The value of a blog July 14, 2006
Posted by dorigo in Blogroll, games, internet, personal.4 comments
Technorati offers a tool which computes the value of a site, based on the traffic it receives. Useless, but fun. See http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/
So here is what I got today: a 26,000 USD quotation. I wonder what that means. My first reaction is to shrug my shoulders and laugh the matter away. But actually, the thing makes me think… How much would _I_ value the time, intellectual effort, and the ideas I put in this blog since its start, six months ago ?
Well… I must say I am kind of embarassed, because as much as I am willing to mock the above result, my quotation would not be too different from Technorati’s one, if I had to pick a number!
I would value as 1000$ a month the sheer time I spend on the blog; and I would estimate an average of 50$ as a commercial value for each the about 400 posts I wrote… That, indeed, makes 26,000$!
Amazing.
Cosmic rays in CMS July 14, 2006
Posted by dorigo in news, physics, science.add a comment
CMS is presently performing a Magnet test. During this test, a part of the detector components are turned on, so that cosmic rays can be collected.
And they have been! It has been more than a month since the first muons were seen in CMS modules. However, last night three full sectors of the muon system were used to catch muons with a regional trigger, and a great many have been collected.
In seven hours of data taking, about 580 thousand events have been collected… The data is useful to help debugging the chambers, the alignment system, test the calibration procedures, verify the detector resolution. Enough to keep us busy for a while…
The picture on the left shows the hits on the four muon stations due to a muon crossing the CMS detector. Yes, they do line up 
