Posts by Roger Moore

'The LHC will implode the Moon or PUT OUT THE SUN'

Neutron Stars+ Cosmic Rays

The "fast moving and so they cannot be captured" argument against possible BHs produced by cosmic rays fails when you consider Neutron stars. The have densities at or above atomic nuclei and would easily trap any BH produced when a cosmic rays hits them. Since we have never seen one disappear, and have known some to exist for thousands of years, this puts a rather large holes in that theory as well.

As I tell my students when they ask - the only time that you should worry is when you see large numbers of us particle physicists boarding rockets for the moon. Until then you can be pretty certain that we are not going to do anything dangerous to the Earth. This worked fine until one student asked whether that was why CERN had a space plane - thank you Dan Brown! (and no we do not have a space plane - otherwise I would not spend my time crossing the atlantic to do shifts in economy class!)

Triumph in Geneva! LHC beams up and running again

@DrRosen: Space collisions NOT Flawed

"If neutral micro black holes are created from cosmic ray impacts with Earth they would pass through Earth and into space adding to the dark matter (non-light emitting matter) in the universe."

Sorry but you are forgetting that the Earth is not the only object in the galaxy. Micro black holes would not pass so easily through a star, particularly a neutron star, and yet nobody has ever seen stars disappear and yet these are being hit by the same cosmic rays that hit the Earth.

"CERN just simply isn't taking this into account."

Yes we are - the argument regarding neutron stars was used in a recent LHC safety report conducted by non-CERN particle physicists. There is absolutely no scientific reason for any safety concern from Black Holes and if you doctorate were in physics you would know that.

Student leader demands lectures be 'put against the wall'

Technology in Lectures

Good to see that the NUS is still as clueless now as it was in my day as an undergrad. What their fearless leader seems to have completely overlooked is the use of technology in lectures. For example techniques such as peer instruction using clickers (or even just paper flash cards). This gets the students trying to explain their understanding of a subject to each other - something that has been demonstrated in multiple different scientific studies to improve student learning. Its a little hard to get students to do this while listening to a virtual lecture in their room. These have their place but will not replace all "lectures" - although the form those lectures take may well change over time.

CERN Proton-smashers: We are economically valuable

Don't talk to String Theorists

"...my wife wrote a huge article for a major Dutch publication about how the LHC was an incredible waste of money. Even the physicists at CERN admitted that the LHC was not powerful enough to test their theories... Despite all of this, it had zero impact on budgetary allocations by the Dutch"

Good - it shows the Dutch government have enough sense to ignore someone who clearly has no clue what they are writing about. There are string theorists for whom the LHC is indeed no where near powerful enough to test their theories. However to talk to them (or similar theorists) and then conclude that the LHC is useless frankly shows that either you are not properly researching the material or that you simply do not have a grasp of what is going on.

The LHC will definitively test the Standard Model Higgs mechanism (the Higgs boson) and either confirm it or exclude it. That is the primary goal of the LHC. It should also have enough energy to produce Dark Matter particles assuming that they do interact via the weak force and were thermally produced in the Big Bang (this is not guarenteed but both are reasonable, broad assumptions). If your wife had actually spoken with the experimentalists working on the machine she would have learnt this.

Quantum and Nuclear

"modern particle physics is about the least likely field of science to ever produce economically useful results. It's hard to argue otherwise. However, and this is a big however, even though the science itself (the search for the Higgs and super-symmetry and so on) is arguably worthless"

One hundred years ago you could have said exactly the same thing about quantum and nuclear physics - then the areas of fundamental physics research. What on earth is the practical application of bombarding alpha particles at a gold foil? Why do we care if an electron is a particle and a wave? etc. etc.

Fast forward a few decades and we have nuclear power, nuclear medicine, semiconductors, hard disks etc. I'll grant you that particle physics is long term but I bet 100 years from now we'll be doing something amazing with the science we are only just learning about now.

Group Test: electronic book readers

Stanza

You comments on Stanza are not quite correct. You can download your own content to the iPod touch or iPhone. You have to run the desktop Stanza app on your Mac and then enable sharing. The iPod app can then see the books it has loaded and download them.

Since the desktop app supports LIT, EPub, PDF, plain text and a whole load of other formats it is actually very good at converting files to be read on the iPod...although I'll accept that it is not particularly convenient or intuitive.

Microsoft claims 'landmark victory' against defunct UK reseller

Non-zero hypocrisy

"Microsoft takes a zero tolerance approach to anyone who undermines the level playing field for our reseller community"

...and yet the reason that the playing field is not level is because MS charges different prices in different countries. This is a curious new use of the word 'zero' I'm unfamiliar with. Are MS applying their embrace and extend policy to English now as well? If so they might want to try with 'hypocrit' next.

John Glenn blasts Moonbase-to-Mars NASA roadmap

First?

Yuri Gagarin was the first human in orbit. The Americans seem to like to forget that they were not the first in space but I expect better from El Reg.

Build a 14.5 watt data center in a shoebox

Metric?

Pounds, inches, fahrenheit? I thought El Reg was more uptodate than that. I don't suppose you could provide translations for those of us born since the Medieval ages ended to save us having to convert everything? Either that or at least provide the prices in groats to complete the picture.

US allows visual inspections of nipple rings

Re: X-ray Machines

"Are not allowed in the US because some privacy groups say it shows to much, then they hooked up a with a fringe medical nu t group that says all those X-rays cause cancer."

Sorry but this is not a fringe medical nut group: X-rays DO cause cancer. The risk is small and acceptable for medically required diagnostics (obviously otherwise they would not be much use!) but I would be against their use at an airport on a routine basis. The increase in cancer risk for routine exposure is precisely why, when you have an X-ray, the technician goes and hides behind a lead glass partition.

While the dosage may be lower at an airport scanner if they only need to penetrate clothes there is a big difference in the risk I am willing to accept to detect potentially serious medical problems vs. the risk I am will to take to get on board an aeroplane.

OpenOffice update released

Re: And they still aren't competitive!

For overbars, slashes etc. install the extension OOolatex. As long as you have a local LaTeX installation it allows you to general equations, symbols etc. from LaTeX. Once generated they are stored as bitmaps so even if you open the presentation on a machine with LaTeX they will display (but you cannot edit the expression).

Wikileaks judge gets Pirate Bay treatment

Re: Key question: how true are those docs?

"There are two sides to everything, and Wikileaks is putting itself in a position like George Bush: "above" the law."

Really? Since when has US law applied in Sweden?

Academics kick off nuclear power war of words

Re: Nuclear power without breeders: impossible

Actually not true. Fusion power looks like it might be FINALLY not too far away having been 40 years away for the past 50 years or so. The ITER project in France may well become the first serious power producing fusion reactor. If we can get fusion working then fuel for power generation becomes effectively limitless (100,000 years of deuterium in the oceans at current power useage levels IIRC). Its also safe in that no long lived isotopes are created (decades rather than millenia) and any containment failure immediately cools the plasma and stops the reaction. It will also, interestingly, be the only form of energy not ultimately from a star as all fossil, renewable and nuclear fission plants are.

Of course we haven't actually built a working one yet...but it might actually be less than 40 years away now!

Why there will never be another GSM

Re: Giving Away The Golden Goose?

"How can it be sensible to give control in perpetuity to a commercial enterprise?"

While I agree that this is not the most sensible suggestion you do have to remember that "perpetuity" just means "until the government changes it mind" which probably means not that long if you are not actually using the spectrum for something popular.

UK gov: Feds will get BAE bribe files when hell freezes over

The real reason...

...it is taking so long is they put the files in the internal mail to send to the foreign office but all they received were a couple of CDs.

CBS to Pirate Bay: 'You're ok by us'

OED prefers 'z'

"btw - I hate seeing z's in there"

Actually 'z' is the prefered letter according to the OED. It ws even used to solve an Inspector Morse case where the murdered English prof would never have used an 's' because they would know to use 'z' so you can't get much more British than that! It only became the fashion to use 's' in the latter half of the 20th century. So you can't really blame the Americans for that.

Colonization?

"And even having enjoyed an old Sid Meier game staged in the 16th and 17th in CGA graphics back then i cant find an appropriate word."

I've got it - Colonists! Although we call them Americans now and they might get upset if you go around refering to them as profiteering criminals.

You were thinking of Sid Meier's Colonization, right?

Lords debate airline liquids ban

Re: Anonymous Yank

"You're all F*** morons, you want one of these going off in the cabin on your next flight?"

What you are failing to remember is that the liquid ban was introduced because of the belief that certain everyday, harmless chemicals could be combined into a bomb. It has NEVER been ok to take any liquid you want onto a flight e.g. petrol, liquid propane, chemical cleaners or say liquid explosives!

The reason for the ban was because it was thought that you could combine common harmless chemicals like toothpaste and marmite to produce an explosive. My understanding is that these are less likely to produce an explosion than a couple of cans of baked beans and a good curry that you are still allowed to take onboard. Don't suppose you have a YouTube video of that? (and no I DO NOT mean the baked beans and curry!)

Met used 'dum-dum' ammo on de Menezes

Re: Balance

>> "In the meantime we have a heck of a problem balancing public safety with public freedoms."

>to live? I know that you're going to reply by saying that the victoms of the bombings

>had a right to live too, but ffs, an innocent man was brutally shot dead...

So which is worse: one innocent shot dead by the police in error vs. tens or hundreds of innocents dead from a terrorist bomb? That's the choice the police are faced with. How many people would be complaining if he HAD BEEN a terrorist with a bomb and the police had held back because they were not 100% sure and he set it off and killed tens or hundreds?

Nobody thinks the police did the right thing this time - including they themselves. The problem is what do you do when not acting can be as bad, if not worse, than acting? People screw up all the time - giving them training and putting a uniform on them will not change that. If we can't, as a society, understand and accept that the police will make such mistakes, terrible and tragic as they are, then is it fair to ask them to make such decisions on our behalf? ...and if we are unwillingly to let the police make such decisions because of these errors then how do we stop the next terrorist plot?

I don't have the answers but the real problem is that I don't think anyone else does either.

Re: Anonymous coward

"Better that 100 coppers die protecting one innocent than one innocent die protecting a hundred coppers."

You might have trouble recruiting any coppers with this attitude or at least run out of those you do recruit. Aren't the coppers innocent too at least until proven otherwise? The quote works for innocent vs. guilty but not death vs. death.

Better we find a non-lethal, safe way to stop these guys and then nobody has to die. In the meantime we have a heck of a problem balancing public safety with public freedoms.

Boffins challenge shape of neutron neutrality

Pions perhaps?

At nuclear energies it is pions which typically transmit the strong force, not neutrons. As previous posters have also pointed out at the fundamental scale it is really the gluons which are responsible.

The charge distribution within a neutron is interesting partly because it is expected to be almost perfectly spherically symmetrical (though not quite perfectly due to the difference between matter and anti-matter, called CP violation). Evidence of a larger than expected non-spherical distribution would be indication of new physics.

Peterborough bloke warned over 'offensive' t-shirt

Update the wording

Clearly they aren't getting the message - perhaps he should update the wording:

"Don't piss me off again, I have now run out of space to hide the bodies"

(In case any traffic wardens from Peterborough are reading this: I am kidding!)

First Airbus seats to be auctioned for charity

Too many fellow passengers

"In fact as a passenger the only real benefit you will realise and enjoy on both airplanes is the lower cabin air pressure, that can be translated into less body stress."

I think you mean higher cabin pressure. Also there is one benefit of flying in the 787 which you will realise: you will not have 800+ fellow passengers. How long will it take to board? How long will you have to wait for your bags? How long will it take to clear immigration when 800+ of you arrive at once? I'd take an A320/330/340 over a Boeing any day but not the A380.