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2010: Leonov’s Trip to Jupiter
4/01/2010It is the year of Our Lord two thousand and ten; a time quite far from that envisioned by Clark. It seems that I’m not alone in feeling technology as we know it has moved at a snails pace.
The past two weeks involved copious amounts of champagne, wine, and scotch – six and seven course dinners and just lazying about in the Hilton. It was definitely hard work but someone had to do it :)
On a different note, this is some information I’ve been hanging onto for a while. The releases to expect from Montblanc this year include:
Patron of Arts Edition : Queen Elizabeth I
Writer’s Edition : Mark Twain
Music Edition : John Lennon
I also snapped these few photos randomly today,
Wishing you a wonderful New Year as well!
The Montblanc Thomas Mann 2009 WE in Detail
29/12/2009
I was shown one of the initial posters to this pen back in April during my visit to London and it did not completely catch my fancy, until now. Here are some details of this edition,
Launch: 2009
Limitation:
12,000 fountain pens
15,000 ballpoint pens
6,000 rollerballs
3,000 sets comprising fountain pen, ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil
- Rhodium-plated 18 K gold nib engraved with the “Buddenbrook” house
- Barrel in precious black lacquer with multilayered inlays
- Platinum-plated clip set with onyx-coloured zircon
- Ivory-coloured Montblanc emblem
Fifteen thousand fountain pens, in reality, does not make this all that limited – at least in my opinion. This is also quite evident by its list price of £545 in London.
At least in my opinion, for something to be limited it needs to be in the sub 500 production range – preferably sub 100 – such as the 75th Anniversary 149, or the Miyamoto Musashi Limited Edition 77.
I found the following snaps of the Mann on Flickr, and they are quite splendid indeed. The nib engraving of Buddenbrook house in particular are quite stunning.
Like all the WE pens, they feature the author’s signature engraved into the cap or barrel – in this case the former,
The Mann is similar to the Shaw in regards to the plating of the section rim just before the nib. I particularly do not enjoy this feature as I have seen the effects of ink corroding into such plating over a period of 10-15 years. While most collectors only store their pens for display and the eventual increase in value, I buy my pens for the pleasure of writing.
Over the past year I have been particularly interested in buying some of the older WE pens, which are getting harder and harder to find. There is no hurry to run out and get the Mann considering, that I am to date buying WE pens from MB – directly – as old as 2001 production. The Thomas Mann is definitely on my eventual ‘list’ but there are quite a few others taking precedence; hopefully, 2010 will be a good year for my humble collection.
Lorentz Attractor in Assassins Creed II Intro
24/12/2009My Mum got me Assassins Creed II as a Christmas gift today, but rather than giving it to me on the 25th, I got to try it out today 8)
While watching the intro I noticed the well known ‘butterfly’ in the intro sequence,
You can see a bit more detail of this particular view of the Lorentz attractor in my report on page 13.
Now who said games were not educational?
Renewable Energy in HEV
22/12/2009I had an idea yesterday with regards to improving the efficiency in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV) that use a diesel internal combustion engine. Almost all modern diesel engines are supercharged in some form and as a result very few naturally aspirated engines are seen in industry. Turbocharging provides many advantages over Supercharger implementations – mainly due to the complex belt mechanisms arising from such an implementation – and are therefore typically preferred.
My hypothesis is based on the fact that the impeller-turbine shaft does not undergo any torsion, and within its suitable operating limits this should not be an issue. The turbocharger would require a third interfacing stage, so that the shaft drives an electrical generator.
Of course, the problem with this system is the added complexity and the fact that the impeller-turbine shaft will have to do work in turning the generator axle. Such a system does post an advantage though.
The research I have undertaken in this area suggests that most HEV designs operate around a singular energy store – from ultra capacitors to flywheels and the more “yet-to-be-viable” hydrogen fuel cells.
With regards to the operation of trains though, most of the ‘recharging’ if these energy sources is achieved during braking, and quite possibly, when running down slopes. Consider the use of the turbine attached generator above – in this scenario, it would be possible to deploy an independent energy store from those charged by the internal combustion engine itself. It would be possible to utilise this secondary energy store to provide extra horse power when needed, especially when the primary store depletes.
However, this idea may not be viable considering railway engines tend to utilise large displacement naturally aspirated engines running at low RPMs. Turbocharger efficiency is particularly poor at low RPMs as the exhaust gasses do not have sufficient energy to enough to overcome the inertia of the turbine to spool up. My idea requires the use of a turbocharger, as the diesel engine in HEVs tends to solely function as a means for driving the electric traction motors – the hot exhaust gasses are typically untapped as a secondary source of energy.
HEV design will most likely focus on smarter means of energy management, as there is a lot more room to make improvements in this aspect, whilst the usual advances in engineering and technology progresses.
The use of Solar powered trains is also quite limited considering there is much overhead obstruction in most cities, especially due to mountains and tunnels etc. Until we see “Terminator” type nuclear or hydrogen fuel cells in mass production, it might be a while till the HEV sector finds its silver bullet.
Musings on the Large Hadron Collider
11/12/2009I was consistently vexed by many folks on Hexus referring to the recent proton-beam collisions achieved in the LHC as ‘laser’ beams.
This was my response,
I hope folks understand the complete achievement in #epicfail by referring to a beam of sub-atomic particles as a laser. A laser by definition is light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation. While it is true you can look at visible light as either the easily understood wave model, there is also the particle model (photons etc). But that does not change the fact that visible light is electromagnetic radiation – an electromagnetic wave that has both a sinusoidal E-field (electric field) and B-field (magnetic flux density, as we engineers call it; physicists just call it the magnetic field) oscillating in phase at right angles.
Now, going back to the laser, this is simply a device that emits light, albeit highly amplified, at a singular wavelength, which is why they are characterised by various colors – with the advent of blue lasers allowing more data to be etched onto the surface of BluRay DVDs for example. While there are very powerful military grade lasers about, I do not suspect any of them can transmit the same quantifiable amount of energy as described by Gordon.
I just guess it is ‘easier’ to conceptualise it as a laser, as that is probably the only beam most people can visualise in the first place.
I found some fantastic images online, mainly thanks to Fraz’s continued LHC discussions on Hexus. He explains,
This was a very low-energy collision, but a collision nonetheless! If you compare against pictures I posted a while back in this thread, the above picture looks a lot more normal – i.e. the beam isn’t hitting the side of the detector, but stuff is colliding at the centre instead. The outer part of the silicon tracker is now also switched on, which is why there are some properly reconstructed tracks (yellow lines) now seen that weren’t in previous images. We couldn’t include the tracker before from fear of damaging it with a poorly controlled beam, which is the reason why the inner tracker is still currently off.
Progress Update on Recent LHC Activities
Fraz says,
Things have moved on a bit, but not much – to me, it seems that the main thing going on is a lot of champagne drinking…
We’ve been colliding very low-luminosity beams (low luminosity means not many protons in the beam) at the injection energy, which is 450 GeV per beam. So basically we’ve just been storing beams in the LHC that have been accelerated in an earlier synchrotron in the chain of LHC pre-accelerators, and then crossing the beams every now and again.
We’ve also used the LHC to accelerate the beams a small amount (up to 540 GeV), but have yet to cross any of these slightly higher-energy beams.
Some people have been trying to analyse the very early data to see how the detectors are doing. Amusingly on one mailing list, some guy is claiming he has “rediscovered the kaon” in one of the events (it was originally discovered in the 1940s), so it looks like the detector I work on is performing well enough to do this, at least!
I think the priority right now is trying to improve the beam lifetime. The LHC is a storage ring as well as an accelerator, and should eventually be able to store 7 TeV beams for ~10 hours. Currently I think we’re only managing to store the beam for about 40 minutes, and that’s only at 450 GeV per beam. Once beam lifetime is improved, we’ll move on to trying to take the “Highest Energy Particle Accelerator” crown from Fermilab. Fermilab has 1 TeV beams, and thus 2 TeV collisions. We’re aiming to exceed 1TeV beams sometime in December.
Data Storage from an Event
An automated magnetic tape vault at CERN computer center, seen on September 15th, 2008. The tapes are used to store the complete LHC data set, from which a fraction of the data is copied to overlying disk caches for fast and widespread access. The handling of the magnetic tape cartridges is now fully automated, as they are racked in vaults where they are moved between the storage shelves and the tape drives by robotic arms.(Claudia Marcelloni; Maximilien Brice, © CERN)
Fraz explains,
Yeah, that system is called CASTOR. It’s good and bad. In certain circumstances, you can certainly be waiting for quite a while for your data to be staged on the hard-disk front-end. I guess that’s pretty unavoidable though.
Raw data alone – i.e. before it gets turned into more useful physics analysis objects – the CMS experiment that I’m working on will be producing about 10 peta-bytes per year. Once you factor in converting the raw data into more useful formats, add on some Monte-Carlo simulation data, and then some data duplication to 2 or 3 other large centres (such as Fermilab), it’ll be pushing 100 peta-bytes per year.
The ATLAS experiment will be producing about the same amount. I’m not sure about the two other smaller experiments, LHCb and ALICE, but let’s call them about 100 peta-bytes together.
So… ball-park, the LHC experiments altogether will be producing about 300 peta-bytes of data per year, and we’ll be running for about ~10 years before we upgrade things. So, for the lifetime of all current LHC-related CERN experiments, I guess the total dataset will be in the region of 3 exa-bytes.
“Any backup?”
Yes, data duplication with other major data centres, such as the one at Fermilab. Basically CERN forms the “Tier 0″ data centre, where one copy of the entire dataset will be stored. There are then a number of “Tier 1″ data centres, such as at Fermilab in the US and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory here in the UK. Between all these Tier 1 centres, the data will be duplicated, but not all of it at any single Tier 1 centre. Then there are Tier 2 centres at various universities, which again between them duplicate all the data at each Tier 1. So, it should be fairly safe.
LHC: Storing Beams!
“I didn’t realise it could be used to store the beams as well, but thinking about it, it’s fairly logical that it would be able to do that (accelerates it, then just keeps the energy cycling, like a giant centrifuge?)”
Yeah, basically that’s right. Right now, the beams aren’t living very long because we don’t have a tight enough control over them. But when we do have good control of the beams, the reason they will only lasts for ~10 hours is because we’ll be crossing them at four locations on the ring every 25 nanoseconds. This slowly degrades the number of protons in the beam, until eventually we discard it and create a new one.
When we’re running at full steam, the beams will consist of about ~3000 tight bunches of protons spaced 25 nanoseconds apart in time, with each bunch containing ~200 billion protons. Every time we collide the beam, roughly 20 proton-proton collisions will occur… so naturally the luminosity of the beam degrades over time because some protons are lost.
So… you see that there are a lot of protons in the beam, each of which has a lot of energy for something so small. To give you an idea, when things are at full power in a couple of years or so, each circulating beam would be capable of instantly liquefying 500 kilos of copper. So, building a beam dump that can absorb the beam if we need to get rid of it quickly is quite difficult… I think each one weighs in at 1000 tonnes and they have to be water cooled to disperse the heat quickly enough.
urrently we are running a low luminosity beam, but at full luminosity the stored energy in the beam is huge. Silly factoids are as follows:
At full luminosity & proton-energy, the beam will store 362 mega-joules of energy, which is:
1) The same energy as the HMS Invincible aircraft carrier moving at 12 knots.
2) The same energy that a Subaru Impreza moving at ~3000 mph would have.
3) Enough energy to melt half a ton of copper.
4) The equivalent of 77.4 kg of TNT. [Correction: it's 87 kg of TNT]Then bear in mind that the LHC could deliver all this energy into an area much smaller than a single square centimeter in less than 90 microseconds.
LHC Photos
The silicon strip tracker of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) nears completion. Shown here are three concentric cylinders, each comprised of many silicon strip detetectors (the bronze-coloured rectangular devices, similar to the CCDs used in digital cameras). These surround the region where the protons collide. (© CERN)
View of the CMS Detector before closure, on August 17th, 2008. (Maximilien Brice; Michael Hoch; Joseph Gobin, © CERN)
Installation of the mini frame of ALICE on 15 May 2009. (Maximilien Brice; Mona Schweizer, © CERN)
Installing the ATLAS calorimeter in November of 2005. The eight torodial magnets can be seen on the huge ATLAS detector with the calorimeter before it is moved into the middle of the detector. This calorimeter will measure the energies of particles produced when protons collide in the centre of the detector. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)
You can view many more stunning images of the LHC here.
SS Montblanc
11/12/2009
Halifax Explosion Remembered
On December 6, 1917, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the largest man-made explosion until the first atomic bomb occurred.
At 8:45 in the morning a French ammunition ship, the Mont Blanc and the Norwegian cargo ship Imo collided in the narrows of Halifax harbour. Vapors from vats of benzol, which were wrongly stored on the deck of the Mont Blanc, were set afire by sparks from the collision. The Mont Blanc was shipping large quantities of munitions to Europe as part of the war effort. She was carrying over 2700 tons of explosives, such as TNT, guncotton, and picric acid. The fire engulfed the Mont Blanc and the crew quickly abandoned ship upon the Captain’s orders. They rowed to safety in two rowboats and reached safety on the Dartmouth shore as the burning ship continued to drift toward the busy port of Halifax.
At 9:04:35, with firefighters on the scene and school children gathering to watch, a massive explosion ensued. More than 2.5 km2 of Halifax was leveled and windows were shattered as far as Truro, Nova Scotia, 100 kilometres away. An anchor from the Mont Blanc was found five kilometres from the harbour. The disaster resulted in approximately 1635 deaths (approx. 1000 died instantaneously from the blast), nine thousand injured and approximately 30 million dollars in damage. 325 acres of city was destroyed. 1500 people became homeless as a result of the devastation. The following day a blizzard hit the city, crippling recovery efforts.
If not for the efforts of neighboring Provinces, the Boston Red Cross and the Massachusetts Public Safety Committee the devastation would have escalated further. Each year, Nova Scotia donates a giant evergreen to the people of Boston as a thank you for their assistance following the Halifax Explosion.
Pre-Christmas Shopping…
10/12/2009Today I did some light shopping and picked up a bottle of Chivas Regal 18 years, Bacardi, and Absolut.
Top (rear) left to right: Remy Martin XO, Balvenie 15 yrs, Balvenie 12 yrs, Johnnie Walker Blue Label (almost finished), same unopened, rear decanter with Balvenie 21 yrs. Bottom right most decanter with Remy XO.
New Signature Design
10/12/2009I never really spent much time or gave much thought to my signature, and over the past two – three months, have been throwing various ideas back and forth on a new signature.
What I wanted from it was quite obviously my ability to be able to reproduce it legibly and have some flourishes to make it harder to be be forged.
This is what I’ve been able to come up with so far,
I tend to normally write my ‘d’ in the traditional fashion, whilst starting from its “belly”, and then working my way up; however, I found the method above not only flows nicely into the flourished tail of the ‘a’ but is also easier to actually write. It looks a bit like an abused ‘partial derivative’ symbol hehe!
Last evening, I went through most of the MBs in my pen box and the one nib to offer the natural line variance you can see above, was quite surprisingly from the Shaw. While I was testing my ideas in a moleskine, the Fitzgerald put down a really thick line, with almost no variance – at least on this paper. Something with ridges, like the Verge de France, G. Lalo paper should bring out its characteristics and I plan to perform a few more tests today.
Week 2: December 2009 Update
10/12/2009Google Chrome:
Google have finally realised Chrome for Mac. I first tried it out on my MBP and found it to be really snappy; right now I’m running side-by-side with FireFox on my Mac Pro. It’s that good, however, not without a caveat – it does not render some sites, and it does not seem Java is playing nicely with it either. It is a definite step forward, although I am not ready to completely shift over considering FireFox great support for extensions.
iPhone 3G
On the iPhone 3G front I would like to state that I have been living life as caveman! It has been over a month since I pwned it to v3.1.2 but did not know about SBSettings till my friend Fahad mentioned it to me today!
It is a must install for owners of jailbroken iPhone’s; just make sure you restart your phone after the install from Cydia.
The second update is to do with Ultrasn0w. The iPhone Dev team finally sorted out the missing carrier name. All this while I used ‘Faked Carrier’ but one can imagine how annoying that would be whilst roaming etc. Here’s their report:
Today we released an ultrasn0w update that fixes an issue for those running firmware 3.1.x with the 04.26 baseband. That specific combination resulted in a missing carrier name in the upper left-hand corner of your home screen. Today’s ultrasn0w update from 0.91 to 0.92 fixes that problem (which was an important issue for roaming). You should see the update available if you have http://repo666.ultrasn0w.com as a Cydia source. Enjoy!
MacBook inhabits a Linksys router
This is one of those rare mods that should go down in the annals of computing history; pure genius really – although I must agree with the bulk of the opinions, “Why oh why a Linksys router?”. More photos and details are posted in the project log, with a plethora of images.
In other news…
I’ve been focussing a great deal on my research writing and just completed a really interesting piece just today on Turbocharger Matching with Diesel Engines. The final report was over 30 pages, with 5,000 words, 70 equations and the complete derivation of Winkler’s method, as well as the solution to a turbocharger matching project.
So, four days later and I’m a little bit wiser; definitely more appreciative of ‘turbodiesels’ for sure, and seem to be lusting over the BorgWarner VGT inside the 997 Porsche 911 Turbo! Here are some sexy images to whet your appetite…
You should watch this for some great laughs, it’s really good!
Bandai PG 00 Raiser New PV
9/12/2009I just saw this posted on figure.fm,
The video can be downloaded in h264 MP4 format.
The gimmicks are pretty cool, although the inner frame does not looks as detailed as the Strike chassis? Hopefully we’ll be seeing some proper PG builds on figure.fm soon!