Most pointless....

[Rave]

Check out this bad boy- makes the Kwak one look a bit lame:

YouTube - Rubot II - the Rubik's cube robot

YouTube - Man Vs Machine (RuBot II)

[iranu]

I have a mega old book on solving the cube, but yeah, there's basically rules for moving colours around the cube without disturbing other blocks, then there's methods for doing other more complicated tasks

Was that the one with the cheesy blonde haired kid on the front? I had worked out how to get one side and two layers all the way around which really only needed one or two known moves, but needed the book for the last layer which could be done by around 4 different moves.

Nice one. I'm a postdoc now - currently working on this bad bwoy:

CERN - CMS detector

cool I love stuff like this. I think I saw a discovery channel programme about building that and they had problems lowering some ridiculously expensive and massive "thing" down one of the holes due to a crane failure.

When they were explaining all the gubbins and how precise and expensive they were I was just amazed at the fact they could build this thing in a hole in the ground. How you even start to think about designing and building something like this? It's very impressive.

[Fraz]

cool I love stuff like this. I think I saw a discovery channel programme about building that and they had problems lowering some ridiculously expensive and massive "thing" down one of the holes due to a crane failure.

There weren't any crane failures that I know of, but this is the thing of which you speak:

CMSeye::YB0 Lowering on 28 February 2007

That section of the detector was the biggest and heaviest to be lowered the 100 metres down from the surface construction hall, weighing in at just under 2000 tons I believe. The gray cylinder in the middle is the largest superconducting solenoidal magnet ever created, and generates a 4 Tesla field, storing 2.6 Gigajoules of magnetic energy as it does so. To put that into context, 2.6 Gigajoules of energy would run a 2kilowatt fan heater for 15 days. It's a lot of energy, and if the magnet quenches (i.e. heats up above superconducting temperatures), they've got to dissipate all that energy in a few seconds to stop the magnet from melting...

When they were explaining all the gubbins and how precise and expensive they were I was just amazed at the fact they could build this thing in a hole in the ground. How you even start to think about designing and building something like this? It's very impressive.

I literally have no idea. Every time I go to a seminar on some aspect of it or another, I'm amazed to find yet new levels of complexity that I hadn't realised before. It's probably one of the top three most complicated things ever built by mankind.

[Funkstar]

There weren't any crane failures that I know of, but this is the thing of which you speak:

CMSeye::YB0 Lowering on 28 February 2007

Holy crapola! That is an amazing sequence of photos.

The science of this project are awsome, but ignoring besides that, the civil engineering required to actualy build the damned thing is pretty mind blowing as well.

[Pyrii]

The Large Hadron Collider ATLAS Experiment, CERN | Peter McCready VR Photography