Particle Tracking: Joining the Dots in the ATLAS Experiment (with a picture for you to complete)

New Particle Gadgeteering post: Particle Tracking: Joining the Dots in the ATLAS Experiment. More exciting adventures about building particle detectors...

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And if anyone fancies a trip to Oxford this weekend, we are doing a big public event with our astronomy friends. Come along to: Stargazing Oxford on Saturday.

Comments

[Admiral Biscuit]

Instructions unclear
derpicdn.net/img/2013/1/16/214653/full.png

[Booster Spice]

And this ladies and gentelmen, is the detector we call Spock. Because although it might guess at whats going on in there, that guess is far better than any of our prior direct measurements.

[Georg]

Alicorn particles detected. Add coffee to continue.

Seriously, though. I once got asked to translate a Fortran IV program into C++ where the original program had been written and re-written to take queries from US Census date and use some complicated maneuver with SAS calls in order to generate centroids of populations laid out in a geographic map for a sociology experiment. I could *swear* each of the successive programmers in Fortran was more insane, probably driven that way by the code, and that the end result was more a function of tweaking the code until it generated the results they wanted rather than actually doing the math correctly.

He wanted to pay me two hundred bucks. After three weeks of intense on and off examination (to preserve my sanity), I took it back to the professor and told him to hire a number of grad students, give them five grand or so, and rewrite the whole thing from scratch or it would never work.

[Cloudhammer]

I mean, I'd like to come, but I don't think I can flap my arms hard enough to make it

[Pineta]

4781248
Sounds like the Python code I'm editing at the moment. Written by a series of students, each on a summer internship, all eager to find an opportunity use all the new algorithms they'd learned. Why take the data in a straightforward logical order when you can call the Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun Travelling Salesperson Problem Solver to resort it first?

[Walabio]

It is nice to see how the sausage is made:

You put in several thousand hours of work investigating whether switching to CMOS would be okay, determine that it would be, but for unrelated reasons, ATLAS does not use CMOS.

[Pineta]

4783460
It looks that way. Although R&D on CMOS will continue and it may be used for future projects.