The Large Hadron Collider and Single Points of Failure
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
When I was in the military working with critical systems, we put a lot of emphasis on single points of failure. We dealt with satellites, and it wasn’t unusual for a new spacecraft to have multiple failures caused by the stresses of being launched. Nearly every piece of hardware was redundant, however, so we would just route processing around the failed components.
Apparently the folks at CERN have not learned this lesson. The Large Hadron Collider, a $5.4 billion atom-smasher is expected to be out of commission for a year due to a single, badly soldered electrical connection along its 17-mile length. Repairs will cost about $20 million. Now that is an example of error-intolerant design.
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
It wasn’t that long ago that scientists discovered 
CNN’s election-night coverage had a new special effect that it called “holograms.” I had my doubts about this, and the linked article sets the record straight. The 3D “hologram” images were special effects added to the video feed and were not visible to the newscasters in the studio (even though they appeared to be).
A company named 
Thinking about purchasing one of those monster-sized LCD/plasma TVs for thousands of dollars? Well you may want to hold off for a couple years and get an 
The linked article has a three-part video tour of the inside of a Lego factory. The vast majority of the manufacturing is automated.
This weapon is capable of identifying and destroying multiple ground targets. The first link is a video explaining how the weapon works, including real film footage. The second link has an embedded video showing a reconstruction of an Iraq war event where the BLU-108 played a major part. It’s just amazing how far weapons technology has come.
Back in November, Chad’s News 
Researchers from SRI International have created a robot that can climb walls made of common building materials. From the article: “The as-yet-unnamed robot uses electro-adhesion to cling to the wall, generating electrostatic charges between the wall substrate and itself to keep from falling.” The linked article has a video of the robot in action.
Chad’s News has 
Toshiba is creating micro nuclear reactors that are capable of powering a single building (or a city block). They’re self-contained and totally automatic, and last for about 40 years.
