Just found this online.
It's the Master Oscillator Room for the NIF laser fusion facility. It ggenerates the 192 shaped fiberoptic pulses that get amplified to free-space megajoule level to whack the hydrogen pellet in the target chamber.
The black rackmount boxes with the circular fan grilles are our fiberoptic arbitrary waveform generators.
What, no graybeards? What?s the world coming to?
3rd row, lower middle? (Hard to make out any detail...)
Nice toys. ;>)
One thing bugs me though- why do such scenes have to be lit with contrasting colors from different angles? Yours aren't as extreme as some I used to see in Sci Am or EDN or other old dead tree magazines, but still.
Mark L. Fergerson
You can see about 15 of our boxes in that pic. There are actually 48 in the racks, one for every 4 beam lines. There were going to be 192 ARBs, but some cheap SOB figured out they they could get by with 1/4 as many.
These units also show two or three vertically-arranged yellow LEDs in that photo. That's weird, because 3 of 4 of the real LEDs are green. Photos often show LEDs as the wrong color.
Here's the box:
The thing on the platform is a dual-stage lithium niobate optical modulator. We drive that to make the shaped optical waveform that whacks the target.
Geez, I've done so many weird things so far.
When you over-run by a few billion dollars, you need flashy PR.
That second picture... Oh. My. Goodness. Lockout, Tagout!
Michael
It?s so... 80?s. Whether it?s a LLNL stock photo or taken by a magazine, it?s like the photog (or editor, at the photog?s elbow) was holding an 80?s EDN issue in-hand, saying ?I think we need a bit more green...?.
You don't associate 1990s lighting with Hi-Tek?
Don't you just love those staged photo's?! I used to dread companies I worked at having the press in as they would always end up wanting photo's or video of 'something technical looking'. One especially annoying photographer wasn't happy with the square pulse images on the screen so a quick play with two sig gens and x-y inputs on the scope gave him some Space 1999 style lissajous figures on screen. He nearly wet himself with joy. Anyone 'in the know' would have realised the scope image had nothing to do with the digital board in front of me and the really eagle eyed would have noticed that the scope probe I was holding while looking intently at the scope was no longer even connected having connected a BNC lead in its place. Fun times.
Did you hear about this "piston fusion" thing that some company is experimenting with?
I guess the idea is to use a bunch of hydraulic rams to compress the fusion fuel in the core of the reactor. Apparently DSP has only recently become fast enough to servo the rams accurately enough to maybe make it feasible.
It's very steampunk...
I'm thinking mid-1920s internal combustion punk - lead added to the fuel to prevent pre-ignition and consequent holes in pistons. This was before cooling systems were sealed and cooling sometimes depended on evaporation so steam came out.
Before lead:
After lead:
The press loves old gear: tape decks, round-tube oscilloscopes, things with meters and knobs. And the people in the pics are always "examinimg" or "inspecting" "contraptions." What can you expect from journalism majors?
Even the tech mags like photos of thru-hole parts on boards.
It's funny when artsy types fake PCB layout patterns.
Den fredag den 18. marts 2016 kl. 17.06.53 UTC+1 skrev John Larkin:
-Lasse
One might argue that the whole purpose of television production is a desperate attempt to make an inherently uninteresting medium interesting.
I think studies have shown that the frequency of "jump cuts" in music videos/TV/film has steadily increased in the past 4 decades. It's at the point now that a friend of mine was showing me a music video the other day, and the jump cuts were happening so quickly that my brain couldn't even process it. Maybe there was a story or something happening in there
- who knows?
Old Tek 'scopes are beautiful when you take the sides off.
George H.
She is repairing a cold solder joint.
When journalism was first offered as a major, practicing journalists said it was like offering a "major in swimming".
The gullibility and innumeracy of the press is awesome. "Million" and "billion" are freely interchangeable. A country-eating swarm of locusts is described as "thousands." Prejudicial adjectives are flung around to let us know what side the author is on.
There should be no university majors in journalism or political science. People should learn how to do something real before they are hired to write about it or manage it.
She needs gloves. The iron could freeze her fingers.
Cheers, James Arthur
Peeve: ?decimated? used synonymously with ?devastated?.
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