Maszman Speaks!

The Uni­ver­sity of Rochester’s Lab­o­ra­tory for Laser Ener­get­ics has just put their new Omega EP Laser on line with a petawatt (10 to the 15^th) of power. They hope to kick off fusion reac­tions with the pow­er­ful beams of light.

I’ve toured the lab mul­ti­ple times. They have a base­ment full of large capac­i­tors to store the elec­tric charge nec­es­sary to fire the lasers since they require so much energy the pow­er­lines sim­ply can’t cope. The beams are focused using an intri­cate set of mir­rors that don’t tol­er­ate dust. One speck of dust can cause a mir­ror to heat up dur­ing fir­ing and explode. The Omega was in a room with a large crane and flecks of yel­low paint on the mir­rors was a con­tin­u­ing prob­lem. It looks like the Omega EP is in a cleaner facility.

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Orig­i­nally uploaded by tom­masz

Parts of the struc­ture over Man­hat­tan Square Park, down­town Rochester, NY.

Speed Graphic, Ilford Pan F ISO 50, 6x7, K1 fil­ter, f16 @ 1/25, scanned from the neg­a­tive.

Gosh, I hope the Chi­nese don’t boy­cott my weblog for post­ing this link to Sharon Stone.

Kid Croc

Orig­i­nally uploaded by tom­masz

One kid-sized Croc.

The Albany County Supreme court has found Dell guilty of fraud, false adver­tis­ing, decep­tive busi­ness prac­tices and abu­sive debt col­lec­tion prac­tices in a case brought by the New York attor­ney gen­eral. Dell, of course, claims their prac­tices are in line with indus­try stan­dards. Which I’m sure is true. Sadly.

It’s the only par­ti­cle physics lab in the US, but Con­gress has been cut­ting the bud­get of Fer­mi­lab to the point they were lay­ing off staff and cut­ting back hours. Now a pri­vate donor has come up $5 mil­lion, enough to get every­one back to full­time (but not to save all the jobs). Fer­mi­lab is try­ing to dis­cover the Higgs boson before it’s found by the more pow­er­ful Large Hadron Col­lider at CERN, this can only help.