Naked Science Forum

Non Life Sciences => Geek Speak => Topic started by: syhprum on 16/05/2012 07:56:24

Title: What are femtobarns?
Post by: syhprum on 16/05/2012 07:56:24

"The project preserves a complete set of BaBar data – all 530-plus inverse femtobarns of it"
A quote from Physics org news letter suerly the strangest unit yet devised!.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BaBar_experiment

Title: Re: obscure units
Post by: Geezer on 16/05/2012 08:01:19

Units are like standards. The great thing is that there are so many to choose from.

Title: Re: obscure units
Post by: CliffordK on 16/05/2012 10:29:52

The unit is:   (Bar-B), from which the BaBar experiment was named.

However, some scientists have their own sense of humor.

Linux is full of little idiosyncrasies. 

For example, the UNIX parser is called "Yacc".

So, in Linux, when it was re-written, it was appropriately renamed "Hairy Bison".

And, for those Evangelical Linux Hackers, there is the "Bourne-again shell".

And, in case one has the drunken desire to run MS Windows programs in Linux, you must first load WINE.

Title: Re: obscure units
Post by: syhprum on 16/05/2012 10:52:39

Wine seems pretty logical I guess its Windows emulation but it puzzeld me at first.

Title: Re: What are femtobarns?
Post by: SeanB on 19/05/2012 15:21:59

Actually WINE is a recursive name. It stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator.

It in fact is an API that interprets a lot of the windows calls and does the same as the published API, but with a different OS behind it. This enables Windows programs to run on non MS platforms, as long as they are X86 compatiable, or have another layer that can emulate X86 instructions and native code. Wine thus does not run directly on an ARM processor, but needs a X86 emulator to run it, although parts have been written so as not to need the emulation. In most cases it works perfectly, although poorly written Windows code will not run properly in it, and in many cases runs poorly in windows as well, or does things that are non standard.

For many older games Dosbox is better, as it does emulate a X86 computer very well.

Title: Re: What are femtobarns?
Post by: evan_au on 13/07/2012 12:55:00

Inverse Femtobarns are a measure of how many collisions a particle collider has generated over its lifetime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_(unit)#Inverse_femtobarn

Title: Re: obscure units
Post by: Boogie on 22/08/2012 00:23:12

Quote from: CliffordK on 16/05/2012 10:29:52

The unit is:   (Bar-B), from which the BaBar experiment was named.

However, some scientists have their own sense of humor.

Linux is full of little idiosyncrasies. 

For example, the UNIX parser is called "Yacc".

So, in Linux, when it was re-written, it was appropriately renamed "Hairy Bison".

And, for those Evangelical Linux Hackers, there is the "Bourne-again shell".

And, in case one has the drunken desire to run MS Windows programs in Linux, you must first load WINE.

Sounds like you have been reading the "GNU testament"!

May the great penguin smile upon you.