Posts Tagged science
GloPoWriMo 2019
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on May 30, 2019
Last November, instead of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) I created NanoRhymo, where I wrote a tiny poem every day inspired by a random rhyme from my rhyming dictionary, rhyme.science. April was GloPoWriMo (Global Poetry Writing Month — NaPoWriMo/National Poetry Writing Month to people from unknown nations who think ‘national’ gives their invented holidays a more realistic sheen) so I decided to do the same thing. Here are the poems I wrote.
Day 1, inspired by the rhyme propounds and zounds:
I see the news, and holler ‘Zounds!
That’s downright nuts! That is not cool!’
To see the thoughts that he propounds
I *hope* it’s all an April fool.
Day 2, inspired by the rhyme shenanigan and Flanagan:
There once was a rascal named Flanagan
who magnified ev’ry shenanigan
and when they were caught
repented, quite fraught,
then made their escape and and began again.
Day 3, inspired by the rhyme excavations and replication’s, and also a line from Jurassic Park:
After careful excavations,
came some reckless replications,
running rife, now run away!
Cunning life, uh, finds a way.
Day 4, inspired by the rhyme mutuality’s and theatricality’s, and the idea that the then-imminent Brexit needs to be summarised as a comic opera:
As now we face with Brexit
an end of mutuality,
I need theatricality
to show what’s going on.
It’s really quite complex, it
must be faced with joviality;
I can’t take the formality
or show-stopping fatality…
Before my poor brain wrecks it
by facing the reality
I need some musicality —
the show’s still going on!
Day 5, inspired by the rhyme asylum and subphylum:
This spineless chipolata
brings disgrace to Vertebrata!
I wish to seek asylum
in a different subphylum.
Day 6, inspired by the rhyme while I and styli:
Some scoff at using styli.
I’m not so highfalutin’,
so please excuse me while I
tweet from my Apple Newton.
Day 7, inspired by the rhyme lawmen and for men:
There’s no need to call the lawmen
and exclaim “Oh no! Us poor men!”
when things aren’t tailored for men.
Cast aside “misandrist” strawmen.
Watch how much you hold the floor, men.
Day 8, inspired by the rhyme airway’s and their ways:
I don’t agree with their ways!
Why can’t they learn new skills?
Their ‘breathing’ thing is hokum!
I won’t pay for their airways!
Why can’t they just use gills?
They’ll learn to if I choke ‘em!
Day 9, inspired by the rhymes ineffectually and intellectually, deficiency and inefficiency, and ineffaceable and untraceable:
If you’re ineffectual, although you’re intellectual,
then your inefficiency might stem from some deficiency —
memories ineffaceable which should be made untraceable,
ineffable reverberations crowding useful thought.
Day 10 (a day late), inspired by the rhyme detectable and connectible, and of course the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration’s announcement of the first image of a black hole:
Eight radio telescopes, made connectible,
made a black hole’s light detectable.
Day 11, inspired by the rhyme mending’s and endings, and of course the Beresheet lunar landing:
One small stop, and mission’s ending.
One giant lapse, no lunar mending.
Look at what you learn and hail your
huge success you earn through failure.
Day 12, inspired by the rhyme unlabelled and disabled:
While some propound that we transcend
ignore the boundaries to end
discrimination: life unlabelled
as woman, Asian, bi, disabled,
how you see me, and I myself,
still have myths attached we fell for,
still affect what we expect
to be, or see, and left unchecked
this blinding to the groups we see just
lets those stealthy fictions lead us.
Day 13, inspired by the rhyme reupholstering and bolstering and definitely referring to gunshot rather than immunisations:
If the shot in your arms is a killer,
you’ll find yourself bolstering the holster,
but if what’s in your arms is a pillow
you’d best be reupholstering the bolster.
Day 14, inspired by the rhyme planetesimals and hexadecimals (best read in a non-rhotic accent):
Previous dates say you’re lesser? Miladies,
we all start out infinitesimal.
Growing from dust we become planetesimals;
now you’re sixteen out of ten, hexadecimal.
Day 15, inspired by the rhyme deSitter and bitter:
I’m just very old; I’m not bitter.
I don’t care I can no more transmit a
request that will pass the de Sitter
horizon and get to your Twitter.
Day 16, inspired by the rhyme cassava’s and guavas, and a true story involving Joey Marianer and I hearing Beth Kinderman’s ‘Stop Covering “Hallelujah”‘ at MarsCon, visiting a ball of twine but not a furniture shop, noticing many other phrases that could scan to Hallelujah, and later writing a song to that tune about the ‘purple guava’ meme on JoCo Cruise. This poem is, of course, to be sung to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah:
At MarsCon just before the cruise,
we heard some Hallelujah blues,
saw Minnesotan places, but not Marva’s.
Beth Kinderman was in our head,
but thanks to Paul we wrote instead
A song like Hallelujah about guavas.
Purple guavas, not cassavas, purple guavas, not cassavas.
We ended up writing and rewriting many songs to that tune, and Joey has been going through our growing list of Hallelujah parodies and singing them on YouTube.
Day 17, inspired by the fact that it was National Haiku Day in some nation or other, and I indeed wrote a Haiku Detector app for macOS a while ago:
Haiku detector
is an app that finds haiku.
I wrote it myself.
Day 18, in reply to a friend who was surprised to have missed that I wrote a haiku detector:
And a robot choir,
a rhyming dictionary,
and an insult app.
Day 19, inspired by the rhyme surviving and depriving:
Let us watch the rich contriving
ways they can continue thriving,
cunning tricks to keep deriving
profits from their deeds depriving
others of the means of striving
for a life above surviving.
On day 20, I considered my post on unintentional haiku in the Mueller report to be my poem for the day.
Day 21, inspired by the rhyme nonvital and recital:
Some may say that art’s nonvital —
mere indulgence for the idle.
But while we breathe with no recital,
without reprieve, we’re suicidal.
Day 22, inspired by the rhymes (in non-rhotic accents) Larousse’s, nooses, and seducer’s, and some of the dictionary brands in my language bookcase:
In my bookcase of seducers:
Collins, Van Dales, and Larousses.
Some who judge not right from wrong,
Some who tighten grammar’s nooses.
Come to my Chambers, Roberts, Pons,
and I will Reed you all night long.
Day 23, inspired by the non-rhotic rhyme PDA to and cater:
Avoiding PDA to
abstemiously cater
to those who’d subjugate a
self you’ve not revealed
may further make the straighter
subconsciously equate a
same-sex love display to
a sin that’s best concealed.
Day 24, inspired by the rhyme dipterocarpaceous and veracious, to be sung to the tune of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious:
My dictionary says some plants are dipterocarpaceous,
even though it sounds like that is doubtfully veracious.
Lots of plant clades sound like this; it’s really not fallacious!
Caryophyll- amaryllid- hamamelidaceous!
I then got distracted by life for a while and wrote more poems in May, but let’s pretend they correspond to days in April.
Day 25, inspired by the non-rhotic rhymes intersected, unexpected, and sectored:
In a culture split and sectored
sometimes came the unexpected
when two groups who both were hectored
saw their interests intersected.
Day 26, inspired by the rhyme anaphylactic and intergalactic:
In an immune system intergalactic
dark energy swells in repulsive analogy
for self-versus-self, a matter of allergy,
and the Big Rip apocalypse anaphylactic.
Day 27, inspired by the rhyme subsistence and coexistence:
Species risk extinction and your
stocks deplete if you seek grandeur.
If instead you seek subsistence,
you might sustain that coexistence.
Day 28, inspired by hearing about someone being asked this question, to be sung to the tune of Tom Lehrer’s song L-Y:
You love with your minds and hearts
but also have matching parts.
“How do you two have sex?” acquaintances pry.
Consensually, consensually, consensual-L-Y.
Day 29, inspired by the fact that May 12 was both Mother’s Day in America and the first Women in Mathematics Day:
Today’s the day we stand beside
the women who have multiplied,
divided, added, and subtracted,
extrapolated, and abstracted
such that all of us were raised
to heights and powers that amazed.
Day 30, written as I was compiling this post, inspired by the rhyme mallets and ballots:
Some pound pavement swaying ballots,
Some pound foes, build walls with mallets
Some pound notes are worth less… well it’s
some pound of flesh to buy and sell us.
∎
My Performances on JoCo Cruise 2019
Posted by Angela Brett in Holiday Highlights, video on April 14, 2019
I’ve been going to JoCo Cruise since it started in 2011, and this year I finally had the nerve and organisation (okay, so actually Phil organised it) to take part in running a shadow event. What with this and MarsCon, apparently 2019 is my year for getting on stage at events I’ve long frequented.
There are many official celebrity guests on JoCo Cruise, but anyone can request a space and time to host their own events, whether concerts, crafting workshops, jam sessions, locksports seminars, hydrating face mask parties, PGP signing parties, space dog slideshows, scotch or foreign snack tastings, meetups of people who are various flavours of non-heteronormative, religious, merfolk, impaired, purple-haired, or scientists, or just a session of yelling at the moon. All of these things are real events that happened this year. This ‘shadow’ cruise, as it’s called, took up 292 of the 605 hours of programming.
My little corner of that was Angela Brett & Phil Conrad with Friends, later referred to as the ‘Hastily Assembled Entertainment Taco’, after the official event ‘Hastily Assembled Entertainment Burrito‘. The friends involved included Randy Parcel on vocals, Ryan Nathan on drums, Joey Marianer on vocals and ukulele, and Jeff Kahan on oboe. You can see the full show in the YouTube playlist below, or read on as I self-indulgently embed the specific parts I had a hand in, along with a few others from the open mic night.
They Might Not Be Giants video
Posted by Angela Brett in News on December 20, 2017
When I commissioned Len Peralta to illustrate my poem They Might Not Be Giants for a poster, I paid a little extra to get a speed-paint video of its creation. This was partly because I love watching how Len draws things, but also because I wanted to make a video that would showcase both the poster and the poem. Well, I finally got around to making that video. Here you can watch Len illustrate the poster (sped up, but probably not by as much as you think, because he’s pretty fast) while listening to me read the poem:
I’ve also collected all the videos I have of this poem (my performances, and Joey’s song) in a playlist, in case you’d like to hear the same words several times, or see how it’s changed over time, or whatever. I just like making playlists, okay?
If you’d like a copy of the poster, check my Things to Buy page for information on how to buy it. Or, if you happen to live in Vienna, catch me at one of the open mic nights some time; I usually have posters and bookmarks with me.
Unintentional Haiku in New Scientist’s Medical Frontiers: The Movie
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector on July 19, 2015
I’ve made a new version of Haiku Detector. The main changes are:
- Performance improvements
- Tweaks to which haiku are identified when punctuation is pronounced differently depending on line breaks and other factors (this includes a workaround for the ‘all numbers pronounced as zero’ bug I found in the speech synthesiser.) In my test data the list of haiku identified is better now.
- Bug fixes.
To celebrate the new release, I fed in the text from the latest New Scientist ‘Collection’ issue, on medical frontiers. The funniest haiku arose when the last sentence of one article joined up with the headline and byline of the next. For example, this looks like the tagline of a movie about an underappreciated superhero, fighting to save anti-vaxxers from diseases of yore:
They will not thank you.
Dan Jones FIGHTING INFECTION
Small shot, big impact
After the opening credits, we see our hero Dan Jones in his lab, and the subtitle announcing his first challenge.
DRUG: Chlorotoxin
SOURCE: Deathstalker scorpion
CONDITION: Cancer
His superpowers come, of course, from vaccines:
Some vaccines seem to
provide us with a host of
extra benefits
But not everybody is happy with that:
Several groups have been
trying to develop drugs
that block these signals.
These groups spread propaganda:
Half an hour or
so later, you’ll feel a lot
better. Or will you?
They work around rules:
“Because we use cells,
not field-grown plants, we don’t come
under the same rules.”
And they target humanity by zapping the very microorganisms they’re made up of. Here’s a quote from the evil mastermind:
There are more cells in
your body than there are stars
in the galaxy.
These cells can then be
killed using a laser that
penetrates the skin.
And just when Dan thought he had the solution, the problems compounded to the point of suspension of disbelief, precipitating a crisis. The mastermind had cooked up her own microbial minions:
Those microbes can be
in the environment or
a vaccine syringe.
To make matters worse,
there is a shortage of new
antibiotics.
The sequel, which may or may not be a Doctor Who crossover, features a heroine who will live forever:
“Just endless.” Helen
Thomson REGENERATION
Let’s get physical
Yep, it’s definitely a Doctor Who crossover. Here’s a quote from that movie:
“I’m the doctor. I’m
going to tell you what your
feelings really mean.”
She discovered that time, and specifically time travel, is the best cure for a broken heart:
If we can’t fix hearts
with stem cells there might be an
even better way
As the animal
was slowly warmed, it began
to return to life.
But however clever the TARDIS is, there’s one thing Helen Thomson isn’t sure she can do:
But can we ever
turn the clock back to a world
without HIV?
It turned out, weirdly enough, that the answer was in making sure there was enough shelf space for one’s awards. So she went home to Britain to save the Officers of the British Empire:
On her return home,
she applied those lessons in
British hospitals.
So far, two patients
have had OBEs, but neither in
a room with a shelf…
While we’re making sequels, let’s revive an old favourite, which never had any sequels:
The matrix holds a
dazzling array of future
possibilities.
But what is the matrix?
Normally, matrix
is harvested from human
or pig cadavers.
I guess you have to see it for yourself.
They Might Not Be Giants Posters, now touched by my own hands
Posted by Angela Brett in Holiday Highlights, News on February 25, 2015
Note: I am back in Europe now, and have the posters available on my Etsy store, which are good value for anyone ordering from Europe. From the US it may work out better to get them from Zazzle.
At the Presidential Variety Show, and later the Open Mic Night, on JoCo Cruise Crazy 5, I recited my poem ‘They might not be giants.‘ Here’s a video from the Open Mic; pretend I said that ‘I was waiting for the shaking to stop’ was the name of my Taylor Swift cover band.
I brought along some locally-printed copies of this Len-Peralta-drawn poster of the poem, since I figured people would like them, and if they bought the ones on Zazzle they’d have to give a lot of extra money to Zazzle and the postal service.
The posters I printed are 11×17 inches (approximately A3) on 300gsm silk-coated stock, which is really quite fancy and sturdy. Quite a few people wanted them, which meant (since we’re not supposed to sell things while onboard, and I was mostly able to resist the urge to give them away) I had more fruity drinks and other items than I otherwise would have, plus some cash from sea monkeys I saw on land. But some people who wanted posters didn’t manage to catch me at the right time to get one. I have some posters left, which you can order from my Etsy store. (Note: when I wrote this post originally, I was temporarily in New Zealand, and it was economical for me to send posters to the US for a lowish price. That is no longer the case, so I have updated the post with a link to my Etsy store which has the correct postage from Austria.) If you’re in Europe, the combined price is slightly lower than from Zazzle while still giving me a bigger cut and getting you a better-quality poster. It is of course better value for both of us if you order more than one at a time, since the postage costs the same amount for multiple posters unless you’re ordering a ridiculous number of them. I’m not a warehouse full of elves, nor am I on my home turf at the moment (update: okay, now I am), so I can’t make any promises about how soon I will post posters after you order, but I’ll do my best. Feel free to order from Zazzle if you prefer elven reliability.
If you want me to sign it or write some kind of message or doodle in the small area or empty space, say so in the message to the vendor when you check out (update: I am not sure if there is a way to do that on Etsy, but contact me here, on twitter, on Etsy or something). Please note that I have not settled on an official famous-person-style autograph yet, so results may vary. Also, my doodles are the doodles of a poet, not those of Len Peralta, so don’t expect them to match the quality of the rest of the poster.
If I gave you a poster on the ship and you didn’t have anything to give in return, you can donate something:
Or you could lend some money on Kiva and join the Sea Monkey team I created yesterday. I don’t have a day job at the moment, so I am no longer promising to lend poster proceeds on Kiva before using them, but I probably will anyway as long as I have enough savings to live on.
Many other things also happened on JoCo Cruise Crazy, which I might summarise when I have time. I have a lot of video to upload when I eventually get home. For now, here’s The Future Soon a cappella and Jim Boggia’s cover of Paul McCartney’s ‘Junk’.
Unintentional Haiku from New Scientist on A Better You
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector, Holidailies on December 27, 2014
It’s been a while since I’ve run an issue of New Scientist through Haiku Detector. Since I’m far behind on holidailies, here are some of the unintentional haiku in their collection issue, A Better You. There were 40 haiku all up, many of which were bylines or captions. Many others were rather underwhelming as haiku, but here are the at-least-passably-whelming ones. First, some about getting smart:
We kick off with the
most important organ in
your body: your brain.
These brain areas
are very active when you
play an instrument.
Then you have to have
the motivation to do
something about it.
Now some about what not to eat:
As a result, health
bodies are gearing up for
a “war on sugar”.
Its conclusion: there
is “no evidence” that food
can be addictive.
Is it simply that
too much sugar equals too
many calories?
Unfortunately,
recent research casts doubt on
their effectiveness.
Headlines have appeared
questioning the benefits
of eating less salt.
The last one on that topic echoes Hank Green’s thoughts on picking the right addiction:
Assuming you will
have some vices, the trick is
to choose them wisely.
Some about growing old gracefully:
Some think the effect
is simply about having
a long way to fall.
What you need is a
bit of excitement along
the way. Take some risks.
What on earth was he
doing differently? What was
cushioning the blow?
Not surprisingly,
one of the most important
is intelligence.
Learning like a child
is easy if you know how,
says David Robson
Whatever you want
to learn, it’s never too late
to charge those grey cells.
He recently took
up Chinese, and has no plans
to stop after that.
Some under the heading ‘Get physical’:
They just haven’t been
very good at telling us
what they’ve discovered.
Could exercise be
a killer lying in wait
for the unwary?
Pain may return on
finishing the exercise,
or the next morning.
So if exercise
is so beneficial, why
won’t people take it?
“I’m sorry,” he says
when I ask about the noise.
“I’m on a treadmill.”
and some recipes for success:
It seems that anger
can make us impetuous,
selfish and risk-prone.
Concentrating in
itself is not enough to
screen out distractions.
Instead of nuking
your friendly bacteria
you should nurture them.
Their wounds were slower
to heal, and they also caught
more throat infections.
One theory is that
CMV plays a key role
in immune ageing.
And good vagal tone
improves emotional and
social well-being.
In conclusion, a haiku from me:
I hope these will lead
if not to better haiku,
to a better you.
‘They might not be giants’ Poster
Posted by Angela Brett in Publishing on June 25, 2014
A while ago I wrote a poem called ‘They might not be giants‘, about the famous phrase, ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ A while later, that poem was published in Offshoots 12, the 2013 anthology of the Geneva Writers’ Group.
Ever since writing it, I’ve been thinking about how great it would be to see a picture of the tower of dwarves described. I’ve also been thinking about which plural of ‘dwarf’ is best, and a couple of grammatical and typographical decisions I made regarding the poem, but mostly I’ve been thinking about the picture. Well, I finally commissioned Len Peralta to draw that picture for me! It is gorgeous.
It is also the real reason I set up a Zazzle store; you can buy it as an 11×17 poster featuring the poem. I’ll have some printed locally as well, so if anyone near Vienna wants one they can buy one directly from me. Maybe you’d like one for yourself, or an aspiring scientist, or an inspiring teacher, or a Len Peralta fan, or an Angela Brett fan (do they exist? Edit: there is one) or even a They Might Be Giants fan who wants their poster collection to cover all possibilities. I think it’s suitable for anyone who has walls. If you know anyone who doesn’t have walls who would like some, see if you can help them find a home.
I’ve always been fascinated by Len’s videos of himself drawing, so I paid a little extra to get this mesmerising speedpaint video, which doubles as a great way to get an idea of what the poster looks like close-up. Note that the final poster has the title of the poem on it, and a few other small changes to the text.
I still can’t watch it without squeeing. It took him 2 hours, 36 minutes, which is about how long it would take me to draw a stick figure version indistinguishable from a Christmas tree.
This is actually not the first time I’ve commissioned Len to draw something for me; he also drew the picture of Jonathan Coulton transforming into an internet superstar at the beginning of a video I made to celebrate Jonathan’s Thing A Week by summarising each song in the form of a ‘roses are red’ poem. He drew most of the rest of the art in the video, too, but that was done already as part of his Visual Thing A Week project, which is the reason I know he exists.
That’s all from me. Go have fun, and tune in tomorrow for the next exciting installment of Forms and Formulae.
Nine of Hearts: ISS vs. LHC update
Posted by Angela Brett in CERN, Space Shuttle, Writing Cards and Letters on June 4, 2013
A while ago I made a somewhat whimsical but as accurate as I could manage too-much-infographic comparing many aspects of the International Space Station with the Large Hadron Collider, and jokingly asking which would win in a fight. I’ve given that a bit of an update and put an annotated text version below for those whose pdf readers don’t show annotations. More importantly, since then, I’ve seen the crew of the STS-134 mission to the space station give a talk at CERN, and wanted to ask them which was more awesome, but was in one of the few spots without a microphone, and I don’t speak as loudly as my friend Hugo, who asked a question from right next to me, does. But at a later talk at CERN, I did ask NASA’s Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, William H. Gerstenmaier. This was his response, which you can find at around 50:45 in the video:
Oh, man. This is a tough question; I don’t know. They’re both unique in their own way, right? Both pretty special research facilities, right? And I think that, again we often talk about, you know, human versus robotic, right, it’s really human all the time, right? Even in a robotic space, the data’s analyzed by a human somewhere, and so, I think again it’s that spirit of exploration that we’re all pushing on. We all want to understand something new, discover something that nobody’s seen before, so at CERN, damn sure, that spirit drives you every day, you’re looking for new things. I see it in your papers: what is this theory? Are we changing physics? It’s the same thing we’re doing. How can I look at a physical phenomenon that occurs in one gravity, remove the one gravity term, and now get a totally different perspective on that same physical phenomenon, that then allows me to advance in a different area. So I think it’s that same passion that drives people. But I don’t know which one’s best.
So there you go. I’ve added this comment to the notes in the TMIGraphic, and also updated data relating to the ISS’s orbit and a few other things, and added a ‘Getting to Orbit’ section, but the best thing is the update to that ‘when to see it’ bubble on the LHC. You can see it at the CERN open days at the end of September. Two full days. The LHC is shut down for upgrades at the moment, so I understand this will be another chance to actually go underground and see it, which probably won’t be possible for a while once it starts running again. And even if you don’t see the LHC or its detectors (there are only so many people that you can get up and down in a lift in two days; 23 000 people out of 53 000 visitors visited the tunnels in one day last time), there are many other things you can see at the open day. I know this because I was at the last one. Maybe I should look through whatever videos I took that day and see if I can make an interesting montage. I know I have footage from various other tours which I should put online.
The pdf version of the ISS vs. LHC comparison has a lot of links and extra notes in the margins detailing where I got the figures from, how I chose the sources, how I found myself gingerly plugging values into a relativistic equation at a demoparty at 1:30a.m, and so on. But I suspect not everyone who looked at the original downloaded the pdf, and those who did might not have been using pdf readers that showed the notes well. Besides that, the infographic is sort of messy (that’s why I call it a too-much-infographic), although I think it does add something to the raw text. So I’ll reproduce all of the text and notes in table format below, show a far-too-small preview of the TMIGraphic version, and encourage you to download the pdf if you like circles and crisscrossing dashed lines and things that can be read while offline.
Sorry if the line spacing is inconsistent in this table; WordPress changes the style for the second and later paragraphs in each cell no matter how I create the paragraph breaks, and it tends to delete newlines, paragraph and break tags if I ever open the page in the visual editor, so the best I can do is put blank lines before the first paragraph in each cell to give that the same style, and then try not to accidentally open the post in the visual editor.
| Aspect | ISS | LHC | Notes |
| Physical Characteristics | |||
| Size |
Solar array: 73m Truss: 109m Modules: 51m |
Dipole magnets: Cold mass diameter: 0.57m Vacuum vessel diameter: 0.91m Length: 15m See the ‘Orbit’ section for the size of the entire LHC. |
Source for ISS size |
| Mass | 419 455kg (but it depends what’s up there) | 37 600 000kg (cold mass) 35 200kg (detector mass, not counting MoEDAL) |
The ISS mass doesn’t include the contents of the station or any spacecraft docked to it. You’ll find different masses around the place depending on what they take into account.The LHC mass is much more than that (calculated from CERN FAQ – LHC the guide: “4700 tonnes of material in each of the eight sectors”.) The 1232 35-tonne dipole magnets alone weigh 43120 tonnes, and there are another 8468 smaller magnets, and many other things. But only 30 tonnes of each of those dipoles is cooled (by 120 tonnes of liquid helium and 10 080 tonnes of liquid nitrogen) As my friend Rob Lambert (who works on LHCb) says: It's difficult to define the mass of "the LHC", because you'd probably want to weigh the concrete in the tunnel walls […] I think the "cold mass" is the best comparison to make, since that is sort of like the LHC payload. The rest is sort of comparable to the shuttles/boosters used to get the materiel up to the space station, which weighs a lot more than the station itself, of course. |
| Weight |
368 730 000N (just the cold stuff, ignoring altitude) |
at least 3 614 899N (using the stated mass at 422km altitude, the point of the ISS’s current orbit where it weighs the least) |
For the LHC, this is just a simple matter of multiplying the mass above with standard gravity. The exact gravity where the LHC is wouldn’t be exactly that, due to the altitude, the distance below the surface, the mountains, the tides (which the LHC itself is sensitive can detect) and all sorts of other things that I don’t know how to calculate.As for the ISS, you might think the station is weightless, but it’s not; it’s in orbit. There’s still gravity up there, just a bit weaker than on the ground (where the station would weigh about 4 109 084N.) The station’s weight keeps it falling toward the Earth all the time. It’s just moving along fast enough that the Earth curves away beneath it, so it doesn’t get any closer to the ground. Things on the station seem weightless because they’re in free fall.Here’s a website which gives the formulas to calculate the force of gravity between two objects, and will calculate it for you. I used 5.97219e21 metric tons for the weight of the Earth, 419455kg for the weight of the station, and 6800km for the distance between them (the radius of the Earth, plus 422km.) I probably shouldn’t give the result that many significant figures. |
| Pressure | Inside: 760Torr (1 atm) Outside: 10-10 — 5×10-8 Torr |
For the ISS, this is actually the pressure at 500km; the closest altitude I could find authoritative-enough figures for. Outside the station, closer to Earth’s atmosphere, the value should be toward the high end of this range.I had a lot of trouble finding an answer to this seemingly-simple question; I found figures which varied by a factor of a billion. In fact it only varies by a factor of 20 depending on the space weather. | |
| Temperature | Inside: ~24°C Outside: -157—121°C |
Inside: -271.3°C Outside: ~20°C Lead collision point: 5.5 trillion °C |
When I first did this comparison, it was possible to check the inside temperature of the space station in real time here at the bottom right, but the temperature doesn’t show for me any more.The inside temperature of the LHC is the temperature of the cold mass of the magnets, given here.The ‘Outside’ temperature is actually the temperature of the LHCb cavern when the detector is turned off. I assume the LHC tunnel should be about the same temperature. 5.5 trillion degrees is an estimate from this Nature blog post. This CERN page says: When two beams of lead ions collide, they will generate temperatures more than 100 000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun, concentrated within a minuscule space. |
| Power | 84kW from solar arrays |
120MW from French and Swiss grid (including the base load for the whole site) |
Of the LHC total, LHC cryogenics uses 27.5 MW and the LHC experiments use 22 MW. It’s hard to say how much of the rest goes toward LHC-related computing, lighting, coffee-brewing etc, and how much goes to the many other experiments and activities at CERN. |
| Orbit and Altitude | |||
| Altitude | 408km — 422km (on 2 June 2013. Has been as low as 331.5km) |
175m — 50m below ground about 450m—380m above sea level |
Here is a nice graph of the ISS’s altitude from launch to 2009. Here’s the source for the LHC depth figures, and an explanation of why it was built underground. I estimated the altitude above sea level going by altitudes in Google Earth at roughly the points where the LHC is deepest and shallowest. I need to find better figures for this. |
| Orbit Diameter | 13 558—13 586km (on 2 June 2013) |
8485m | I used the mean Earth radius of 6371km to calculate the orbit diameter of the ISS, . I guess I should have calculated the diameter at the actual angle the ISS orbits at, but as a maths major I don’t trust my arithmetic. |
| Orbital Speed | 7 666.2m/s (on 2 June 2012) |
protons at 7TeV: 299 792 455m/s (3m/s slower than the speed of light) lead ions at 2.76 TeV per nucleon: 299 792 441m/s (17m/s slower than the speed of light) |
You can check the ISS orbital speed in real time. Protons haven’t circulated in the LHC at 7TeV yet, but they will. I got the 2.76TeV figure from the LHC FAQ document (which is very comprehensive and interesting, by the way. I recommend it.) A nucleon is just a proton or neutron. But I couldn’t find the actual speed, so I calculated it using this formula at 1:30a.m. I’m a maths major, so I can’t guarantee its correctness. Wolfram Alpha can calculate this by itself if you ask it ‘relativistic speed of 2.76 TeV proton’ but the answer is so near to the speed of light that it rounds it off to 1c. |
| Orbital Period | ~92 minutes |
88.928µs (11245 orbits per second) either protons or lead ions at full energy |
The ISS data used to be on the real-time tracking page listed previously, and the LHC figures were here. I’m going to need to find new sources for those. |
| Getting to Orbit | Zarya and Zvezda modules launched by Proton rockets Pirs and Poisk launched by Soyuz-U rockets Everything else launched by Space Shuttle with the help of its solid rocket boosters | Protons accelerated by Linac 2, then the Proton Synchrotron Booster, the Proton Synchrotron, Super Proton Synchrotron, and finally the LHC | It’s all about protons and boosters. I’m all about tenuous connections and dubious puns. |
| Particle Detectors | |||
| Detectors | AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) Calibrated using proton beam Real data from cosmic rays |
CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) Calibrated using cosmic rays Real data from proton beam |
AMS was designed at CERN, and one of those proton beams came from the Super Proton Synchrotron, which also accelerates protons to inject them into the Large Hadron Collider (see also the bottom half of the too-much-infographic.) The AMS control room is also at CERN.For a while the AMS was just across the road from my office. I took a few pictures of it just before it left, with my phone since my camera was broken at the time. One is shown below. The astronauts who installed it gave a talk at CERN a year after the installation, which you can watch online. |
| TOTEM In development |
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| LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) Calibrated using cosmic rays Real data from proton beam |
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| MoEDAL (The Monopole & Exotics Detector at the LHC) In development |
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| ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) Calibrated using cosmic rays Real data from proton beam |
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| LHCf (Large Hadron Collider forward) Simulating cosmic rays using proton beam |
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| ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) Calibrated using cosmic rays Real data from proton beam |
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| Construction | |||
| Countries Involved | 16 | 111 | The International Space Station’s Facebook page and also the International Cooperation page say 15 nations. NASA’s Human Space Flight FAQ says 16. I went with the higher number, because people from other countries are probably involved anyway. I know that at CERN, it’s usually the countries of the institutions that are counted, when there might be people from many other countries working for those institutions. Here is a list of countries involved in CERN. As a maths major, I don’t trust my counting abilities, so I got the 111 figure from the LHC UK site. As explained above, the real number is probably higher. |
| Conceived |
1976 (Mir-2) 1984 (Freedom) 1986 (Columbus) 1993 (ISS) |
1984 | Here’s an interesting document on the conception of the ISS, which was essentially the coming together of several separate space station projects. The idea for the LHC (sometimes called the Juratron in early papers, after the Jura mountains) had been floating around since 1977 (see this talk by Lyn Evans for a nice history of the LHC) but 1984 was the date of the first conference about it. The idea was officially approved in 1994. |
| On-site Assembly | 1998—2013 | 1998—2008 | Of course, this depends what you count. The LHC date is from the start of civil engineering to the completion of the beam pipe around the entire circuit including the detectors. There was a huge repair effort after the cooling leak in 2008, and there’s work going on right now to upgrade the detectors and get the LHC itself up to the original design energy of 7TeV. |
| Operational Since | 2000 (first astronauts) |
2008 (first beam) 2009 (first collisions) |
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| Operational Until | 2020 | 2022 (after which it will be upgraded) |
Some sources say the ISS could run till 2025 or 2028, but for now it’s officially funded until 2020. There are so many plans for upgrades and successors to the LHC that I’m a little confused as to when the LHC itself actually shuts off, but I’m going by the diagram in this article. |
| Estimated Budget |
$72.4billion in 2010 dollars unofficial calculation, not counting shuttle missions |
CHF6 billion | Having a real-life space station occupied continuously for nearly 13 years, and finding out what the universe is made of? Priceless! For the LHC, the figure of 4.6 billion is given here, but I chose the CERN FAQ/LHC Guide as the reference since it is newer and probably more carefully checked by more people. This was the booklet given out to volunteers at the 2008 open day. |
| Transport | |||
| To/From |
Shuttles driven by ISS personnel (Kennedy Space Center to/from ISS, 1998—2011) Soyuz driven by ISS personnel (Baikonur Cosmodrome to/from ISS, 2000—present) |
Powered flight (Geneva Airport to/from any airport on Earth) Shuttle driven by ISS personnel (Geneva Airport to/from CERN Meyrin site) |
Here is a picture of an ISS employee driving a CERN shuttle: |
| Around | Unpowered flight | Shuttles driven by ISS personnel between various CERN sites | |
| Unmanned cargo transport |
H-II Transfer Vehicle (Tanegashima Space Center to/from ISS) Progress (Baikonur Cosmodrome to/from ISS) Automated Transfer Vehicle (Guiana Space Center to/from ISS) |
ROCLA magnet transport robots Magnet alignment robots |
I saw an explanation of the CERN robots at an event in Microcosm years ago, but haven’t been able to find much information on them online. |
| Outcomes | |||
| Challenges Faced |
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The bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread. | |
| Science | 121 “International Space Station” papers on arxiv.org |
more than 1000 “Large Hadron Collider” papers on arxiv.org | The paper count for ISS is from August 2012; when I checked again in June 2013, the count was 116, but I assume the other papers still exist. In any case, this is only a rough idea of how much science has been done with the help of the ISS. It shouldn’t be taken as a serious estimate of the benefits thereof. |
| Fiction | Only fictional space stations can destroy a planet with an energy beam. | Only fictional particle accelerators can destroy a planet with their energy beams. | I haven’t even seen Star Wars and I still managed to get a reference in. |
| Spinoffs |
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You can see more about NASA technology spinoffs, search for NASA technology available for licensing, or find out about CERN technology transfer. |
| When to see it | As it passes overhead just before dawn or just after sunset | When it’s not running; ideally the 2013 Open Days. | If you set your location and follow @twisst on Twitter, you can be notified whenever there will be a visible ISS pass in your area.You can see CERN’s other exhibitions, or book guided tours at any time. |
| Overall | |||
| Awesomeness |
★★★★★ Most awesome man-made thing in Earth orbit. Don’t make me compare it with Mars rovers. |
★★★★★ Most awesome man-made thing on Earth. |
They’re both unique in their own way, right? Both pretty special research facilities, right? […] I think again it’s that spirit of exploration that we’re all pushing on. We all want to understand something new, discover something that nobody’s seen before, so at CERN, damn sure, that spirit drives you every day, you’re looking for new things. I see it in your papers: what is this theory? Are we changing physics? It’s the same thing we’re doing. How can I look at a physical phenomenon that occurs in one gravity, remove the one gravity term, and now get a totally different perspective on that same physical phenomenon, that then allows me to advance in a different area. So I think it’s that same passion that drives people. But I don’t know which one’s best. — William H. Gerstenmaier at CERN on 6 November 2012 |
It turns out I can read fake plqaD.
Posted by Angela Brett in News on March 5, 2013
21 hours and already two posts ago, I linked to my post about the program I wrote for exploring grapheme colour synaesthesia. So I happened to look at that post again, and realised that despite the fact I learnt the words to Chicken Monkey Duck without any reference to the personally-coloured lyrics (Mac users: download the file and open it in TextEdit to see the text with coloured outlines matching the initial letters, which the box.net preview doesn’t show. Windows users: sorry, I’ve noticed Windows rtf viewers don’t show outlines) I made, I could still start to answer some of the questions. I asked, among other things:
- Could grapheme-colour synaesthetes learn to look at a sequence of colours that correspond to letters in their synaesthesia, and read a word?
- Could colours be used to help grapheme-colour synaesthetes learn to read a new alphabet, either one constructed for the purposes of secret communication, or a real script they will be able to use for something?
And I included this picture of some text in a supposedly-Klingon font (though it does not seem to be quite the same as plqaD; I am not sure why I didn’t find this font at the time) with the letters coloured according to my own grapheme-colour synaesthesia for the corresponding letters in the latin alphabet:
Looking at it today, I realised I couldn’t remember what the text was; I wrote that post ten months ago. It definitely wasn’t ‘How razorback-jumping frogs can level six piqued gymnasts!’ So I decided to see if I could figure it out based on the colours.
The first and second words I figured out in seconds: Swimming is. S, W and I are pretty distinctive colours, and the Ms even look like Ms. Then… teemncgc? No, that’s not a g. I can imagine a capital G in that sort of colour, but I’m using small-g colour for the ‘g’s, and anyway the letter is a different shape. It’s an H! And that’s not an n but a u; they’re fairly similar. Actually I’d say u is closer to a c-yellow than to n-yellow, so maybe I put that one in wrong. So Swimming is tee? much like (‘like’ is easy to read once I figure out it’s an l rather than a c; I love the colour of the letter K) mathing? No, bathing! M and B are pretty similar colours. So that’s not tee… it’s slightly grayer… logically it must be too. I guess I don’t think too much about the colour of the letter O, but that’s about right. Swimming is too much like… bathing. Okay, I’m googling that; I assume I took a Klingon quote from the internet. Yep, it’s Worf.
So yes, at least one grapheme-colour synaesthete can look at a sequence of colours that correspond to letters in their synaesthesia, and read a word. As for the second question, I haven’t really learnt much of the Klingon ‘alphabet’ from this, because I’ve been reading the colours and only paying attention to the shapes of the letters when two letters are of similar colour. The colours mean I can cheat and not even look at the shapes, so they might actually make it harder for me to learn the shapes in the short term. On the other hand, I can read more, more quickly, since I’ll never have to refer to a chart to look up which letters the shapes correspond to. I suspect that practice reading the colours (perhaps gradually fading to black) would help me learn the shapes in the long run.
I haven’t touched the Synaesthetist app since I wrote it; maybe I should go back and implement some of the features I was thinking about.
Jack of Diamonds: They might not be giants
Posted by Angela Brett in 54 Costumes of Manneken-Pis, Writing Cards and Letters on October 7, 2012
Note: this poem is now available on a poster!
“If I have seen farther,” the scientist said,
“it’s not because I am a giant.
“Great minds of the past have helped me get ahead;
it’s their shoulders on which I’m reliant.”
“Now listen to me!” said the great on whose shoulder
the first one was glad to have stood.
“I’m quite short of stature, it’s just that I’m older
and those before me were so good.”
And sure enough, this one was perched on the neck
of a giantist of great renown
who balanced in turn on another; by heck!
It’s little guys all the way down.
And some were thought giants, and some were thought midgets
and some were thought nothing at all,
but each would insist, “Those below were no idjits.
It’s them that have made me so tall.”
And scrambling around them their fans would aspire,
to see something not seen before
by climbing the tower of dwarves, ever higher
for glimpses, or footholds, or more.
Most could not scale to the summit in time,
before their peak fitness would end.
Some found it tough and abandoned the climb
while some would, with vigor, descend:
Aware that such heights were so taxing to reach,
they helped to lift people and hopes,
inventing new ladders and platforms to teach,
securing and showing the ropes.
“They might not be giants, but they must go far
and that journey isn’t for me.
I’ll boost them through science, raise them and the bar
and profit from what they will see.”
So said the teacher while lifting a child
on shoulders so humble and stressed.
The youth saw a vista that had them beguiled
and bounded straight up to the crest.
Quotes similar to “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” have been attributed to many scientists and scholars. It’s been bugging me for a while, because even if the people whose shoulders they’re standing on are metaphorically taller than average, they’re nowhere near as big as how giants are imagined today, and they’re surely standing on someone else’s shoulders. There are no giants; it’s a tower of dwarves, and if it ever looks like it’s made of ivory, it’s just because the dwarves don’t spend enough time in the sun. You don’t need to be a giant to get up onto the topmost shoulders, but you need to do an awful lot of climbing; there’s a lot to learn before you can discover something new these days. Enjoy the view on the way up.
Luckily, we have people who invent new climbing techniques and equipment, and telescopes to see more when we get up there. This poem focusses more on teachers, but they could be science writers, YouTubers, educational charities, scientific songwriters (yes, even the ones that might be giants), inventors of more efficient lab equipment (the real or metaphorical telescope), maybe even code monkeys like me. Now that I’ve listed those things, it reminds me of the song ‘Somebody Will‘ by Sassafrass.
I would love to see illustrations of the tower of dwarves.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 
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