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.
Como o software / consultoría persoas, we encounter many difficult business requirements in our career. Most the time, we love meeting those requirements and in fact, 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, at this time and place in world history? Eu creo que: pretty terrible.
Over the years, some of the requirements I’ve faced have been extremely challenging to meet. Complex SharePoint stuff, building web processing frameworks based on non-web-friendly technology, complex BizTalk orchestrations and the like. We can all (esperanza) mirar para atrás con orgullo na nosa carreira e dicir, "yeah, que foi difícil de resolver, pero ao final eu pwned que sumbitch!" Mellor aínda, retos aínda máis interesantes e divertidos agardar.
Eu persoalmente creo que o meu currículo, a este respecto, é moi profundo e estou moi orgulloso del (aínda que eu saiba que a miña muller non vai entender 1/20th del). But this week, Eu estaba lendo un artigo sobre o Large Hadron Collider in my Scientific American magazine and had one of those rare humbling moments where I realized that despite my "giant" estado en certos círculos ou quão profundo Creo que o meu pozo de experiencia, 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 (aínda que eu fose moi desconfiado sobre iso dende que eu aprendín está desacelerando a rotación da Terra, que non pode ser bo para nós seres humanos a longo prazo). Pero, the LHC team does have to worry. LHC’s measuring devices are so sensitive that they are affected by the Moon’s (Terra-rotación desaceleración e-eventualmente-morte-all-vida) gravity. That’s a heck of a requirement to meet — producir medidas correctas pesar da interferencia da Lúa.
Eu estaba reflexionando sobre esta cuestión cando lin esta frase: "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.
Next time I’m out with some friends, I’m going to raise a toast to the good people working on the 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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