Got to have one of the more unique tours Saturday. Spent a few hours over in Pickering touring the Nuclear Simulators.
These rooms are quite interesting, both from a ‘regular person’ perspective, and from a technical person perspective.
When walking in, the rooms are overwhelming with hundreds, possibly thousands of little lights and instruments confronting the eye. One can’t help but wonder how a human being could possibly comprehend what is going on at any given time. But these people do. It gives me a new respect for the people that perform jobs like this.
The geek in me wanted to know more about the backend and it is truly staggering. A room like this can have 10,000 connections back to the simulator computers and they know the position of every control, and every gauge. Even more astounding to me is the sheer math that must go into this, and the relations that exist between the individual componments. Amazing stuff.
Makes me wonder where I put that Microsoft Fortran compiler I was using in the 80’s…