DreamGypsy

DreamGypsy's Journal

June 15, 2013

In my heaven, god plays a twelve string Rickenbacker

I took flight from the nest with the Byrds. Obviously a group that created a unique sound in a unique time, with great individual musicians - Gene Clark, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, Micheal Clarke and Jim (Roger) McGuinn.

McGuinn's fantastic guitar work epitomizes the American sound of that era.

Enjoy this flight of the a Byrd:

June 13, 2013

International Linear Collider publishes its Technical Design Report

Earlier today n2doc posted the thread Japan mulls building next supercollider. I went poking around doing a little more research and found the above titled article. Thought it was worth a separate post.

From the Linear Collider Collaboration:

A five-volume report containing the blueprint for a future particle physics project, the International Linear Collider, was published on 12 June 2013. The Technical Design Report (TDR) marks the completion of many years of globally coordinated R&D and completes the mandate of the Global Design Effort. It contains all the elements needed to propose the ILC to collaborating governments, including a technical design and implementation plan, that are realistic and have been optimized for performance, cost and risk.

Highlights of the achievements include the successful construction and commissioning of superconducting radiofrequency test facilities for accelerators all over the world, great strides in the improvement of accelerating cavities production processes, and plans for mass production, as 16,000 superconducting cavities will be needed to drive the ILC’s particle beams. The details of the two state-of-the-art detectors that will record the collisions between electrons and positrons are also part of the report, as well as an extensive outline of the geological and civil engineering studies conducted for siting the ILC.

Six separate pdfs are available for the Technical Design Report, three under 10Mb each and a total of 229Mb for the other three.

The Outreach document provides a good overview of the project, with lots of glossies like the one below. The content of the outreach document is duplicated on the General Public website. The Physics document (volume 2) provides more detailed, but still accessible, technical information.

Another great international collaborative project to carry us deeper into the mechanisms of our universe.

June 13, 2013

Gillibrand loses bid to strip military sex assault cases from chain of command

Source: NBC

The Senate’s staunchest advocate for transferring military rape cases to independent prosecutors to contain a rape epidemic in the ranks said Wednesday she was distressed by the rejection of her proposal, saying, "The victims’ voices aren’t being heard."

“To reverse this crisis, I do not believe it will be enough if we do not seize the opportunity and embrace the kind of systemic reform that will truly increase accountability," said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee to consider amendments to the proposed fiscal 2014 military budget.

However, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., on Wednesday replaced Gillibrand’s amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2014 with his own plan: If unit commanders decide not to prosecute service members for alleged sex assaults, those cases would be required to undergo "an independent review by the next higher level of the chain of command." Further, Levin's amendment would make it a crime for service members to retaliate against victims who claim they were sexually assaulted.

Navy veteran Trina McDonald, who said she survived three rapes while serving in Alaska in 1989, called Levin's move "proposterous." In an interview Wednesday with NBC News, she predicted the military's sex-assault crisis will deepen because Gillibrand's plan was spiked and replaced by Levin's amendment.

Read more: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/12/18920746-gillibrand-loses-bid-to-strip-military-sex-assault-cases-from-chain-of-command#comments

Hmmm. "an independent review by the next higher level of the chain of command."

And the *uck stops there. Right.

June 6, 2013

Running on a track is boring. Run like a proton at Fermilab’s new playground!!

Or you can run like an antiproton if you prefer.

From a press release by Fermilab, the National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois:

It’s one thing for kids to try to envision particles zipping around underground when learning about the science at Fermilab. It’s another thing entirely for them to pretend to be particles charging along an accelerator path, revealing new physics as they fly by.

This week the Fermilab Education Office celebrated the completion of its new Run Like A Proton accelerator path for middle- and high-school-age visitors to the laboratory.

Located at the Lederman Science Center, the path is an aboveground, scaled-down version of the routes a particle can take through Fermilab’s accelerator complex. While running along the path, kids can act like they are the particles of the lab’s physics program zipping through underground tunnels.

“Kids have different modes of learning,” said Spencer Pasero of Fermilab’s Education Office. “They can learn about the work of the lab with our indoor exhibits, but now they can also learn about it through our new outdoor playground.”

It’s a playground with a physics lesson. Kids playing the parts of protons and antiprotons “collide” by high-fiving each other as they run along the accelerator path. Signs along the path guide them in the right direction, whether they want to follow the path a proton would take as it circles the Main Injector or assume the flight of a neutrino headed toward Minnesota

<snip>

“Students run like a proton around the accelerator path, and afterward when they go on a tour of Fermilab, the docents ask them, ‘Remember when you were running like a proton?’” said Marge Bardeen, head of the Education Office. “And they remember! What a great way to learn.” .

Fermilab’s new Run Like A Proton accelerator path
at the Lederman Science Center is now open.
Photo: Reidar Hahn

Learning about science really is fun, for everyone!

A good comment to this announcement was posted on Quantum Diaries:

Chris says:

One difference. The protons don’t cry when they collide with an anti-proton.

June 3, 2013

Our Place in the Galactic Neighborhood Just Got an Upgrade

(I posted this earlier as a reply (#20) to a thread in GD, but it seems worth of a standalone Science post as well.)

Reported today by Alberto Sanna of the Max Planck Institute at the AAS meeting in Indianapolis, story in Universe Today: Our Place in the Galactic Neighborhood Just Got an Upgrade

Some cultures used to say the Earth was the center of the Universe. But in a series of “great demotions,” as astronomer Carl Sagan put it in his book Pale Blue Dot, we found out that we are quite far from the center of anything. The Sun holds the prominent center position in the center of the Solar System, but our star is just average-sized, located in a pedestrian starry suburb — a smaller galactic arm, far from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

But perhaps our suburb isn’t as quiet or lowly as we thought. A new model examining the Milky Way’s structure says our “Local Arm” of stars is more prominent than we believed.

“We’ve found there is not a lot of difference between our Local Arm and the other prominent arms of the Milky Way, which is in contrast what astronomers thought before,” said researcher Alberto Sanna, of the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, speaking today at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana.

<snip>

As part of the BeSSeL Survey (Bar and Spiral Structure Legacy Survey) using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), astronomers are able to make more precise measurements of cosmic distances. The VLBA uses a network of 10 telescopes that work together to figure out how far away stars and other objects are.

<snip>

“I would say yes, that’s a nice conclusion to say we are more important,” Sanna told Universe Today. “But more importantly, we are now mapping the Milky Way and discovering how the Milky Might appear to an outside observer. We now know the Local Arm arm is something that an observer from afar would definitely notice!”

Hmmm. Good and bad. Probably means the rent will be increasing substantially.

If you would like more details, you can get a preprint of the findings in the Astrophysical Journal here: On the Nature of the Local Spiral Arm of the Milky Way (42 pages, pdf)

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Name: Dave
Gender: Male
Hometown: Oregon
Home country: US
Member since: Wed Mar 28, 2012, 07:14 PM
Number of posts: 2,252