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Germany is turning on its monster stellarator

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Re: Germany is turning on its monster stellarator

#91

Post by sp332 »

riffraff wrote: post #81
kuschku wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this defeat device is nothing you should blame on a single engineer, it is clearly a systematic issue, and normal engineers should not be held accountable for actions that the CEO and board forced them to do.

and yet the "I was only following orders" line of defense should not be very popular anymore, especially in a german context.

It's not a defense. It encourages lower-level employees to come forward with incriminating information about higher-ups, even if if would also incriminate themselves. It's the best way to get them to roll over on their bosses.

Re: Germany is turning on its monster stellarator

#92

Post by madaxe_again »

justifier wrote: post #87
jakeogh wrote: post #11

Wendelstein 7-X - from concept to reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqt6u5_sHA Im Zeitraffer: Zusammenbau von Wendelstein 7-X: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJpSrqitSMQ (best @ 0.56x) Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437075 More: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAx243-m51RI-k_4lsAqidA/fee...

the first video claims a magnetic field strength of 2.5 Tesla(o) roughly that of an MRI(i) can anyone speak to sort of considerations that lead to this value? 2.5T seems insignificant considering the events it will be confining how sensitive is the field to magnetic interactions outside of the device? (o) https://youtu.be/lyqt6u5_sHA?t=301 (i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(unit)#Examples

That's part of the beauty of the stellarator design - you need a comparatively weak (2.5T is still an unholy field) field to maintain containment.

Re: Germany is turning on its monster stellarator

#93

Post by jessriedel »

justifier wrote: post #87
jakeogh wrote: post #11

Wendelstein 7-X - from concept to reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqt6u5_sHA Im Zeitraffer: Zusammenbau von Wendelstein 7-X: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJpSrqitSMQ (best @ 0.56x) Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437075 More: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAx243-m51RI-k_4lsAqidA/fee...

the first video claims a magnetic field strength of 2.5 Tesla(o) roughly that of an MRI(i) can anyone speak to sort of considerations that lead to this value? 2.5T seems insignificant considering the events it will be confining how sensitive is the field to magnetic interactions outside of the device? (o) https://youtu.be/lyqt6u5_sHA?t=301 (i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(unit)#Examples

Steady magnets can't get much stronger than that. The very strongest steady magnets, purpose built, are in the 40-70 tesla range. I believe the limit is set by the break down of normal matter. Higher field strengths can be achieved, but only for fractions of a second and are general destructive.

Re: Germany is turning on its monster stellarator

#94

Post by noir_lord »

zamalek wrote: post #46
ThePhysicist wrote: post #38

I once did an internship at the MPI in Garching and had the opportunity to visit the Stellarator. Although it looks much less spectacular with all the coils hidden in their housing it is still an incredibly impressive machine with an audacious design. Today the numerical effort required for realizing it might seem not very impressive given the technological capabilities that we have, but you have to take into account…

I have no doubt that a design that goes with the physics (instead of going against it like Tokamaks do) is going to yield great results, however I hope something comes out if it that will also allow for viable Tokamaks. Stellarators are hellishly complex and expensive.

> Stellarators are hellishly complex and expensive.

True but that is largely true of the first of anything complex and expensive since it's Development Costs + Construction costs / 1 until they build another.

Re: Germany is turning on its monster stellarator

#95

Post by kuschku »

mtgx wrote: post #88
archon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all non-board employees have full immunity, even if they worked on the defeat device I'm not trying to pick a fight, but how is that in any way honorable?

Didn't they blame two engineers for it? http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/08/volkswagen-emissio...

That’s what the CEO of the US branch said.

Those "engineers" were the leading engineer of R&D and the leading engineer of Engine Design. Both board members.

Re: Germany is turning on its monster stellarator

#96

Post by fsloth »

balabaster wrote: post #83
nerdy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My inspiration from massive science projects is more like: "With that in mind, debugging this 1500-line function is nothing!"

Dude... refactor that shit. There is no place in today's development world that a 1500 line function is okay :P

Not all functions are refactorable. A 'purely hypothetical' scenario: a numeric routine of several klocs on length, that takes in 20 parameters with 1-3 letter obscure variable names, was written 30 years ago in fortran, was f2c:d 20 years ago into c and has been doing it's 'stuff' correctly ever since somewhere in the bottom of mission critical code in a codebase of millions of lines. Commercial codebase. Only a handful of developers. Management expect new features and expedient, safe bugfixes that do not change end user functionality.

Re: Germany is turning on its monster stellarator

#97

Post by TeMPOraL »

balabaster wrote: post #41
adrianN wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find watching the assembly of these ultra-high tech machines to be super inspiring. It gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies to see what we're able to do if we put our mind to it.

Mostly it's inspiring because most people sit back and say "It can't be done, it's impossible" or "wow, they must have had a shit ton of luck to get this out of the door" instead of looking for solutions or ways to circumvent or exploit the million little problems along the way that seek to obstruct the endgame. Kudos to these guys for sticking at it long enough and persevering to achieve their vision.

I guess different people see different things in such projects. What I see:

  - *massive* success of coordination and cooperation
  - illustration of potential humanity has
  - that careful and methodical approach can make even such monsters of recursive complexity work
Luck does not enter the picture. Will and determination do though.

Re: Germany is turning on its monster stellarator

#98

Post by ant6n »

zamalek wrote: post #46
ThePhysicist wrote: post #38

I once did an internship at the MPI in Garching and had the opportunity to visit the Stellarator. Although it looks much less spectacular with all the coils hidden in their housing it is still an incredibly impressive machine with an audacious design. Today the numerical effort required for realizing it might seem not very impressive given the technological capabilities that we have, but you have to take into account…

I have no doubt that a design that goes with the physics (instead of going against it like Tokamaks do) is going to yield great results, however I hope something comes out if it that will also allow for viable Tokamaks. Stellarators are hellishly complex and expensive.

Well, if this one works, they just need to copy, it, right? I mean in the end, you really only need one viable design.

Re: Germany is turning on its monster stellarator

#99

Post by TeMPOraL »

fsloth wrote: post #96
balabaster wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude... refactor that shit. There is no place in today's development world that a 1500 line function is okay :P

Not all functions are refactorable. A 'purely hypothetical' scenario: a numeric routine of several klocs on length, that takes in 20 parameters with 1-3 letter obscure variable names, was written 30 years ago in fortran, was f2c:d 20 years ago into c and has been doing it's 'stuff' correctly ever since somewhere in the bottom of mission critical code in a codebase of millions of lines. Commercial codebase. Only a han…

That's actually simple. All you need is to npm yeoman to generate a proper skeleton for grunt and gulp to work using Mockito.js, C2F.js and Fortran.js, then you can auto-generate unit tests that will be paralelly distributed over AWS.

More seriously though, the kind of code you described will be what I imagine the first subject of study of the software archeology field in the future.

http://akkartik.name/post/deepness

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