1:12 am (PDT), JoAnne: The beam is at Point 8, which is 3/4 of the way around! Thanks to SkyNews for the feed!

1:18 am (PDT), JoAnne: Now the beam is at ATLAS, 7/8 of the way through. They are giving ATLAS some events (not collisions, but beam halo and beam gas). Lyn Evans, LHC project manager, was heard to say that he’s going to win his bet, whatever that is.

1:23 am (PDT), JoAnne: BEAM! We have BEAM! All the way round! Now they’re doing it again.

I love the internet!

From symmetry breaking:

The Large Hadron Collider saw its first protons today, around 6:30 p.m. at CERN (12:30 p.m. US EDT), as scientists conducted the first beam injection test in one section of the collider. The protons traveled just a few meters into the LHC in a clockwise direction. The tests will continue through the weekend to transfer the beam from one section of the accelerator complex to another. A second beam injection test is scheduled for later in August. Protons will circulate around the entire collider for the first time on September 10.

Yay!

CERN has a press release going over the ramp up to September 10th a bit more, as well as a link for a live webcast to be streaming as soon as the LHC is. After that, the collider is set to be officially unveiled on October 21st.

August 8, 2008: The start of the South Ossetia War, Summer Olympics, and, now, the Large Hadron Collider.

Clockwise:

1. Assembly and installation of the ATLAS Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The ATLAS detector contains a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around the central interaction point where the LHC’s proton beams collide.

2. Lowering of the last element (YE-1) of the CMS detector into its underground experimental cavern.

3. Transporting the ATLAS Magnet Toroid End-Cap A between building 180 to ATLAS point 1.

More at Boston.com’s The Big Picture.

How do you describe things of this size or length of time, this speed or heat? Experience, being broadly empirical, gives us no meaningful terms. What we do have is domestic analogies, and poems that reference outer space tend to tell us more about inner space – ourselves – than anything about the cosmos.

Any description of the deep underpinnings of science is likely to border on poetry or prose. As Laird says, the facts of the universe are so beyond our imagination that analogies are necessary to explain the world in anything but math. Thus any attempt to put the truth in layman’s terms is an attempt at poetry.

Also, Laird reminded me of perhaps my favorite two lines ever put together from the English language:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.

(via Alexander Pope)

L-methamphetamine…is found in Vicks Vapor Inhalers. … This is the mirror image of D-methamphetamine – the street drug.

The thing is, L-methamphetamine isn’t really anything like the D-methamphetamine isomer that is found in street drugs. D-methamphetamine is psychoactive, while L-methamphetamine isn’t very psychoactive at all. In certain receptor and enzyme pockets where D-methamphetamine fits, L-methamphetamine fits like a left foot in a right shoe.

This is a post from 2006! That is to say: fromthearchives. Get used to it, the internet is being boring.

Although we know tons and tons of details about the brain, we are almost completely lacking in ideas of how to connect all those details. Similar situations existed in physics and biology before the likes of Einstein and Darwin (respectively), and Karl Friston is attempting to follow in their footsteps by describing a simple theory that explains a wide range of neuroscience phenomenon.

Friston’s ideas build on an existing theory known as the “Bayesian brain”, which conceptualises the brain as a probability machine that constantly makes predictions about the world and then updates them based on what it senses. … Instead of estimating the distance to an object as a number, for instance, the brain would treat it as a range of possible values, some more likely than others.

Importantly, these predictions are ever evolving. Any new information the brain receives influences the predictions, constantly minimizing error whenever possible. However, describing the brain as a “probability machine” has involved a number of different approaches, all of which would need to be tied together to create an overarching unified theory.

First mentioned on TEDBlog, the WorldWide Telescope builds a “seamless” view of the universe with images taken from telescopes and satellites all over the world and sky. The software is pretty amazing, but the WWT website is unfortunately a cesspool of terrible promotional videos, so I recommend just heading over to the download page.

In many ways, the WWT is simply a desktop version of Google Sky. It’s just…a lot more robust, detailed, and inspiring to behold.