Re: Electrostatic actuators to move robots legs...

How do little pieces of paper defy gravity when you put a charged comb near them? Isn't the energy supplied by rubbing the comb against some material to give it the charge to attract the paper? Where does the voltage come from which is applied to the bag electrodes?

Didn't we discuss something like this not too long ago, or was it in another NG?

That was right here in s.e.d in July. And no, thermodynamics, or rather conservation of energy is not violated. It never is.

I don't think that they can get useful amounts of work out of these things. The Science Daily article is useless, as always, and I did not bother to read the paper.

Jeroen Belleman

CERN is about fundamental, not applied, research. It doesn't spend trillions either. Its annual budget is about 1.2 billion. It provides the hardware and infrastructure for high energy physics research. Many thousands of scientists flock together there to use its facilities.

The results of high energy research may have been a bit disappointing lately. That's the nature of fundamental research. You don't know if you'll find something immediately useful.

The real purpose of CERN is to gather and keep an active community of smart minds in Europe. This produces plenty of spin-offs that eventually contribute to a dynamic and innovative economy. Money spent by CERN directly benefits thousands of businesses in all of its member states and beyond. Many start-ups are created by CERN alumni or by other enterprising individuals who perceive the opportunities.

Nations apparently still appreciate CERN. The number of member states is steadily increasing. The current count is 24, but ten more are still in the pipeline. Even non-member states get to cooperate in its projects. Japan, the USA, and until recently Russia have contributed hugely and eagerly. Most nations of the world have international cooperation agreements with CERN.

CERN also has a teaching function. Young scientists get to learn the ropes of research. All this in an international environment where you get to work with people of all nations and cultures. That in itself is precious.

Jeroen Belleman

Kicad and web browsers are quite useful, even if the physics is of no interest to you.

I think Berners-Lee spent more time at CERN than that. He was a software engineer involved in data acquisition software for physics experiments. We were in the same department. I've been in meetings with him present. This was in the 1980s. We were young. The subject at the time was FastBus software libraries. FastBus was used in the LEP experiments, but it was expensive and cumbersome and never lived up to expectations. It died with the end of LEP.

The World Wide Web was just one of his pet projects that grew out of proportion. Its original aim was to make documentation more easily accessible. At the time, if you weren't in meetings, on distribution lists, or if you didn't know the right people, it was very hard to find information.

CERN was fertile ground for such a development. The infrastructure was there. There were computers everywhere. There were several kinds of networks to interconnect them. There was a lot of documentation, but it was hard to find and hard to maintain. The web addressed all that. Personally, I think it's a shame it mimicked a commonly used text formatting software of that era: SGML. Oh well.

Of course, it helps that CERN management decided to release the web software into the public domain. I invite you to imagine what it would have been like if Micro$soft, IBM or Apple had come up with it. You wouldn't have liked it nearly as much, I'm sure, if you could even afford it. In fact, Apple had something like it at the time, proprietary of course. It didn't survive, because.

Jeroen Belleman

I wasn't involved in that. The neutrinos came from the CNGS installation, a target in a beam line tangent to the SPS and sloping downwards into the earth, aimed at Gran Sasso in Italy. I recall the physicists were greatly embarrased by the precipitous publication of these obviously faulty results.

Jeroen Belleman

Science Daily is such nonsense.

"To date, all the machines they have built -- whether for factories or elsewhere -- have had one thing in common: they are powered by motors, a technology that is already 200 years old."

People "invent" some gadget that is orders of magnitude away from being useful, and press release it as a breakthrough, and it gets breathlessly published.

Anyone remember JANET?

I never used it myself, but a friend at the OU in Milton Keynes used to show me printout from discussions she had been having on JANET.

The article says he was at CERN from June to December 1980, and again from 1984 to 1993 or so.

Jeroen Belleman

Fastbus was an even stranger version of CAMAC.

We used to sell CAMAC modules and crates but passed on Fastbus, went to VME instead.

There are still a couple of people making CAMAC, I think. VME is still a sizable market.

Yes, it was very dry and desperately dull for the most part. But that was about all that was on Usenet when I first got online to bring wisdom where formerly there was but ignorance - and all pre-WWW.

Good decision. Fastbus was a monster. It wasn't all that fast either, depite being all ECL. Near the end of the 1980s, physicists had understood that too, and they embarked on the design of another monster: The Scalable Coherent Interconnect, or SCI. Thankfully, that never went anywhere, as far as I can tell. I left that department around that time and concentrated on accelerator instrumentation instead.

Jeroen Belleman

I've been to Milton Keynes, working in an old cow barn to design a tomographic atom probe.

The best thing about MK is that it's close to Oxford.

I really must disagree. The best thing about MK is Bletchley Park. It's more than possible that none of us would be here if it wasn't for the activities at Station X in the early 40s.

It's perhaps interesting to surmise that if what went on at Bletchley Park hadn't been kept secret until the mid 70s, perhaps the new town envisioned in the 60s would have been called "Bletchley" in honour and recognition of what it had done to hasten the end of World War II.

They've made a museum out of it and it's *very* well worth a visit.

The first time I vsited BP musem I was absolutely fascinated by the equipment and the expertise of the volunteers who were restoring it. A few years later I visited again - where was everything? The place had become an overpriced, ovehyped, funfair with photographs of the equipment but hardly any equipment and few, if any, knowledgeable guides.

Then I discovered the National Museum of Computing at the far end of the car park. That was where all the equipment and volunteers had gone when they were kicked out by the coporate types who took over BP. I arrived just as they were about to close, but no matter; they switched the equipment back on and gave me a personal mini-tour in the time available.

I have been back since and viewed it at leisure, with time to chat to the volunteers. Forget about visiting Bletchley Park, it's rubbish, go to the National Museum of Computing instead and have a fantastic and informative experience with people who know what they are talking about.

I visited at the end of November 2009, when it had just opened and the huts were still in a pretty rough state. It was a good time to go as it was a very cold day and there were few visitors. I was lucky on two counts. Firstly, we were shown round by Jean Valentine (who worked there during the war and had appeared on numerous "Station X" documentaries. She was one of those who entered the various settings onto the Bombe machine, and then phoned the possible decryption code to the hut where Turing worked. It was more-or-less next door, but she had no idea where it was, not even if it was at Bletchley Park!). Secondly, I was able to chat to Tony Sale for a while, as there was nobody else around. He, of course, was the driving force behind rebuilding Colossus. He had spoken with Tommy Flowers, who designed and built the original, and helped Sale with the rebuild as almost all the original documentation had been destroyed on Churchill's orders

Astounding brain power those guys had. What is it about the English that makes them such amazing thinkers? They're not so great when it comes to building things affordably and efficiently, but as conceptualists, they're simply unbeatable.