Due to some oddball United Airlines flights I took in the mid 90’s, I somehow ended up with an offer to transform "unused miles" into about a dozen free magazine subscriptions. That is how I ended up subscribing to Scientific American magazine.

Og hugbúnaður / ráðgjöf fólk, we encounter many difficult business requirements in our career. Most the time, við elskum fundinn þeim kröfum og í raun, 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, á þessum stað og tíma í sögu heimsins? Ég held: nokkuð hræðileg.

Í gegnum árin, some of the requirements I’ve faced have been extremely challenging to meet. Complex SharePoint stuff, bygging vefur vinnslu ramma byggt á non-vefur-vingjarnlegur tækni, complex BizTalk orchestrations and the like. We can all (vonandi) líta stolti baka á feril okkar og segja, "yeah, sem var erfitt einn til að leysa, en á endanum ég pwned að sumbitch!" Better yet, Jafnvel fleiri áhugaverður og gaman áskoranir bíða.

Ég held persónulega að ný minn, í þessu sambandi, er nokkuð djúpt og ég er nokkuð stolt af því (þó að ég veit konan mín mun aldrei skilja 1/20th af því). But this week, Ég var að lesa grein um að Large Hadron Collider in my Scientific American magazine and had one of those rare humbling moments where I realized that despite my "giant" staða í ákveðnum hópum eða hversu djúpt ég held vel minn reynslu, 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 (þó að ég hef verið mjög grunsamlega um það síðan ég lærði að það er hægur snúningur jarðar, sem getur ekki verið gott fyrir okkur mönnum í langan tíma). En, the LHC team does have to worry. LHC’s measuring devices are so sensitive that they are affected by the Moon’s (Earth-snúningur-hægur-og-að lokum-morð-allt-líf) gravity. That’s a heck of a requirement to meet — framleiða réttar mælingar þrátt truflunum tunglsins.

Ég var að velta þessi mál þegar ég las þessa setningu: "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.

Næst þegar ég er út með nokkrum vinum, Ég ætla að hækka á ristuðu brauði til góða sem vinna á 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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