LHC Goes Live Today

I’ve been hearing a lot about the Large Hadron Collider lately, not entirely knowing what it is or what it’s supposed to do. I did a little research last night and learned quite a bit about this giant crazy science project.

The LHC is a particle accelerator that shoots beams of protons at each other at nearly the speed of light so they collide and explode into little subatomic particles like quarks and gluons. It doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re a physicist, but the thing’s incredible, nonetheless.

Basically, it’s a giant 27km long circular tunnel buried 100 metres underground, occupying parts of both France and Switzerland. There’s a bunch of pipes, huge superconducting magnets, giant sensors to detect the presence of dark matter and other crazy shit, and it’s all cooled by 96 tonnes of liquid helium to reach a temperature of -271 degrees Celsius, which is just two degrees above absolute zero.

The 27km long circular tunnel was created in the early 80′s, and the LHC construction began in 1996. To date, the project has cost about $6 billion! It’s a joint effort, with thousands of physicists, engineers and technicians from over 80 countries taking part in the construction, operation and analysis of the LHC.

Scientists hope the LHC will answer a lot of questions relating to matter, antimatter, gravity, extra dimensions and all kinds of stuff that sounds like it came out of a Star Trek episode. This has been a long time coming, and now that I know a bit more about it, I’m pretty excited. The LHC is the biggest scientific achievement of our time, just like the moon landing of my parents’ generation.

Here’s a few more quick facts about the LHC:

• at full power, the LHC will use about $100,000 worth of electricity per day
• the LHC will generate enough data to fill a CD every second
• protons will make 11,000 laps around the 27km tunnel every second
• each proton will cross the France/Switzerland border 44,000 times per second

Cuil: Google Killer or Epic Fail?

It’s time for me to jump on the Cuil-bashing bandwagon. I first heard about the search engine after reading the Toronto Star Tuesday morning. When I got to work, several non-technical people were asking me about it, so it obviously got some serious hype in a short time.

At first, I was like, WTF is this? How do you pronounce it? “Quill”? “kwee-uhl”? Is it French? Maybe “soo-ill”? I never would have guessed “cool”. I’m no branding expert, but right off the bat, the name just doesn’t seem like something that will catch on easily.

Functionally, the site hasn’t had very positive reviews. They claim to index more pages than Google – over 120 billion. However, looking up very simple words often brought no results, and as of two days ago, searching for “Cuil” returned no results related to the site itself, either. If they can’t find themselves in their own search engine, who’s going to trust them for anything?

In a timely fashion, the guys at Google’s blog had a post last Friday mentioning they’ve indexed 1 trillion unique URLs on the web. Take that Cuil, with your measly 120 billion…

It makes me mad to see some ex-Google employees drum up 33 million dollars over a bunch of hype. I hope the investors lose their money. They deserve it.

Montreal Bike Trip – Day 4

We got up early, knowing this was our last day on the road. We were riding at 8am, and got to Cornwall by 9:30. Spencer’s spoke supply was getting low, and he misplaced his spoke wrench the day before, so we stopped in at Bicycle World in Cornwall to pick up what we needed. Bicycle World was the best bike store I’ve ever been to. The people were super nice, and they even let us in a few minutes before their usual opening time, since they knew we were on a big trip.

We stopped for lunch at a McDonald’s not far from the Quebec border. Shortly after lunch, we hit the border and took a few pictures. We met a nice French cyclist who rode with us for a bit and gave us some tips on the construction we’d encounter. We took Route Verte #5, which was a very nice bike path that went on forever. It followed alongside the Soulanges Canal, which used to be Quebec’s main shipping route before the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959.

Around this time, I started feeling a weird pain in my right ankle/achilles area. It got worse as the day went on, but luckily I was able to continue riding.

When we reached the end of Route Verte, we were mostly on streets, going through some very nice little towns. Pat got his first flat tire around this time. Shortly after that, Spencer broke another spoke. We stopped for dinner in some little town at a roadside pub. At about 7pm, we realized we still had about 30km to go before we’d be in Montreal. We knew this was the homestretch, so we started riding hard. Along the way, we encountered a spandex rider on a fast-looking bike, so we started chasing him. We were on his tail for over 30 minutes, and Spencer caught him at one point, but then fell back to join us. We were ripping it up, averaging over 30km/h with our fully loaded bikes, gaining speed up hills, racing through the busy streets. It was a lot of fun, and I’d like to think we kinda scared the guy away, although he very well may have just been going home…

We continued along at a pretty quick pace, making it to our hotel in Montreal at 8:30 – at the same time Pat and Spencer’s girlfriends rolled up in their cab.

It was quite the adventure, with a lot of ups and downs, but it was tons of fun. Riding our bikes was a full time job for those four days, and I know I really pushed myself to my limits, both physically and mentally. It was a great feeling to make it to our destination, knowing we could just relax and enjoy Montreal for a few days. And to top it all off, we had a free bus ride home.

Distance covered: 160km
Total time on the road: 12.5 hours (8am to 8:30pm)

Total trip distance: 633km
Total time on the road: 48.5 hours

RIP Mickey Cat :(

The day before yesterday, we noticed we hadn’t seen our cat Mickey in over a day. She’d usually go out and about on adventures, but she would always come home. Almost every night between 3am and 6am, I’d get a scratching at my bedroom window, and Mickey would be there waiting to be let in. After not experiencing this for a couple nights, and no one in my family seeing her at all, we knew something must be up.

We went around the neighbourhood to see if we could find her or any trace of her, but we had no luck. Yesterday after work, I went down to Whitby Animal Services, where I learned the bad news. It didn’t happen at all like I expected it would have.

I got there and told the very large man that I was looking for my family’s cat. Ken and I went to check out the cages where all the cats were, and Mickey wasn’t among them. I asked about the worst-case scenario, and he said “let’s check the roadkill book”. The last entry in the book noted a “domestic long hair gray cat” that was trapped and put down because it was considered wild…

I asked him if he could tell me where it was caught, but he said they weren’t allowed to release that info. He did, however look up the traps that were lent out and he told me the trap was borrowed by someone on Garrard Rd, which is very near our house. When he wasn’t looking, I peeked at the form and saw the exact address, which is a house almost right behind ours.

Ken was a nice guy, albeit very vulgar, tossing out f-bombs, calling women “broads” and ranting about a lot of things both job-related and not-at-all-job-related. He explained the situation like this: basically, the people were having some sort of nuisance issue with a cat coming around. This could be that the cat was digging, shitting, or spraying on their property or perhaps fighting or tormenting one of their animals. Usually, Animal Services would recommend that the people find the owner and either confront them or get one of the officers to go and speak with the pet owner to warn them of the problem.

In our case, we don’t know the people since they live on another street outside our subdivision. Mickey didn’t have a collar, so there was no identifying information. At that point, the people borrowed a trap from the town, caught Mickey and brought her in. She had no way of being identified, so there was no way to contact us. Ken said based on the report, the cat was considered “wild” and therefore had to be put down. Typically, a cat won’t be too happy being in a cage, so they let it calm down first before attempting to let it out and put it into a holding cell. A well-behaved cat would normally be held for seven days, but Mickey was a bit crazy, and I could see that she would probably not co-operate very well. He said if after several attempts to handle the cat, it still won’t calm down and poses a danger to staff or other animals, it will be deemed wild and put down.

I almost wish she had just been hit by a car or something. Mickey was about 11 years old and still had some years left. Instead, she was put down for reasons she had no control over and couldn’t understand. I can’t help feeling partially responsible, since we didn’t have a collar or any other identifying marks on her (like a microchip or ear tattoo). There’s a lesson to be learned here. Make sure your pets have a collar with some sort of ID on it. Registering your pet with the town or city is also a good idea.

I hate to think of what her last hours were like, being scared, trapped in a cage. Instead, I’ll try to remember the last time I saw her – she was laying on my stomach, purring as I petted her head.

Montreal Bike Trip – Day 3

We woke up on Day 3, had the hottest campsite showers ever and were on the road by 9:30am.

Around lunch time, we stopped for Spencer to fix a spoke and we were surprised to see our friends Chris and Sandra pull up in front of us. They were in the Brockville area for the weekend, so we met up with them again once we got into Brockville and had some lunch.

In the late afternoon, the rain started up again. It got really dark and windy just as we got to Crysler Park, which is somewhere around Morrisburg. We took cover at the pavilion there for about an hour while we waited out the storm. The rain slowed down, so we took off and eventually made it onto this really cool forest trail. The rain started coming down hard again and it was getting dark quickly. We started to worry a bit about where we’d be able spend the night, but we kept on pedaling through the rainy forest and suddenly we found ourselves at the entrance to Farran Park campground.

The young sweetie at the front gate must have liked us boys, because she was really nice and gave us free camping for the night. We set up our tent in the rain and had a shitty night’s sleep because of the rain and extreme winds.

Distance covered: 140km
Total time on the road: 12 hours (9:30am to 9:30pm)