Week 18 has faded into history, but not before you wrote some great captions! A hearty thanks to all the entrants. Astute reader [jlbrian7] has done it again! He’s uncovered the story behind this image. The woman in this photo is manually analyzing photographs of charged particles taken in a bubble chamber. He linked to an article from Fermilab, and to a 1971 film about Gargamelle, CERN’s largest bubble chamber at the time. The film is well worth a watch. It’s aimed at the layman, explaining the design, construction, and operation of bubble chambers. The photo scanning section starts at 14:40. The video has plenty of “1970’s-isms”, such as referring to the women analyzing the photographs as “scanning girls”. The filmmaker even bookend the section with an actual scanned girl – a possibly NSFW (by today’s standards) ASCII art printout of a nude pin-up model, as printed by a Control Data Corporation supercomputer.
The Funnies:
- “Tabatha, the dungeon master, plots tonight’s dungeon and dragons game inside the exploded atom.”- [LloydTCannonIII]
- “CERN, the only place you can watch Netflix on the same table that you eat lunch and plot global domination. Muwahahaha!” – [Joshua]
- “They take Kerbal Space Program very serious at CERN. Here you can see the first interactive real time orbital view display.” – [haxtormoogle]
This week’s winner is [Jarrett] with “Friday night is Missile Command night in the lab. It’s a serious event”
We’re giving away two prizes this week – one to [jlbrian7] for his research on this and other CERN images, and one to [Jarrett] for his winning caption! Congrats to both of you. Enjoy your Logic Pirates From The Hackaday Store!
Week 19
Just about every workplace has to worry about safety. Many companies have a safety team that is trained to handle emergencies and help patients until proper medical technicians arrive. In a typical office environment this training is pretty easy, but what if you’re working on the bleeding edge of science? CERN’s safety team trains for everything, including badly burned hands and partially removed eyeballs. Don’t worry, these are just simulated injuries, which is probably why this CERN scientist is so calm, even smiling for the photo! CERN’s medical room also appears to be well stocked – with a full skeleton, and no less than four different types of fire extinguishers.
So, even though we already have a pretty good idea of what is going on in this photo (and the accompanying album), we’re sure you’ll come up with some great captions. Have at it!
This week’s prize is a Lightblue Bean from The Hackaday Store. Add your humorous caption as a comment to this project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the contest log, not on the contest itself (or on this post).
As always, if you actually have information about the image or the people in it, let CERN know on the original image discussion page.
Good Luck!
We Are the Borg. You Will be Assimilated. Resistance is Futile.
If you think I got it bad check what is left of jimmy in the corner over there
Cubicle wars are taken very seriously at CERN.
“Do NOT look into Laser with one remaining eye!”
In the power outage, CERN employees had to try alternative experiments. Sneezing with your eyes open was a bust.
Dr. Banks never tried eyeballing the electron beam alignment again.
I am locutus of CERN
Great captions – but don’t forget that they don’t count unless you post them up on the contest log! https://hackaday.io/contest/4200-caption-cern-contest/log/19322-caption-cern-contest-week-19
“your lab assistant kick my eye and now I need operation!”
The doctors told me that I needed to stop having sex with random women, after I contracted “blue waffles” on my finger. So I strapped the lab vacuum cleaner to the lab skeleton, and had at it…Everything was fine until I bent over to take a look…
“Become a pirate they said, it will be fun they said”
hmm… Unforeseen consequences…
The Minion Dave, before his yellow color hack.
Arrrr, we be huntin’ for the great white Higgs! It took me eye and two of me fingers, but we will harpoon it to the standard deviation acceptable for proof.
Small point: she’s not *analyzing* the tracks, she’s digitizing them so they can be analyzed later,
As I posted before, we had this exact same setup in the Physics building at UMass/Amherst in the 70s. I used to walk by it all the time.
And I had a punched tape or punchcard copy (can’t remember which) of the “girl on the stool”. Technology has definitely improved in that area…
Dave’s ingenious method of counting protons in the beam didn’t work as well as expected.