I have been meaning to write about our trip to CERN last Friday, not only for the extremely interesting conversation we had with our host - who had a whole raft of ideas for us after seeing our demo - but because of how great it was to see a physicist turned web dude react to the experience. Brian was in heaven.
When we arrived and were waiting for Francois to meet us at reception, we noticed the floor was a swirly metal of various colors with red and blue lights shooting through it at different times. 
It was a cosmic ray particle detector. As we made our way through the courtyard towards the cafeteria / beer garden we passed all kinds of giant metal formations that looked right out of a 1960s sci-fi movie. Brian and Francois stopped and talked about what they all were. I tried to nod and appear like I understood. Francois also told us about the new particle accelerator, the grid and volunteer computing programs (check out the Africa at Home project for example). I asked a few, mostly idiotic, questions about the search for higgs and black holes.
But what really came out throughout all of this is the passion for research, the passion for data, the strong belief that there are things to be learned from data we already have, not to mention the new data to come (in the case of the new accelerator, we are talking petabytes at regular intervals). Add to this the idea of volunteer computing, which is not just processing power, but scientific discovery as well – as in the case of the stardust at home project where accountants by day become stardust hunters at night.
Part of Swivel’s core belief is that humans are good at pattern detection and they will know what they are looking for when they see it, as in the example of walking a user from data set, to graph to data cloud to map with each step along the way allowing different insights into the same data to be made. Seems Swivel and stardust hunters are on the same page - strong communities of dedicated individuals with a purpose need and want access to data and make great insights when they have it.
Swivel Home
My new book (fiction), 'The Ancient Order of Moridura, postulates a nascent singularity caused by a meteor impact creating a gravitational anomaly in Extremadura.
See http://moridura.blogspot.com and http://www.moridura.com for details.
The CERN LHC experiments in 2008 may create black holes, however miniscule. (See Brookhaven NY lab gold atoms experiment 2005). If a black hole does result, it will boost my book sales, but the destruction of the solar system will make collection of royalties difficult.
Life's can be hard sometimes ---
regards
Peter Curran
Edinburgh, Scotland
Posted by: Peter Curran | June 21, 2007 at 12:52 AM