Due to some oddball United Airlines flights I took in the mid 90’s, Ek het op een of ander manier geëindig met 'n aanbod te transformeer "ongebruikte myl" into about a dozen free magazine subscriptions. Dit is hoe ek geëindig inskrywing wetenskaplike Amerikaanse tydskrif.
As sagteware / raadgewende mense, we encounter many difficult business requirements in our career. Most the time, we love meeting those requirements and in fact, it’s probably why we think this career is the best in the world. I occasionally wonder just what in the world would I have done with myself if I had been born at any other time in history. How terrible would it be to miss out on the kinds of work I get to do now, at this time and place in world history? Ek dink: pretty terrible.
Over the years, some of the requirements I’ve faced have been extremely challenging to meet. Complex SharePoint stuff, building web processing frameworks based on non-web-friendly technology, complex BizTalk orchestrations and the like. We can all (hopefully) kyk met trots terug op ons loopbaan en sê, "yeah, dit was 'n harde een om te los, maar in die einde het ek pwned dat sumbitch!" Beter nog, selfs meer interessant en pret uitdagings wag.
Ek persoonlik dink dat my CV, in hierdie verband, is redelik diep en ek is baie trots op dit (al weet ek my vrou sal nooit verstaan 1/20th van dit). But this week, Ek was die lees van 'n artikel oor die Large Hadron Collider in my Scientific American magazine and had one of those rare humbling moments where I realized that despite my "giant" status in sekere kringe of hoe diep dink ek my goed ondervinding, there are real giants in completely different worlds.
The people on the LHC team have some really thorny issues to manage. Consider the Moon. I don’t really think much about the Moon (though I’ve been very suspicious about it since I learned it’s slowing the Earth’s rotation, which can’t be a good thing for us Humans in the long term). Maar, the LHC team does have to worry. LHC’s measuring devices are so sensitive that they are affected by the Moon’s (Earth-rotation-slowing-and-eventually-killing-all-life) gravity. That’s a heck of a requirement to meet — produce correct measurements despite the Moon’s interference.
I was pondering that issue when I read this sentence: "The first level will receive and analyze data from only a subset of all the detector’s components, from which it can pick out promising events based on isolated factors such as whether an energetic muon was spotted flying out at a large angle from the beam axis." Really … ? I don’t play in that kind of sandbox and never will.
Volgende keer as ek uit met 'n paar vriende, Ek gaan 'n heildronk in te samel om die goeie mense wat op die LHC, hope they don’t successfully weigh the Higgs boson particle and curse the Moon. I suggest you do the same. It will be quite the toast 🙂
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