret from Brookhaven National Laboratory. "One of the most important assumptions we've made is that, for very intense collisions, the quark-gluon plasma behaves according to hydrodynamic calculations in which the matter is like a liquid that flows with no viscosity whatsoever."

Proving that under certain conditions the quark-gluon plasma behaves according to such calculations is an exciting discovery for physicists, as it brings them a little closer to understanding how matter behaves at very small scales. But the challenge remains to determine the properties of the plasma under other conditions.

"We want to measure when the quark-gluon plasma behaves like a perfect fluid with zero viscosity, and when it doesn't," says Lauret. "When it doesn't match our calculations, what parameters do we have to change? If we can put everything together, we might have a model that reproduces everything we see in our detector." See:Probing the Perfect Liquid with the STAR Grid

Update:

• Heavy Ion Collisions: A Few CMS Results

Atlas Experiment :Tile Calorimeter Barrel

Atlas Photos

The tile calorimeter will collect the energy released in the LHC's proton-proton collisions. Special plastic manufacturing techniques have been adapted to mass produce the ATLAS elements.

Strings 2011 in Uppsala, Sweden

Welcome to Strings 2011 in Uppsala, Sweden!

   Thanks to Lubos Motl for link too, "Jeff Harvey Summary Video" and of course,  the current state of String Theory. Of course conference has since past,  but hey, the information is great from many perspectives that were there.

Tattoos

Let no one destitute of geometry enter my doors."

I never gave much thought to it before. I thought at this late stage in my life what affect could it possibly having coming now to the twilight years of my life? I have often thought of it over the years. While quite young and in the Armed Forces having gone through an intelligence program,  reference was made to identity markers and this had always stuck in my mind. But as I said that's not a issue. I now have set up an appointment.

So why that one? Regardless of it's age in terms of the Platonic solids...to me it is a foundational approach with which a mind thought to approach existence and reality of the world in which we live. So even if  it's not suitable from a lot of perspectives with regard to foundational approaches that is why I chose it as a descriptor, as it relates to the idea of geometries

One thing I noticed a lot about the young people that I have work around me is the different tattoos I have come to see on different individuals. As well as,  students who work along side for the summer months in order to make extra cash to help with their education. Help there parents with their educations.

Some of the most interesting were equations a young fellow had tattooed over his arms and back.

So I'll let you know come the time it is done. Any thoughts?

Cymascope

Vibration underpins all matter in the universe. No matter can exist without sound and vibration. To see the periodic motions that lie at the heart of matter is to lift the veils that conceal many mysteries of the universe. The CymaScope represents the first scientific instrument that can give us a visual image of sound and vibration - a cymatic image - helping us to understand our world and universe in ways previously hidden from view.

When the microscope and telescope were invented they opened vistas on realms that were not even suspected to exist. Cymascope

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The sand collected in nodal lines producing symmetrical patterns similar to Hookes flour on the glass plate. It is also important to note that this influenced Faraday in thinking about lines of force in magnetic in his electrical experiments.

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Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni

Born in Wittenburg in Germany, Chladni's Father demanded that he study Law not science. He obtained his law degree in 1782 from Leipzig. After the death of his Farther he vigorously pursued his career in science. Chladni achieved recognition for his pioneering work in the mathematical analysis of acoustics. This research was built on the early experiments of Robert Hooke at Oxford University. On July 8th 1680 Hooke formed the experiment of glass vibrating 6.4.8. places. This was done by putting flour on a glass plate, and bowing on the edge of glass. Hooke had observed that the motion of the glass was vibrate perpendicular to the surface of the glass, and that the circular figure of the flour changed into an oval one way, and the reciprocation of it changed it into an oval the other way. This phenomenon was rediscovered by Chladni in the eighteenth century, and given his name "Chladni figures". What Chladni did was to take thin metal plates and cover them with sand and caused them to vibrate. The sand collected in nodal lines producing symmetrical patterns similar to Hookes flour on the glass plate. It is also important to note that this influenced Faraday in thinking about lines of force in magnetic in his electrical experiments.

The Classical Education Movement Historical

Seal of the University of Pennsylvania from 1894 depicting the trivium as a stack of books providing the foundation for a quadrivium of mathematics, natural philosophy (empirical science), astronomy, and theology.

The Classical education movement advocates a form of education based in the traditions of Western culture, with a particular focus on education as understood and taught in the Middle Ages.

The term "classical education" has been used in English for several centuries, with each era modifying the definition and adding its own selection of topics. By the end of the 18th century, in addition to the trivium and quadrivium of the Middle Ages, the definition of a classical education embraced study of literature, poetry, drama, philosophy, history, art, and languages.^[1] In the 20th and 21st centuries it is used to refer to a broad-based study of the liberal arts and sciences, as opposed to a practical or pre-professional program.^[1]

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Quadrivium(Medieval usage)

The subject of music within the quadrivium was originally the classical subject of harmonics, in particular the study of the proportions between the music intervals created by the division of a monochord. A relationship to music as actually practised was not part of this study, but the framework of classical harmonics would substantially influence the content and structure of music theory as practised both in European and Islamic cultures.

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By education, the divine essence of man may be unfolded, brought out, lifted into consciousness byFriedrich Fröbel

Sometimes one has to look behind a statement in order to see the depth that might be revealed and what the comment might be reacting too? So of course, I throw it out there,  to see what comes back.


Extra-Dimensions....What is Heaven Like?

Imagine a world with no Anti-Matter? No equatorial axiomatic expressions of the universe?:) Just plain, Dark and Dead.:) Walking over a bridge in visualization is escapism....while there exists another side to the question?

At 4:00 PM, June 25, 2011,  Phil Warnell said... The book I mentioned previously is an attempted construction of what perhaps this would have turned out to be. What I find as ultimately interesting is that is for each having and maintaining a true dialogue is the most critical requirement of science and philosophy more generally. So although they had opposing views about the relevancy of the foundations in seeking the truth, each agreed about one key aspect of its methodology, which is not an axiom, yet required as a prerequisite before any can be postulated or denied there being necessity to do so.(Bold added for emphasis by me)

So while waiting for a response....it is understood that such "a schematic" was realized by this author for what may be expletive for that which reads,"which is not an axiom" as to reveal some bias by this author of discoveries about "deep play thinking." About subjects at hand, and the journey one might want to take.

It was found to reveal the "same geometrical tendencies" that are inherent in the quest for such truth's as to the wording of,  writing and visualizing to advance, reveals a topographical relationship with the world around us. Why if it can exist in such equatorial description cannot such a dialogue exist within self? Where did it begin?;)

This dance of sorts of leading to self evident questions and answers, that lead to any apprehension of position for which too,  rebuttal the world, and paint a picture there of. Off handed statements do reveal positions.

See: The Socratic Method.....and Plato's Ideas, is Replaced by Google?