Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Make Your Own Vacuum Tubes

An absolutely fascinating video that revives a lost art. It has a nice sound track. The titles are in French, but it doesn't matter. About 17 minutes of absolutely no politics.

HT hanelyp at talk.polywell

2 comments:

LarryD said...

Congressional budget cuts of particle physics are beginning to bite:
The reality of the US budget cuts to particle physics has hit home. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, US, has just announced a trio of painful consequences: the end of work on the International Linear Collider, the imminent closure of its BaBar antimatter experiment, and the layoff of 125 workers.

SLAC and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois are the main US institutions involved in the International Linear Collider (ILC), a future $6.7 billion particle accelerator designed to recreate the conditions of the early universe.

But all US work on the ILC has now ground to a halt after the US Congress voted in December to cut $90 million from the country's high-energy physics programme for fiscal year 2008. The decision came just days after the UK pulled out of the project.

... The US will also cut its 2008 funding for ITER, set to become the world's largest nuclear fusion facility.


ITER has hovering funds for decades, but the rest sound like basic research projects. Maybe Congress wanted to free up the money for earmarks.

Anonymous said...

From personal experience the DOE's big labs are littered with the leftovers from projects started but either in hiatus or never finished. this happens to the good as well as the bad, forcing loss of talent and wasted resources.