Xandria

Xandria Official

Xandria is a band, founded in Bielefeld, Germany, in 1997. The band's music combines elements of symphonic metal and rock making it hard to define exactly what music genre they are part of.

After various demos and great success on different MP3 portals, they released their first album in 2003, entitled Kill the Sun, which reached #98 on the German music charts. The follow-up album, Ravenheart (2004), stayed on the charts for 7 weeks, reaching #36. In 2005 they released their third album India, which is more oriented to the symphonic metal.

Starting December 14th, 2006 Xandria began recording their fourth album, Salomé - The Seventh Veil, which was released on May 25th, 2007.

Albums

* Kill the Sun (May 3, 2003)
* Ravenheart (May 24, 2004)
* India (August 22, 2005)
* Salomé - The Seventh Veil (May 25, 2007)

Line Up

Lisa Middelhauve - Vocals, Piano
Marco Heubaum - Guitar, Keyboard
Gerit Lamm - Drums
Philip Restemeier - Guitar
Nils Middelhauve - Bass Guitar

DEC

DEC CPUs


Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC. (This acronym was frequently officially used by Digital itself, but the official name was always DIGITAL.) Its PDP and VAX products were arguably the most popular minicomputers for the scientific and engineering communities during the 1970s and 1980s. DEC was acquired by Compaq in June 1998, which subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002. As of 2007 its product lines were still produced under the HP name. From 1957 until 1992 its headquarters was in an old woolen mill in Maynard, Massachusetts.


Accomplishments

Digital supported the ANSI standards, especially the ASCII character set, which survives in Unicode and the ISO 8859 character set family. Digital's own Multinational Character Set also had a large influence on ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) and, by extension, Unicode.

The first versions of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system ran on Digital's PDP series of computers (first on a PDP-7, then the PDP-11's), which were among the first commercially viable minicomputers, although for several years Digital itself did not encourage the use of Unix.

Work on the first hard-disk-based MP3-player, the Personal Jukebox, started at the DEC Systems Research Center. (The project was started about a month before the merger into Compaq was completed.)

PDA concepts created in DEC's Western Research Lab, originally called Itsy, were incorporated into The iPaq which was developed as a successor to Compaq's own PDA, the Aero, originally developed to showcase WindowsCE using display and other technology from Nintendo color GameBoy.

...

Charon

Charon NASA

Charon discovered in 1978, is, depending on the definition employed, either the largest moon of Pluto or one member of a double dwarf planet with Pluto being the other member. With the discovery in 2005 of two other moons of Pluto (Nix and Hydra), Charon is now also referred to as Pluto I. The New Horizons mission is scheduled to visit Charon and Pluto in July 2015.


Distant Pluto and Charon (Hubble Space Telescope)

Charon appears to be covered by water ice, which differs from Pluto's surface of frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide. One theory is that the materials that formed Charon were blasted out of Pluto in a collision. That's very similar to the way in which our own moon is thought to have been created.

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and scientist who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, electrostatics, astronomy, and optics. Sometimes known as "the prince of mathematicians" and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians.

Gauss was a child prodigy, of whom there are many anecdotes pertaining to his astounding precocity while a mere toddler, and made his first ground-breaking mathematical discoveries while still a teenager. He completed Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, his magnum opus, at the age of 21 (1798), though it would not be published until 1801. This work was fundamental in consolidating number theory as a discipline and has shaped the field to the present day.


Error Function (In mathematics, the error function (also called the Gauss error function) is a non-elementary function which occurs in probability, statistics and partial differential equations.)

OLED

Sony 11" OLED

OLED Wikipedia
Comparison of Display Technology Wikipedia

An organic light-emitting diode (OLED), also Light Emitting Polymer (LEP) and Organic Electro-Luminescence (OEL), is any light-emitting diode (LED) whose emissive electroluminescent layer is comprised of a film of organic compounds. The layer usually contains a polymer substance that allows suitable organic compounds to be deposited. They are deposited in rows and columns onto a flat carrier by a simple "printing" process. The resulting matrix of pixels can emit light of different colors.

Such systems can be used in television screens, computer displays, portable system screens, advertising, information and indication. OLEDs can also be used in light sources for general space illumination, and large-area light-emitting elements. OLEDs typically emit less light per area than inorganic solid-state based LEDs which are usually designed for use as point-light sources.

A great benefit of OLED displays over traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) is that OLEDs do not require a backlight to function. Thus they draw far less power and, when powered from a battery, can operate longer on the same charge. OLED-based display devices also can be more effectively manufactured than LCDs and plasma displays. But degradation of OLED materials has limited the use of these materials.

Bernanose and co-workers first produced electroluminescence in organic materials in the early 1950s by applying a high-voltage alternating current (AC) field to crystalline thin films of acridine orange and quinacrine. In 1960, researchers at Dow Chemical developed AC-driven electroluminescent cells using doped anthracene.

The low electrical conductivity of such materials limited light output until more conductive organic materials became available, especially the polyacetylene, polypyrrole, and polyaniline "Blacks". In a 1963 series of papers, Weiss et al. first reported high conductivity in iodine-doped oxidized polypyrrole. They achieved a conductivity of 1 S/cm. Unfortunately, this discovery was "lost", as was a 1974 report of a melanin-based bistable switch with a high conductivity "ON" state. This material emitted a flash of light when it switched.

In a subsequent 1977 paper, Shirakawa et al. reported high conductivity in similarly oxidized and iodine-doped polyacetylene. Heeger, MacDiarmid & Shirakawa received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "The discovery and development of conductive organic polymers". The Nobel citation made no reference to the earlier discoveries.

Modern work with electroluminescence in such polymers culminated with Burroughs et al. 1990 paper in the journal Nature reporting a very-high-efficiency green-light-emitting polymer. The OLED timeline since 1996 is well documented on oled-info.com site.

Lord Of War (2005)

Lord Of War IMDb (7,7 out of 10)

Lord of War is a 2005 film written and directed by Andrew Niccol and starring Nicolas Cage. It was released in the United States on September 16, 2005, with the DVD following on January 17, 2006 and the Blu-ray Disc on July 27, 2006. Cage plays the antiheroic protagonist, an illegal arms dealer with similarities to Russian arms dealers Viktor Bout and Leonid Minin. The film was officially endorsed by the human rights group Amnesty International for highlighting the trafficking of weapons by the international arms industry.

Directed by Andrew Niccol.
Produced by Nicolas Cage, Chris Roberts, Andreas Grosch.
Written by Andrew Niccol.
Starring Nicolas Cage, Bridget Moynahan, Ethan Hawke, Jared Leto, Ian Holm.

"There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11? "

"Of all the weapons in the vast soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947. More commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle. A weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple 9 pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam, or overheat. It'll shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy, even a child can use it; and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin. Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists. One thing is for sure, no one was lining up to buy their cars. "

Epica

Epica Official

Epica is a Dutch symphonic metal band which puts emphasis on the use of operatic elements and death grunts, also performing some song passages in Latin. It was founded by guitarist and vocalist Mark Jansen subsequent to his departure from After Forever.



Line Up:

* Simone Simons - Mezzo-soprano vocals
* Mark Jansen - Guitar and grunts/screams
* Ad Sluijter - Guitar
* Yves Huts - Bass
* Coen Janssen - Synthesizer and piano

Studio albums:

* The Phantom Agony (2003)
* Consign to Oblivion (2005)
* The Score - An Epic Journey (2005)
* The Divine Conspiracy (2007)

Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)

Werner Karl Heisenberg

Werner Karl Heisenberg (December 5, 1901 – February 1, 1976) was a celebrated German physicist and Nobel laureate, one of the founders of quantum mechanics and acknowledged to be one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century. Heisenberg was the head of the German nuclear energy project under the Nazi regime, though the nature of this project, and his work in this capacity, has been heavily debated. He is most well-known for discovering one of the central principles of modern physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and for the development of quantum mechanics, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932.

"The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known."
Heisenberg, uncertainty paper, 1927

Space Invaders

Space Invaders

Space Invaders is an arcade video game designed by Tomohiro Nishikado in 1978. It was originally manufactured by Taito and licensed for production in the U.S. by the Midway division of Bally. Released initially in its native Japan in 1978, it ranks as one of the most influential video games ever created. Though simplistic by today's standards, it was one of the forerunners of modern video gaming.

openMosix

openMosix Official

openMosix is a free cluster management system that provides single-system image (SSI) capabilities, e.g. automatic work distribution among nodes. It allows program processes (not threads) to migrate to machines in the node's network that would be able to run that process faster (process migration). It is particularly useful for running parallel and intensive input/output (I/O) applications. It is released as a Linux kernel patch, but is also available on specialized LiveCDs.

openMosix was originally forked from MOSIX by Moshe Bar on February 10, 2002 when MOSIX became proprietary software.

openMosix is considered stable on Linux kernel 2.4.x for the x86 architecture, while porting to Linux 2.6 kernel is still under development. Support for the 64-bit AMD64 architecture only starts with the 2.6 version.

On July 15, 2007, Bar announced that the openMOSIX project will reach its end of life on March 1, 2008, due to the decreasing need for SSI clustering as low-cost multi-core processors increase in availability.

Benoît B. Mandelbrot

Benoît Mandelbrot Wikipedia

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, PhD, (born November 20, 1924) is a Franco-American mathematician, best known as the "father of fractal geometry". He was born in Poland, but his family moved to France when he was a child; he is a dual French and American citizen and was educated in France. Mandelbrot now lives and works in the United States. He is Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences, Emeritus at Yale University; IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center; and Battelle Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

On his retirement from IBM in 1987, Mandelbrot joined the Yale Department of Mathematics. At the time of his retirement in 2005, he was Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences. His awards include the Wolf Prize for Physics in 1993, the Lewis Fry Richardson prize of the European Geophysical Society in 2000, the Japan Prize in 2003, and the Einstein Lectureship of the American Mathematical Society in 2006. The small planet 27500 Mandelbrot was named in his honour. On November 23, 1990, he was made a knight in the French Legion of honour.

In 2004, Mandlebrot was given the honor of being the subject of a pop song pop written by Jonathan Coulton.

In December 2005, Mandelbrot was appointed to the position of Battelle Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Mandelbrot was promoted to officer of the French Legion of honour on January 1, 2006.

"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line."

B.Mandelbrot

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 Official

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, primarily used as a research vehicle. It was developed as the research successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002. Plan 9 is most notable for representing all system interfaces, including those required for networking and the user-interface, through the filesystem rather than specialized interfaces. Plan 9 aims to provide users with a workstation-independent working environment through the use of the 9P protocols. Plan 9 continues to be used and developed in some circles as a research operating system and by hobbyists.

The name "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" is a reference to the classic science fiction B-movie Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Plan 9 replaced Unix at Bell Labs as the organization's primary platform for research and explores several changes to the original Unix model that improve the experience of using and programming the system, notably in distributed multi-user environments. Plan 9 was a Bell Labs internal project from its start during the mid 1980s. In 1992, the first public release was made available to universities. In 1995, a commercial second release version was made available to the general public. In the late 1990s, Lucent Technologies, who had inherited Bell Labs, dropped commercial interest in the project. In 2000, a non-commercial third release was made under an open source license. In 2002, a non-commercial fourth release was made under a new free software license.

A user and development community, including current and former Bell Labs and MIT members, continues to produce daily minor releases as ISO images. Bell Labs still hosts development. The development source tree is accessible over the 9P and HTTP protocols and is used to keep an installation up to date.

Hypercube

In geometry, a hypercube is an n-dimensional analogue of a square (n = 2) and a cube (n = 3). It is a closed, compact, convex figure whose 1-skeleton consists of groups of opposite parallel line segments aligned in each of the space's dimensions, at right angles to each other.

A point is a hypercube of dimension zero. If one moves this point one unit length, it will sweep out a line segment, which is a unit hypercube of dimension one. If one moves this line segment its length in a perpendicular direction from itself; it sweeps out a two-dimensional square. If one moves the square one unit length in the direction perpendicular to the plane it lies on, it will generate a three-dimensional cube. This can be generalized to any number of dimensions. For example, if one moves the cube one unit length into the fourth dimension, it generates a 4-dimensional unit hypercube (a unit tesseract).

The standard tesseract (8-cell or octachoron) in Euclidean 4-space is given as the convex hull of the points (±1, ±1, ±1, ±1). That is, it consists of the points:

Federico Faggin

intel4004.com

Federico Faggin (born December 1, 1941) is an Italian-born physicist/electrical engineer, principally responsible for the design of the first microprocessor and responsible for leading the 4004 (MCS-4) project to its successful outcome and for promoting its marketing. He also designed/led the design and was the vital force during the first five years of Intel's microprocessor effort. He continued to play a pacesetting role as founder and CEO of Zilog, the first company solely dedicated to microprocessors, for the next five years.


Intel 4004D

The Intel 4004 is one of world's most sought-after collectible/antique chips. Of highest value are 4004s that are gold and white, with so-called 'grey traces' visible on the white ceramic (the original package type). As of 2005, such chips have reached around US$1000 each on eBay. The slightly less valuable white and gold chips without grey traces typically reach $300 to $500. Those chips without a 'date code' underneath are earlier versions, and therefore worth slightly more. More recently however, these vintage ICs have been dropping in value due to their relative abundance as the market is now flooded with surplus stock from sellers looking to cash in on the Intel craze.

Max Planck (1858-1947)

Max Planck Biography

Max-Planck-Society

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (April 23, 1858 in Kiel, Germany – October 4, 1947 in Göttingen, Germany) was a German physicist. He is considered to be the founder of quantum theory, and therefore one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century.

At the end of the 1920s Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli had worked out the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, but it was rejected by Planck, as well as Schrödinger and Laue; even Einstein had rejected Bohr's interpretation. Planck expected that wave mechanics would soon render quantum theory—his own child—unnecessary. This was not to be the case, however—further work only cemented quantum theory, even against his and Einstein's philosophical revulsions. Planck experienced the truth of his own earlier observation from his struggle with the older views in his younger years: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

"What always interested me primarily in physics were the great general laws that are of significance in all natural processes, irrespective of the properties of the bodies undergoing the processes.''
Max Planck, 1943

Ryan Church

Ryan Church Official

Ryan Church (born July 18, 1971 in Long Beach, CA) is a concept designer best known for his designs of vehicles, planets, and architectures.

"In the Spring of 2005, I relocated back to Southern California to start the next chapter of my career as a freelance concept artist. I still have strong ties to Industrial Light + Magic and Lucasfilm, and my client list keeps growing and now includes Paramount Studios, Universal Pictures, Mattel, Sony Pictures, Blue Sky Studios, Bay Films, Lightstorm Entertainment, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Dino de Laurentiis Company, and Electronic Arts. I have been lending my skills on many bid projects as well as high profile film projects such as John Carter of Mars, Star Trek (2008), Barbarella (2008), and James Cameron's Avatar (2009)."

Resume

Star Trek (2008) Director: J.J. Abrams, PD: Scott Chambliss, Paramount Pictures
April 2007 - present. Concept Designer

Avatar (2009) Director: James Cameron, PD: Rick Carter, Twentieth Century Fox
June 2006 - present. Concept Designer

unannounced project Director: Stephen Sommers, Paramount Pictures
September- January 2007. Concept Designer

unannounced project Walt Disney Animation Studios
November 2005 - September 2006. Concept Designer

Transformers (2007) Director: Michael Bay, PD: Jeff Mann, Paramount Pictures
December 2005 – March 2006. Concept Artist

John Carter of Mars Director: Jon Favreau, Kerry Conran, Paramount Pictures
December 2004 – March 2006. Concept Artist

Outlander (2007) Director: Howard McCain
June - September 2005. Senior Concept Artist

Hot Wheels, the Movie Columbia Pictures / Mattel, Inc.
January – March 2005. Concept Designer

War of the Worlds (2005) Director: Steven Spielberg, Paramount Pictures
July - October 2004. Creature Designer (Tripods)

INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC June 1998 - April 2005. Senior Art Director

Star Wars Episode 3 - Revenge of the Sith (2005) Director: George Lucas, Fox / Lucasfilm
May 2002 - April 2005. Concept Design Supervisor, Senior Visual Effects Art Director (ILM)

Star Wars Episode 2 - Attack of the Clones (2002) Director: George Lucas, Fox / Lucasfilm
December 2000 - May 2002. Concept Design Supervisor, Senior Visual Effects Art Director (ILM)

Skid Row

skidrow.com

Skid Row is an American heavy metal band which became the glam metal prototypes of the late 1980s metal scene and were successful until they were eclipsed by the Seattle grunge bands in 1991.

As of 2007, Skid Row has released five full-length albums, an EP, a compilation album, and a live album. The band became popular with their first two albums, Skid Row and Slave to the Grind, which are often considered their best-known works to date. Their last full-length studio album, Revolutions Per Minute, came out on October 24, 2006. The group has sold over 20 million albums worldwide, according to then-lead vocalist Sebastian Bach.

They are often associated with glam metal, partly due to their appearance and their sound on their debut album, Skid Row, which spawned the hits "18 and Life", "Youth Gone Wild", and "I Remember You" for the band.

They would eventually go on to make music more akin to thrash metal with hard rock leanings. The band bought the name Skid Row from Gary Moore's first band Skid Row.

Karas

Karas: The Prophecy IMDb

Karas is a six-part OVA (Original video animation) that takes place in a futuristic setting. It is produced by Tatsunoko Productions. The first DVD of episodes 1–3, "Karas: The Prophecy", was released April 24th 2006 in the UK, and April 25th in the US. The second DVD which contains episodes 4–6, "Karas: The Revelation", was released October 23 2007 in commemoration of Tatsunoko Productions' 40th anniversary.

Karas was originally a one-shot comic book released in English through Dark Horse Comics on November 3, 2004. It was written by Phil Amara who created Sky Ape, with art by Nuria Peris and Sergio Sandoval. This makes it to be one of the few American comics to be made into an actual Japanese anime, like Witchblade.

NEC SX-9

NEC SX-9 Press Release

NEC SX-9 is to be the world's fastest vector supercomputer with a peak processing performance of 839 TFLOPS. The SX-9 features the world's first CPU capable of a peak vector performance of 102.4 GFLOPS per single core.

In addition to the newly developed CPU, the SX-9 combines large-scale shared memory of up to 1TB and ultra high-speed interconnects achieving speeds up to 128GB/second. Through these enhanced features, the SX-9 closes in on the PFLOPS range by realizing a processing performance of 839 TFLOPS. The SX-9 also achieves an approximate three-quarter reduction in space and power consumption over conventional models. This was achieved by applying advanced LSI design and high-density packaging technology.

In comparison to scalar servers incorporating multiple general-purpose CPUs, the vector supercomputer offers superior operating performance for high-speed scientific computation and ultra high-speed processing of large-volume data. The enhanced effectiveness of the new product will be clearly demonstrated in fields such as weather forecasting, fluid dynamics and environmental simulation, as well as simulations for as-yet-unknown materials in nanotechnology and polymeric design.

The SX-9 will be showcased at SC07 (Supercomputing 2007), the world's largest supercomputing exposition, in Reno, Nevada from November 10 - 16. It will also be on display at iExpo2007 (NEC's own personal exhibition), at Tokyo's Big Site from December 5 - 7.

The machine will be built in Kobe in western Japan and operated by public research institute Riken.

Louis Aragon (1897-1982)

Poet, novelist, and essayist, a founder of Surrealism with Paul Éluard, André Breton, and Luis Buñuel among others. Aragon's work reflects the principal trends of thought of the 20th century.

Les Yeux d'Elsa

Tes yeux sont si profonds qu'en me penchant pour boire
J'ai vu tous les soleils y venir se mirer
S'y jeter à mourir tous les désespérés
Tes yeux sont si profonds que j'y perds la mémoire
À l'ombre des oiseaux c'est l'océan troublé
Puis le beau temps soudain se lève et tes yeux changent
L'été taille la nue au tablier des anges
Le ciel n'est jamais bleu comme il l'est sur les blés

Les vents chassent en vain les chagrins de l'azur
Tes yeux plus clairs que lui lorsqu'une larme y luit
Tes yeux rendent jaloux le ciel d'après la pluie
Le verre n'est jamais si bleu qu'à sa brisure

Mère des Sept douleurs ô lumière mouillée
Sept glaives ont percé le prisme des couleurs
Le jour est plus poignant qui point entre les pleurs
L'iris troué de noir plus bleu d'être endeuillé

Tes yeux dans le malheur ouvrent la double brèche
Par où se reproduit le miracle des Rois
Lorsque le coeur battant ils virent tous les trois
Le manteau de Marie accroché dans la crèche

Une bouche suffit au mois de Mai des mots
Pour toutes les chansons et pour tous les hélas
Trop peu d'un firmament pour des millions d'astres
Il leur fallait tes yeux et leurs secrets gémeaux

L'enfant accaparé par les belles images
Écarquille les siens moins démesurément
Quand tu fais les grands yeux je ne sais si tu mens
On dirait que l'averse ouvre des fleurs sauvages

Cachent-ils des éclairs dans cette lavande où
Des insectes défont leurs amours violentes
Je suis pris au filet des étoiles filantes
Comme un marin qui meurt en mer en plein mois d'août

J'ai retiré ce radium de la pechblende
Et j'ai brûlé mes doigts à ce feu défendu
Ô paradis cent fois retrouvé reperdu
Tes yeux sont mon Pérou ma Golconde mes Indes

Il advint qu'un beau soir l'univers se brisa
Sur des récifs que les naufrageurs enflammèrent
Moi je voyais briller au-dessus de la mer
Les yeux d'Elsa les yeux d'Elsa les yeux d'Elsa


Les Yeux d'Elsa, Louis ARAGON, Les Yeux d'Elsa, (1942)

Black Body

In physics, a black body is an object that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation that falls onto it. No radiation passes through it and none is reflected. It is this lack of both transmission and reflection to which the name refers. These properties make black bodies ideal sources of thermal radiation. That is, the amount and wavelength (color) of electromagnetic radiation they emit is directly related to their temperature. Black bodies below around 700 K (430 °C) produce very little radiation at visible wavelengths and appear black. Black bodies above this temperature however, produce radiation at visible wavelengths starting at red, going through orange, yellow, and white before ending up at blue as the temperature increases.

The term "black body" was introduced by Gustav Kirchhoff in 1860. The light emitted by a black body is called black-body radiation (or cavity radiation), and has a special place in the history of quantum mechanics.


The temperature of a Pahoehoe lava flow can be estimated by observing its colour. The result agrees well with the measured temperatures of lava flows at about 1,000 to 1,200 °C.

The radiance or observed intensity is not a function of direction. Therefore a black body is a perfect Lambertian radiator.

In the laboratory, a black-body radiation is approximated by the radiation from a small hole entrance to a large cavity, a hohlraum. Any light entering the hole would have to reflect off the walls of the cavity multiple times before it escaped, in which process it is nearly certain to be absorbed. This occurs regardless of the wavelength of the radiation entering (as long as it is small compared to the hole). The hole, then, is a close approximation of a theoretical black body and, if the cavity is heated, the spectrum of the hole's radiation (i.e., the amount of light emitted from the hole at each wavelength) will be continuous, and will not depend on the material in the cavity.

Calculating this curve was a major challenge in theoretical physics during the late nineteenth century. The problem was finally solved in 1901 by Max Planck as Planck's law of black-body radiation. By making changes to Wien's Radiation Law (not to be confused with Wien's displacement law) consistent with Thermodynamics and Electromagnetism, he found a mathematical formula fitting the experimental data in a satisfactory way. To find a physical interpretation for this formula, Planck had then to assume that the energy of the oscillators in the cavity was quantized (i.e., integer multiples of some quantity). Einstein built on this idea and proposed the quantization of electromagnetic radiation itself in 1905 to explain the photoelectric effect. These theoretical advances eventually resulted in the superseding of classical electromagnetism by quantum electrodynamics. Today, these quanta are called photons and the black-body cavity may be thought of as containing a gas of photons. In addition, it led to the development of quantum versions of statistical mechanics, called Fermi-Dirac statistics and Bose-Einstein statistics, each applicable to a different class of particles.

Fermilab

Fermilab

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located in Batavia near Chicago, Illinois, is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. As of January 1, 2007, Fermilab is operated by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC, a joint venture of the University of Chicago and the Universities Research Association (URA). URA is a consortium of 91 leading research oriented universities primarily in the United States, with members also in Canada, Japan, and Italy. Fermilab is a part of the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor.



Fermilab's Tevatron is a landmark particle accelerator; in fact, at 6.28 kilometers (4 miles) in circumference, it is the world's highest energy particle accelerator. In 1995, both the CDF and D0 (detectors which utilize the Tevatron) experiments announced the discovery of the top quark. In addition to high energy collider physics, Fermilab is also host to a number of smaller fixed target experiments and neutrino experiments, such as MiniBooNE (Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment), SciBooNE (SciBar Booster Neutrino Experiment) and MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search). The MiniBooNE detector is a 40-foot (12-meter) diameter sphere which contains 800 tons of mineral oil lined with 1520 individual phototube detectors. An estimated 1 million neutrino events are recorded each year. SciBooNE is the newest neutrino experiment at Fermilab; it sits in the same neutrino beam as MiniBooNE but has fine-grained tracking capabilities. The MINOS experiment uses Fermilab's NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) beam, which is an intense beam of neutrinos that travels 735km through the Earth to the Soudan Mine in Minnesota.

Experiments

* Tevatron proton-antiproton collider: D0 and Collider Detector at Fermilab
* MiniBooNE: Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment
* Sciboone: SciBar Booster Neutrino Experiment
* MINOS: Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search
* MINERνA: Main INjector ExpeRiment with νs on As
* NOνA: NuMI Off-axis νe Appearance (proposed)

Computer Cluster

top500.org

beowulf.org

clusterknoppix

bccd.cs.uni.edu

ParallelKnoppix

openmosix

OpenSSI

chaos

A computer cluster is a group of loosely coupled computers that work together closely so that in many respects they can be viewed as though they are a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area networks. Clusters are usually deployed to improve performance and/or availability over that provided by a single computer, while typically being much more cost-effective than single computers of comparable speed or availability.



The TOP500 organization's semiannual list of the 500 fastest computers usually includes many clusters. TOP500 is a collaboration between the University of Mannheim, the University of Tennessee, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As of June 2007, the top supercomputer is the Department of Energy's IBM BlueGene/L system with performance of 280.6 TFlops.

Top500:

373 Clusters (74,60 %)

107 MPPs (21,40%)

20 Constellations (4,00%)

Chandra X-ray Observatory

Chandra X-ray Observatory

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date.


M87 Core; about 50 million light years

The Instruments:

The Science Instrument Module (SIM) holds the two focal plane instruments, the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) and the High Resolution Camera (HRC), moving whichever is called for into position during an observation.

ACIS consists of 10 CCD chips and provides images as well as spectral information of the object observed. It operates in the range of 0.2 - 10 keV. HRC has two micro-channel plate components and images over the range of 0.1 - 10 keV. It also has a time resolution of 16 microseconds. Both of these instruments can be used on their own or in conjunction with one of the observatory's two transmission gratings.

The transmission gratings, which swing into the optical path behind the mirrors, provide Chandra with high resolution spectroscopy. The High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer (HETGS) works over 0.4 - 10 keV and has a spectral resolution of 60-1000. The Low Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer (LETGS) has a range of 0.09 - 3 keV and a resolution of 40-2000.


G292.0+1.8; about 20,000 light years; 142 hours of observation

Latest Discoveries:

# X-ray emissions from materials falling from a protoplanetary disc into a star.
# Hubble constant measured to be 76.9 km/s/Mpc using Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect.
# 2006 Chandra found strong evidence that dark matter exists by observing supercluster collision
# 2006 X-ray emitting loops, rings and filaments discovered around a supermassive black hole within Messier 87 imply the presence of pressure waves, shock waves and sound waves. The evolution of Messier 87 may have been dramatically affected.
# Observations of the Bullet cluster put limits on the cross-section of the self-interaction of dark matter.