back to article The Large Hadron Collider's mega-pic churn

The Large Hadron Collider has been operating for a few months now, and it hasn’t ripped apart the space/time continuum – not where I live, anyway, and that’s mostly all I care about. Of course, it could be that it’s still early, and that the cumulative effects of accelerating particles really fast could still spell the end of …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    The search goes on

    for element 115, and how to produce it like a factory.. Our alien friends are holding back...

    1. mmiied
      Big Brother

      Elerium

      they found it they just called it Ununpentium so that the secret of it's emence power would not leak out the the little pepol

  2. lglethal Silver badge
    Joke

    Finally...

    "unless there’s some late-breaking scandal involving salacious text messages and nude starlets. In that case, we’ll cover the universe thing a few days later."

    Finally, some honesty in reporting!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      IT Angle

      Great!

      It's nice to see El Reg getting it's priorities right :-)

  3. Shades
    Stop

    Tortured logic...

    "the LHC is generating enough data to keep scientists busy from now until doomsday (unless doomsday is in the next couple of years)."

    Please don't try to be clever or funny when the result is neither. It feels like being stuck in a meeting with middle-management.

    1. Sarah Bee (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: Tortured logic...

      Boooooooo.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      @ Shades

      I call sense of humour bypass on that one.

      Actually, that joke was too clever for middle management. You need to come out with stuff so cringeworthy that it will instill your headcount with thoughts of ways of killing you with a blunt hammer. Thus:

      Doomsday? That'll really help with my headcount! Ho, Ho, ho (it's compulsory to laugh at your own jokes).

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      @Shades

      "the LHC is generating enough data to keep scientists busy from now until doomsday (PARTICULARLY IF doomsday is in the next couple of years)."

      Is that better?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Headmaster

    Eh?

    "the LHC is generating enough data to keep scientists busy from now until doomsday (unless doomsday is in the next couple of years)."

    Some kind of illogic logic being applied there?

    1. Geoff Mackenzie

      Personally,

      I think this sentence fragment is evidence of the damage being done to the space time continuum by the LHC. At least the time part. Also, I'm not going to submit this post until next Tuesday.

  5. John 110
    Coat

    Have to...

    Have to upgrade to Flickr pro then...

  6. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
    Boffin

    Its a race

    between HDD makers and the LHC boys to see if the HDD makers can make HDDs faster than the LHC can fill them up

    Then what happens is that all that data forms a critical morass and implodes the internet leaving us to struggle along without it.....

  7. Kobus Botes
    Boffin

    Billion? Trillion?

    "In terms of pictures per second, we’re talking six thousand trillion: a six with 15 zeros, or 6x1015".

    In deference to countries silly enough to follow SI standards, could we perhaps in future articles specify which scales are being used: the long scale or the short scale?

    On the long scale it is "only" 6000 billion pictures, or, more accurately, 6 quadrillion on the short scale and 6 billiard on the long scale (sadly, no el Reg units).

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales.

    Ps. Damn 'merkins wanting to sound richer/bigger/larger than anybody else, methinks. Mutter mutter...

    1. Anomalous Cowherd Silver badge

      Meh

      It's a science story, so it's SI units. And I have yet to meet anyone that still uses the word "billiard" without following it with "balls".

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Wake up

      No one has ever used billion to mean "million million" anywhere I've seen or heard it in my entire life (45 yrs) and I've always been interested in science. So, stick your moronic WP page where the sun don't shine and stop trying to be clever when you're clearly not up to the task.

      1. Chris Miller

        @Robert

        You don't get to continental Europe much, then? Milliard is widely used to describe the US billion - France has no billionaires, only milliardaires.

        I strongly advise against visiting India, where Lakhs and Crores might cause your head to explode.

      2. Chemist

        Re : Wake up →

        Displaying your ignorance on The Reg - even if driven by 45 years - . is not a pretty sight. A billion used to mean a million million in the UK but was replaced by 1E9 years ago (~1970). Quite a lot of people still don't believe this and indeed it has been the subject of debate on The Reg.

  8. STurtle
    WTF?

    Busy until doomsday?

    "Until that happens, the LHC is generating enough data to keep scientists busy from now until doomsday (unless doomsday is in the next couple of years)."

    So scientists are busy for a certain span of time time, which happens to be _shorter_ than the "next couple of years"?

    I would have thought that they are busy until doomsday, regardless whether doomsday happens happens sooner or later, since they are really pretty busy, no?

    1. SkippyBing

      but

      they won't be finished by doomsday, which I think was the point.

    2. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

      Sigh...

      All it means is that if doomsday happens in the next couple of years the scientists will have to remain busy *beyond* doomsday.

  9. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge
    Pirate

    Virtuality is the Existentialist Norm for Global Operating Devices* .... and SMART Machines**

    "So far the LHC has yet to find the Higgs boson or other particles or forces predicted by theoretical physics, but that’s the cool thing about having a Large Hadron Collider – it means you can finally test to see how closely reality conforms to theory."

    Finally, the admission that reality is a theory.

    * And this is relevant and also relative .... "God is Dead, said Nietzsche, …. and left the building, ages ago. Which means that Future Building is a Creative Work in Progress for Smart Beings who share Simply Great Ideas?" and only posted yesterday 31 August 2010 at 1:55 pm to .... http://sluggerotoole.com/2010/08/29/the-pup-soon-to-be-the-mary-celeste/

    And if you are of a nervous disposition and paranoid nature, please ignore, as best you can, the semantic entanglement in the file name of the hyperlink.

    ** Is a Human Being, SMART Machinery .... or a Dumb Tool for Arrogant Fools in Ignorant Pools?

  10. Shaun Roe
    Happy

    Nude starlets recreate big bang

    Pleease.

  11. zenkaon
    Thumb Up

    Some numbers and graphs

    For the Atlas experiment

    http://dashb-atlas-data.cern.ch/dashboard/request.py/site

    Have a poke around

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Damage already done

    The universe as we knew it has been destroyed!

    Porn has been overtaken! The internet is not for PORN, its now for Noise!

    We must recover our universe, everyone take lots of naked pics and upload them now!

  13. ian 22
    Headmaster

    Conformation confirmation

    "reality conforms to theory" shirley should read "theory conforms to reality". It is science after all. Only in religion does reality conform to theory^W dogma.

  14. Adrian Esdaile
    Badgers

    Hang on...

    I thought Doomsday happened about a week ago.

    I'm pretty sure it did, I was totally doomed. In fact, we're all DOOMED right now! So must STILL BE Doomsday!

    Don't panic! Don't panic!

    Put that bloody light out!

  15. Sureo

    Sensor takes 40 million pictures per second...

    How the heck do they do that?

    1. Michael Dunn
      Coat

      @Sureo

      Yes, my question precisely.

      Er..I've got a Fujifilm one-off camera in the pocket - more like one picture every 40 million seconds!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Re : How the heck do they do that?

      Very quickly

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    CERN ACKNOWLEDGES IN ITS INTERNAL DOCUMENTS THAT IT WILL CREATE 500 STRANGELETS PER MONTH

    We have obtained an astounding self-confession, a ‘leak’ encrypted in the tons of documents CERN produces only for ‘physicists’ experts:

    ‘My name is Panos Katsas. I work as an experimental physicist for the CASTOR forward calorimeter of CMS and my main area of interest is the study of exotic events in heavy ion collisions, especially the identification of strangelets, which are likely to be produced.’

    Never Mind CERN has denied in all suits and press releases any chance to producing strangelets. Since according to the most advanced theoretical research on the subject, from the Shanghai Institute of Higher Physics strangelets would sink the Earth into a 15 kilometers rock.

    It is a fact that it has designed a machine, CASTOR, and installed it to detect them.

    More of this confession and many other leaked internal documents in which CERN affirms that it will produce strangelets but also advices to deal with ‘the press, maximizing opportunities and minimizing threats’ can be found at http://www.cerntruth.com/?p=125

    regards

    luis sancho, lead plaintiff in the case Sancho et Al. Vs DOE & CERN

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