41–50 of 109 posts
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> Recovering astroparticle physics PhD here If I may ask: why 'recovering'?
There's a massive oversupply of people who want to do science vs science that people will pay to have done. Supply and demand are balanced by making the environment so toxic that most leave. Hence 'recovering.'
My coworker went down to the South Pole to install Debian on the IceCube cluster (funny story: it's hard to cool servers there because the air is really dry) ~14 years ago. Basically, a 48 hour trip both ways just to insert a CD and press reset. We were all jealous.
>it's hard to cool servers there because the air is really dry Not sure how this could be the case. Dry air has higher thermal conductivity than moist air.
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> just to insert a CD and press reset That may have been all he did that time, but imagine if stuff had gone sideways, he'd have to troubleshoot it from Antarctica! I thought working from home was bad...
Yes, that's why he was sent. In case something went wrong, he was qualified to fix it in production. I've come to an appreciation for people who have jobs where they don't do much most of the time, but when the shit hits the fan, they do exactly what was required.
ieee link includes an interstitial and then fails to load the article for me, probably my ad blocker. Alternate reporting: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/12/628142995/a-4-billion-light-y...
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I work on an experiment at the south pole (not IceCube). sshing into fix stuff is painful, even when the "good" satellite is up. Protip: pressing up several times and then enter is very dangerous since the command that you will actually run may not have appeared on your screen yet.
Similar experience to being a hacker-cracker 20 yrs ago, bouncing off servers around the world over a modem connection to telnet into some poor SunOS 4 boxes in South Korea or at GSFC (NASA). Sometimes you had to wait minutes before anything appeared on the screen while TCP was doing its thing. God forbid if you accidentally (yp)cat’d some large file..:)
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> just to insert a CD and press reset That may have been all he did that time, but imagine if stuff had gone sideways, he'd have to troubleshoot it from Antarctica! I thought working from home was bad...
I work on an experiment at the south pole (not IceCube). sshing into fix stuff is painful, even when the "good" satellite is up. Protip: pressing up several times and then enter is very dangerous since the command that you will actually run may not have appeared on your screen yet.
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There's a massive oversupply of people who want to do science vs science that people will pay to have done. Supply and demand are balanced by making the environment so toxic that most leave. Hence 'recovering.'
A pity some of our new billionaires don't make a hobby out of funding genuine science research. Rather than, say, adventures in space tourism.
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>"After 3.9 billion years of hurtling unhindered through the vast reaches of the universe, a ghostly neutrino particle died on 22 September 2017. It was annihilated when it collided with an atom in the frozen darkness two kilometers beneath the surface of the south polar ice cap." Your article says the neutrino came from far away, which disagrees with that post that says it was probably "photonuclear with local photo…
That's exactly why the author gets paid. By local I meant near the source, not near us.
When would a photon not be created at the source? What is a non-local photon, only CMB photons?
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There's a massive oversupply of people who want to do science vs science that people will pay to have done. Supply and demand are balanced by making the environment so toxic that most leave. Hence 'recovering.'
A pity some of our new billionaires don't make a hobby out of funding genuine science research. Rather than, say, adventures in space tourism.
It's really sad that the only ways to fund science seem to be charity and war.
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>it's hard to cool servers there because the air is really dry Not sure how this could be the case. Dry air has higher thermal conductivity than moist air.
Dry air also increases the probability of static damage. They probably can't use outside air exchange to cool the server room. I imagine just circulating your nice toasty air into a larger area filled with moist humans who want to be warmer would work, but it depends on your building layout.
Now walk across a carpet in leather-soled shoes. Do NOT even touch metal doorknobs, let alone metal faucets!