Fireball

Recently, I got to read Angels & Demons by Dan Brown, the much talked about Author of “The Da Vinci Code”.

Dan Brown is typically straight forward. He reveals facts through his novels. The best part I loved in the book is as follows:

“I have people here at the lab very adept at extracting user information from the web.”

Langdon was skeptical. “Sounds like your lab knows a lot about the web.”

“We should,” the man fired back. “We invented it.”

It took around 5 minutes for me to relieve out of that shock. I was thinking that Tim Berners Lee invented WWW in America! World’s first website, by Lee lies here! Even Brown stresses this ignorance, also he quotes in many other places where people think that Americans were the bosses. A lot of advertisement has been given about CERN, the Council for Nuclear Research.

I have a habit of researching about the topic of the book after reading it. After reading Da Vinci Code (which my friend Abhay spelt as Da Vinki!) , I spent around a week searching about the presence of Priori of Sion and its history in internet.

I went out on a google-cum-wikipedia hunt for CERN, and I landed up in CERN site, and the following are my findings:

• CERN is not a Nuclear Research Centre in particular. If you read The Hindu’s Editorial, you should have noticed this message. The story is like, President Kalam went to Geneva recently, “The Hindu ” had an article on the visit. The Director of CERN himself wrote a letter to the Hindu! This letter was regarding the inaccuracies in the CERN, and here is the quote directly from that article:
  
  

  With reference to the report “Kalam arrives in Geneva” (May 26), on the visit of President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to Switzerland, I would like to clarify some inaccuracies regarding CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Your article appears to link CERN to nuclear technology, a point that is thoroughly inaccurate.

  CERN’s field of study is fundamental science in particle physics. Although containing the word `nuclear’ in its title, CERN does not deal with nuclear power for energy production, for other civilian uses, or for military purposes. Moreover, any research for military purposes in explicitly forbidden by the Organization’s convention. All results of research performed at CERN are published openly, and are freely available to scientists the world over.

  Isn’t that great? If you are interested, read the whole mail.

• Scientific Linux CERN 3 - A linux distro by CERN! I never new Nuclear Research Centres made Linux Distributions . I later compromised myself from the fact that even WWW was invented there!
• CERN has got a ocean of websites under the domain cern.ch! Practically, it will be my largest post if I included the list here!
• CERN has got a document server called CDS(CERN Document Server) which runs on a software called CDSware(The CERN Document Server Software) which is GPLed! Boy, this is getting great! It is freely downloadable
• CERN is called a particle physics research centre, but it develops many softwares. For eg. CERN Webmaker, a popular doc-maker was designed in CERN .

Thats what I found till now, may be many things pop-up in time-being. Besides, I found to read “Mr.Sampath, the printer of Malgudi” by RK Narayanan. The story is really practical. Narayanan has portrayed a life of a printer and an editor of Malgudi, the imaginative town by Narayanan. Personally, Srinivas the editor of Banner is an impressive character. I couldn’t review much about it, because the story is very simple, no special features.

Updates:

Give your message to the inhabitants of the world after 5000 years. KEO Project, a project supported by Unesco,Hutchinson and European Space Agency, is sending a satellite, with your message which will return after 5000 years!