Technology Twists : Friend of the Printer

Sometimes technology has very unexpected and surprising side effects. Not sure what I’m on about? OK, let me relate to you a real-life recent example. We all love Printers … but they run out of toner or ink, and until you order more, your need to render your beloved electronic text into flat-dead-tree format is … Read more

How to fix a particle accelerator.

Around the house you only need two items for carrying out necessary repairs. These are, a can of WD-40, and a roll of duct tape. Confused? OK, its like this …

  • If it moves, and it shouldn’t, you deploy the duct tape
  • It it doesn’t move, and it should, you deploy the WD-40

So that’s all you really need :-)

Ah, but does this model scale up? What if you are not at home, but instead are at work at say … Fermilab, and just happen to encounter an issue with the Tevatron particle accelerator, what then? Remember now, this is a complex multi-billion dollar machine that is about four miles in circumference and involves about a thousand superconducting magnets, which accelerate protons and antiprotons to super-sized energies. Also, these are not common magnets, they are cooled with liquid helium so that they consume only one-third of the power they would normally require. If you hit an issue, do you shut down for a week, and call in a team of specialists at considerable cost to pull it apart for repair, or do you instead get out your roll of duct tape and patch it up so that you can carry on with no outage?

And the answer is …

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Ig Nobel 2010 winners

Well here they are at last … the list of our learned friends who have, in their attempts to push the boundary of knowledge, taken a left-hand turn into what can be best described as the “WTF” zone …. enjoy :-) … the official prize ceremony took place last Thursday evening at Harvard. ENGINEERING PRIZE: … Read more

Bibles

In the context a real debate between several atheists on the idea of having Bibles in hotel rooms, the following are some of the suggestions and comments that came up: “Whenever I find one, I always sign it ‘All the very best – God’” “I always add a note at the beginning that says ‘Spoiler … Read more

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