The top reply there is mine, and this little exchange got me thinking. I have no idea who SnBEternally is and what their problem is. They did tell the whole of CSICON to go fuck themselves though, so there’s some animosity at least.

Anyway. So why this demand for respect? First let me clarify what I am referring to here. I do respect people’s freedom of religion, belief and speech. This is not what I’m targeting her. What I am talking about is why should I respect a given belief by default? There are numerous religious and alternative beliefs I simply cannot respect or accept because I’m a secular humanist. I don’t respect the acts of terror performed by fundamentalist Muslims. I don’t respect the hatred displayed by Christian fundamentalists towards gay people and other groups they target. I don’t respect the homoeopath who sell water and sugar for medicine to sick people. I don’t respect the anti-vaccine activist who indirectly cause great suffering for individuals and put the flock-immunity of dangerous diseases of the entire population at risk. I don’t respect the global warming denier who is too fond of their wasteful lifestyle to want to sacrifice it for the common good. I don’t respect the pope for sweeping child abuse under the rug and opposing prevention of the spreading of HIV in Africa. The list of assholes I don’t respect is long. Too long.

But let’s flip the coin and ask: Why do these people crave our respect? I don’t really give a shit if they don’t respect my world view. My world view doesn’t rely on that. It isn’t fixed. I evaluate my world view based on how well it fits with reality. Specifically I rely on scientific evidence when I make up my mind what to believe. If the evidence isn’t present I either make up my mind based on available data, or don’t form an opinion at all. I have no problem with not knowing the answer! This maybe is the key. The religious and the alternative thinking seem to demand an answer regardless of how well the answer applies to observable reality. Where did the universe come from? God made it. How does homoeopathic medicine work? Quantum mechanics does it. (As a physicist, the QM explanations for homoeopathy is complete gibberish to me). So why this craving for respect? The answer is simple I think: validation. Their world view is not self-consistent, self-evident or self-reliant, thus they need external affirmation. That is why they get so annoyed when we don’t provide this. This is also why it is a bad idea to pay too much lip service to these people. The so-called “accommodationism approach”.

Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel is about three nerdy friends in a pub. The one guy played by Chris O’Dowd (from IT Crowd) is obsessed by time travel, and tells a story about a girl he just met who claimed to be a time agent. It’s all a bit silly really, and the guys don’t quite believe him. He doesn’t really believe the story himself it turns out. Then one of the guys needs to take a leak. When he comes back from the toilet, he has been sent forward in time. There is a time-rift in the men’s room! The story quickly gets confusing with several versions of themselves in the same pub trying to avoid running into each other. Some classic time-travel elements like a post-apocalyptic version of the city in snow-clad rubble is added to the mix, as well as evil time villains. It is all delightfully absurd, and there is just enough confusion for it to not be annoying.

Well worth watching if you’re looking for a laid back British comedy film.

Sadie Crabtree – Winning Hearts and Minds for Skepticism from JREF on Vimeo.

In any case, it caused me to write a script that logs SMART-data to a MySQL database. I also wrote an admin webpage that displays this data for me in an easy to follow way. The monitoring script itself is written in php5 and so are the admin pages. I used php5 because it is easy to communicate with MySQL from it, and it has the needed string manipulation commands. It could probably be done as easily in Python though. The script is called as a cron job every 2 hours on the servers and every hour on the desktops when they’re running. Examples of the code I’m using is attached below and includes the cron-ed script and the code generating the log output and plot.

What to look for?

Well, that is the big question. How do you know if a drive is about to fail? Google Labs has looked into this topic back in 2007 in this paper: «Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population». An interesting read if you are at all concerned about harddrive failure in servers. The results for how temperature affects the lifetime and failure rate in harddrives are especially interesting. It turns out, at least in their data, that low temperature isn’t such a good thing for the drives contrary to what many people seem to assume. I have up until now been concerned that my drives get too hot, but in fact they seem to be almost overcooled the way I have things set up now.

When I wrote these scripts this summer I decided to log temperature and reallocated sector count primarily, which is what is emphasized in the log display scripts. Seems now I also should be including scan errors as well after reading that paper. The colour coding I use in the temperature plot below is loosely based on Figure 4 in the paper and reflects what seems to be the optimal operating temperature for harddrives.

Screenshots

Screenshot 1: The overview page.
Screenshot 2: Details of one of the RAID-drives.
Screenshot 3: Details of one of the drives with reallocated sectors.

Code

The php source code I wrote is available in this file: hd-mon.tar.gz

It is specifically designed to work with my setup and hardware and probably isn’t universal, but it gives an idea of how I set it up. There are probably better ways of doing this though. I just call shell commands from php and parse the returned text-string and do simple search on it and input the data into a MySQL database.

I also included php-snippets showing how the admin page is generated. These are not standalone php files, they need to be wrapped in a template. However they reproduce what is seen in the screenshots above.

Packages needed for these scripts to run:

• php5-cli for the php5 command line.
• mysql-client, php5-mysql for the database connection.
• smartctl to access the SMART-data.
• mdadm to access RAID-data (assuming you use mdadm for RAIDs in the first place)

All are available in the Ubuntu repository.

So what are the results from OPERA? Well in a nutshell from the conclusion of the presentation:

Basically what this says is that the neutrinos arrived at the detector some 730 km from the point they were created 60.7 nanoseconds before a photon would have arrived had it undertaken the same trip.

The big question is of course: are the measurements correct? The big points here are the synchronization of the clocks at both locations and the accurate measurement of the distance between them. The paper from arxiv.org linked below describes in detail how these are calibrated and how accurate they are. Another point, and this is probably where the error is made, is how they fit the plots of the arriving neutrinos. The 60 nanosecond shift produces the best fit, but I don’t think this looks very convincing (as discussed in the link to Résonaances below).

Other previous measurements of neutrinos from supernovae have not shown this result. This question was asked in the Q&A session after the presentation, and the answer given was that these are high-energy neutrinos at 17 GeV. Supernova-neutrinos are not, they’re in the 10 MeV range, so a factor of a thousand less. As you may know, nature does a lot more funky stuff at high energy than at low energy, another reason for building machines like the LHC. What needs to happen now is to have some of the other experiments try to reproduce this result at the same energies.

The article from NewScientist below also gives a possible explanation for this phenomenon using extra dimensions.

Regardless, time will show if this result is real or a fluke of some sort. If it turns out to be real, it requires explanation, and that’s where all the fun begins … for physicists at least!

Further reading:

• Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam
  (arxiv.org)
• Brian Cox on Cern’s baffling light-speed find (BBC)
• Dimension-hop may allow neutrinos to cheat light speed (NewScientist)

Other comments:

• Nothing travels faster than light but gossip! (Quantum Diaries)
• Elementary, my dear neutrino… (Quantum Diaries)
• The Phantom of OPERA (Résonaances)

Updated 24.09.2011

Now that error was not really my point for writing this, you can read all about that in the article, but the point is that immediately the “warming-denialist” trolls come crawling out from underneath their rocks making comments like:

Not surprisingly it is “Martin” and “Jan” here who gets it spectacularly wrong.

Firstly, this claim is not a “global warming pillar” as the claim by Times is clearly an error, and scientists are also pointing this out in the article. Secondly, the satellite surveillance does a lot more than just photograph the extent of the ice sheets. Modern technology is a bit more sophisticated than that. That comment is purely based in ignorance. But that seems to be the trend amongst these people. First they claim that the erroneous data or claim is a pillar of climate science—which it is not as climatologists would point out, then they further claim that global warming cannot be true based on this first misconception. You don’t need to be a rocket-surgeon to spot the logical fallacy here. Recognize it from the creationsists “god of the gaps” argument? A quick google and a read of different reports on this story shows that the vast majority of the politicised denialists argue in this fashion.

Let me enlighten you numbskulls a bit: One of the main pillars of global warming is the actual data showing … wait for it … global warming! It isn’t that tricky. But then we understand these people’s agenda. If you can deny global warming, you can deny the main suspect cause, human activity. If you can, by hiding your head in the sand, deny that we did this, you can continue your current way of life and ignore the environmental impact of your lifestyle. This is ultimately just selfishness, and so incredibly irresponsible.

livingwithoutreligion.org

Fan Service: On Losing Patience for Women Kissing
Talking about the Star Trek Deep Space Nine (one of my favourite TV-series) episode Rejoined where a female main character kisses another woman. These characters are of a race called Trill, who live in a symbiosis with a humanoid host. The story here goes that they used to be married in an earlier host or “life” and now meet again. This was a setting that allowed for a controversial scene at the time (1995)—two women kissing on TV. The blogpost makes some reflections on the topic.
Reposted from Skepchick.

Gender Gap Vanishes in Female-Empowered Cultures
Another topic that I have read a bit about lately … and watched a few BBC documentaries on. The biological difference between the brain of men and women. Interesting research showing that the differences may be even less “biological” than we’d think.
Reposted from Skepchick.

Quantum computer chips pass key milestones
So for a technology update. The article describes a new design based on superconducting electrical circuits as a competitor to current set-ups using photons or ions.
From NewScientist Physics & Math.

]]> http://blog.itsfortytwo.net/2011/09/in-the-news-part-i/feed/ 0 http://blog.itsfortytwo.net/2011/09/university-of-oslo-200-years/ http://blog.itsfortytwo.net/2011/09/university-of-oslo-200-years/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:34:19 +0000 Frank http://blog.itsfortytwo.net/?p=977 Read more »

Latest news is that the LHCb detector has not detected any anomaly in the Bs-Bsbar mixing. Bs-mesons are heavy mesons made up of a bottom-quark and a strange-quark. One matter and the other one anti-matter (the only possible way to combine two quarks due to colour-charge restrictions). These mesons however will oscillate between two states. Essentially the quarks swap who is the matter and who is the anti-matter particle through an exchange of virtual top-quarks (mostly) and W-bosons. Current physics predicts that this mixing violates conservation of charge/parity (CP), however so-called new physics—essentially what the LHC was built to find—predicts a larger violation. This has not been found. Which is disappointing. Why the need to find “new physics”? Well, because the Standard Model is incomplete. It doesn’t explain all the phenomena we observe—like dark matter for instance—so we need to figure out what’s missing from the theory.

This is also of course the case for the infamous Higgs. The last particle predicted by the Standard Model that not yet has been discovered. Not that it is far behind the rest. The top-quark wasn’t confirmed until 1995.

The problem with the Higgs is that the theoretical model (electroweak theory) of the Higgs has two unknown parameters. For this reason we don’t quite know where to find the Higgs (essentially how heavy it is). However we have a fairly good idea of how it will behave depending on how heavy it is, so we can look for signs of its presence along the mass axis in the data. The other challenge is that the Higgs resonance is in most cases so weak that it drowns in background “noise” from other more common processes. Or in other words. Many other particles do the same thing as the Higgs. Like the Z-boson. So how do you tell which did what? Well, that is the challenge.

The latest news from ATLAS and CMS is that they have excluded the Higgs from 145 to 466 GeV. The old exclusion was a lower bound of 115 GeV from back when the LEP accelerator was running at CERN and from Tevatron in the US. Tevatron also gave us an exclusion range in the 150-ish to just over 180 GeV range. The new limits now leaves us with the 115-145 GeV window. The Higgs is running out of places to hide … if it exists at all.

The relevant posts from Résonaances:

• LHCb says: no Bs anomaly
• Higgs won’t come out of the closet, part I, part II

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