

Large Hadron Collider restarts after two-year rebuild - raverbashing
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32160755

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octoploid
[http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.ph...](http://op-
webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.php)

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Achshar
I see it makes network calls in dev tools. Is this live? Because if it is then
that's fascinating.

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espinchi
Yes, these public displays (internally called vistars or fixed displays) are a
real-time stream. Essentially the same that's being broadcasted in the Control
Center (the CCC), but at a (much) lower frame rate.

You can navigate and find others, like the ones focused on the luminosity that
the experiments are getting (not yet useful), or on the injector accelerators.

(I was working on the vistar project for a year.)

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jcrites
What kind of tools are used to build those dashboards and data streaming
systems? Anything you'd want to use for regular system monitoring? Looks like
part of it might be Gnuplot?

It reminds me a bit of the factories or refineries that have elaborate control
flow systems. In software, Netflix's Hystrix dashboards are a fun inspiration
for example: [http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/12/hystrix-dashboard-and-
tu...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/12/hystrix-dashboard-and-turbine.html)

I've always wanted to build a visualization like that for the systems I work
on :-)

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espinchi
Java Swing. Not the fanciest, I know.

We had a powerful framework to create graphical elements that display values
from the hardware.

The previous version of these displays was teletext (do you remember what that
is?), with some analog signals sometimes directly overlayed onto them. So,
considering we came from that, Java Swing is quite a technology leap :)

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pbhjpbhj
OT - SEO/Google-juice:

Glyphish domain must get some serious value out of being linked from cern.ch
pages regardless of the fact CERN about to be linked from many of the social
media sites. Wonder how much revenue that simple connection will earn.

Interestingly it seems the link was only required because CERN didn't want to
pay the $99 license?

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gpmcadam
He is reborn!

~~~
mkr-hn
Took me a minute to remember this is a religious holiday, and that this is a
joke based on it.

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EGreg
Is it just me or is the large Hadron collider really scary in how it can start
a black hole chain reaction?

~~~
ufmace
No, and here's a really detailed explanation as to why this couldn't possibly
happen:

[https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/could-the-lhc-make-
an-...](https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/could-the-lhc-make-an-earth-
killing-black-hole-886d9e600c28)

TL:DR:

1.) If these miniature black holes exist, the Earth has been getting hit by
them for billions of years, and it’s still here. 2.) If you do create a
miniature black hole, they will decay, via Hawking Radiation, on ridiculously
small timescales. 3.) You can compute the rate at which a black hole eats
matter, and it’s not even close to being as small as the lifetime of our
planet.

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blackMatterFood

      the rate at which a black hole eats matter...
    
    
      ...it’s not even close to being as small as the 
      lifetime of our planet.
    

So the duration of time in which any given black hole might eat an amount of
matter takes a lot longer than the age of the earth?

I think it's important to note that these things being discussed would
potentially be _micro_ -singularities, smaller than anything that might be
visible to the naked eye.

Otherwise, it's pretty obvious that a planetary-scale black hole could handily
destroy the earth in short order, by way of mere collision, whether consumes
all of the earth's matter beyond its event horizon or not.

...anyway, yeah, the LHC's capacity for stranglets is otherwise negligible,
and not very worrisome at all.

