Not US 101 — Interstate 280. Scott Parker on AARoads sez:
“There is one historic oddity regarding I-280: the bridges over SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), on Stanford University land, were constructed between 1965 and 1967, some 4 years before the remaining construction on that segment of freeway commenced -- but in conjunction with the western extension of the accelerator (a long continuous structure that extends under the freeway). This advance construction was done as a joint project between the Division of Highways and Stanford in order to ensure that any vibrations emanating from the bridge structure would not affect SLAC operations and experiments. The bridge bents on either side of the accelerator building are double-isolated, with vibration-absorbing pads between the bridge beams and the vertical bents -- and the bents themselves are sitting in a "sheath" of sand and clays to dissipate any remaining vibrations that might be transmitted to the ground; the entire bridge structure therefore "floats" above the surrounding ground rather than terminating there. It is held in place by its own weight; connected to the remainder of the freeway by a series of short metal bars over which traffic passes (driving it, one feels a series of minor "bumps" at the connecting bars as well as a bit of a "dip" in the middle of the bridge itself -- a deliberately designed "sag" due to the irregular hillside that was carved out to accommodate the accelerator structure. The unusual design of this road-to-structure isolation interface was a condition imposed by Stanford University as part of the agreement to route I-280 through the back of campus property; there are seismometers installed in the ground underneath and adjacent to the bridge to measure the continuous effectiveness of the isolation measures; when particularly precise SLAC experiments are undertaken, I-280 has on rare occasion been closed for the duration of such an experiment. This is a one-of-a-kind accommodation by Caltrans and its predecessor agency made necessary by the nature of this particular atom-smashing device.”
All sorts of interesting topics from early computing (I found them when looking into IBM Channel I/O), practical material research, and of course building a linear accelerator. Even a few recent ones I've seen are interesting, like when to use rsync, or notes on PCIe NVME SSD use.
Do you perchance know if they ever caught the perpetrators or discovered their motives? A quick Google doesn't seem to show much and the article didn't seem to have details either
Given how universities deal with lab security, I would not be suprised if the dynamite was stolen SLAC dynamite to be used on some fishing trip being hidden somewhere that got hot ...
It’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. SLAC no longer is the acronym. This is partially because, in theory, the lab could be contracted out to an entity other that Stanford to run. There was an attempt to brand it SNAL for a bit in the 2000s, but it was thankfully dropped for just SLAC.
During SLAC’s construction, excavators uncovered a fossil of a very large 25 million year old hippo relative. I got to go on a tour of SLAC with my girl scout troop, and we saw the long corridor and lots of shiny metal things with tubes sticking out of them, but the one thing that really stuck with me was seeing that fossil skeleton.
Author here. I'll take this comment charitably, because it did lead me to discover that I merged the PR well before my Github action to compress images completed. Just re-ran it, and the images are all ~50% reduced in size now: https://github.com/whatrocks/blag/pull/22
Thank you for this nudge. I'm sure there's more I could do here, but hopefully this helps.
The JS bloat is likely the interactive stuff in my "/library" and it's been on my to-do list to fix this. Thanks for this nudge, too.
Nope, definitely not. Seems like a side-effect of that Github Action. Haven't seen it before. I manually re-rotated and then purged the cloudflare cache. So I think they should be normal again. Thank you for the ping!
Not US 101 — Interstate 280. Scott Parker on AARoads sez:
“There is one historic oddity regarding I-280: the bridges over SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), on Stanford University land, were constructed between 1965 and 1967, some 4 years before the remaining construction on that segment of freeway commenced -- but in conjunction with the western extension of the accelerator (a long continuous structure that extends under the freeway). This advance construction was done as a joint project between the Division of Highways and Stanford in order to ensure that any vibrations emanating from the bridge structure would not affect SLAC operations and experiments. The bridge bents on either side of the accelerator building are double-isolated, with vibration-absorbing pads between the bridge beams and the vertical bents -- and the bents themselves are sitting in a "sheath" of sand and clays to dissipate any remaining vibrations that might be transmitted to the ground; the entire bridge structure therefore "floats" above the surrounding ground rather than terminating there. It is held in place by its own weight; connected to the remainder of the freeway by a series of short metal bars over which traffic passes (driving it, one feels a series of minor "bumps" at the connecting bars as well as a bit of a "dip" in the middle of the bridge itself -- a deliberately designed "sag" due to the irregular hillside that was carved out to accommodate the accelerator structure. The unusual design of this road-to-structure isolation interface was a condition imposed by Stanford University as part of the agreement to route I-280 through the back of campus property; there are seismometers installed in the ground underneath and adjacent to the bridge to measure the continuous effectiveness of the isolation measures; when particularly precise SLAC experiments are undertaken, I-280 has on rare occasion been closed for the duration of such an experiment. This is a one-of-a-kind accommodation by Caltrans and its predecessor agency made necessary by the nature of this particular atom-smashing device.”