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Thursday, July 22

Geek

Units Of Measure

Today on Pixy's Science Theatre: Tales of the Very Small!

A micron, or micrometre, is one millionth of a metre, 10-6 m. A typical human hair is about 80 microns thick (the range is rather large, from 18 to 180 microns). A human red blood cell is 6 to 8 microns across; the average bacterium is between 1 and 10 microns. The wavelength of visible light is around half a micron - ranging from 0.38 microns for violet to 0.74 microns for red. The smallest features of today's computer chips are just 0.09 microns wide.

An Ångström is much smaller, one ten-thousandth of a micron, one ten-billionth of a metre, 10-10 m. Atoms are around one Ångström wide - half an Ångström for hydrogen, the smallest of all atoms. X-rays have a wavelength of around an Ångström. The double-helix of DNA is about 20 Ångströms across.

The Fermi is far smaller still, one one-hundred-thousandth of an Ångström, one quadrillionth of a metre, 10-15 m. A proton or neutron is about one Fermi in diameter.

The Planck Length is really ridiculously small: about a tenth of a billionth of a quadrillionth of a Fermi, 1.6 x 10-35 m. According to current theoretical physics, that's as small as you can go: any distance smaller than a Planck Length doesn't actually exist.

62 orders of magnitude in length
83 orders of mangitude in mass

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:32 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, July 15

Geek

Look Ma, No Hands!

Oh look, a new urgent security update!

Really, the difference between open-source software and closed-source software is not the number of bugs, but the manner in which fixes are announced. Err, and the price too.

But this time I managed to completely rebuild MuNu's Apache server with all its attentand modulary without breaking anything! As far as I know...

Update: DOH! Why the hell does the Apache install script in CPanel reset the permissions on everyone's home directory, forcing me to manually correct the settings for 113 users?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:40 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, July 14

Geek

Again!

The database archive server failed a perfectly good disk out of the RAID-5 set. A quick raidhotremove and a raidhotadd - and a 20-hour resync - and it's back again. It would be better, though, if Linux didn't fail disks out of RAID-5 volumes every time a gnat farts in the computer room.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:11 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, July 12

Geek

Shrug

Well, that was weird. No mouse, reboot, no Windows. Boot from CD, chkdsk, reboot, no windows. Put CD back in, reboot... Windows. Eh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:47 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Geek

Meeses To Pieces

My mouse - my shiny 7-button Logitech MX700 cordless optical mouse - no longer mouses. Woe!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:15 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Saturday, July 10

Geek

What Those Physicists Are Really Up To

> Theories are wonderful things. IIRC, there is some speculation that
> the photon possesses a (albeit small) nonzero mass. Also, there is
> the notion that all particles have what is called a "supersymnmetric
> dual", speculatively named the photino, neutralino, and gravitino for
> the photon, neutrino, and graviton respectively.

And squarks, sleptons, ... gluinos and higgsinos. Actually, the
supersymmetric dual of the neutrino is the sneutrino. The neutralino is
a combination of, I think, the Zino, the photino and maybe a Higgsino
that ends up being the lightest supersymmetric particle. In a number of
theories, this particle cannot decay and turns out the be a great
candidate for dark matter.

(Dwight Thieme and Aaron Bergman on rec.arts.sf.science)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, July 08

Geek

Needles And Haystacks Have Nothing On This

I have 86GB of documents here in a hundred different proprietary formats, and I am searching them for the word "pelican".

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:38 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, July 07

Geek

Inductive Reasoning And All That

The good thing about computers is if you think something is true but you're not 100% sure, you can quickly spot-check a few million examples.

Well, it's useful in my line of work, anyway.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:41 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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