Caption CERN Contest Week 10

We had some great entries in the Caption CERN Contest this week. A huge thanks goes out to everyone who entered.  The jury is still out as to whether the gentleman on the left is a CERN staffer, or a Morlock caught on camera. Our eagle-eyed readers picked out some things we didn’t even notice at first blush – like the strange foreshortening of the “pipe smoking dude’s” right leg. (Yes, he is officially known as pipe smoking dude here at Hackaday HQ). We spotted him again in this image, and he’s in almost exactly the same pose!

The Funnies:

  • “Billy looked on as the James, the workplace bully, was about to walk in to Billy’s electrified puddle of water..” – [Leonard]
  • “This is Bob. Bob made a BAD ENGINEERING MISTAKE. Bob is going to spend some time in THE CORNER. Corners are not easy to find in a ring, so this is Bob’s BAD CORNER.?” – [ca5m1th]
  • “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. His name was Boson Baggins and he had a great fondness for pipe weed and protons.” – [shlonkin]

The winner for this week is [Greg Kennedy] with “You call that a moonwalk? Stand back, Edmund, and let me show you how it’s done.”  If [Greg’s] name sounds familiar, that’s because he used some creative web scraping to compile the unofficial stats for the 2014 Hackaday prize. They were pretty interesting, so we featured them right here on the blog. [Greg] will be hacking in style wearing his new Robot T-Shirt From The Hackaday Store!

On to week 10!cern-10-sm

There’s something for everyone in this image from CERN’s achieves. Gas bottles, chemicals, huge concrete blocks, high voltage wires, and a rather surprised looking scientist. What sort of experiment would require this sort of shielding? What is the photographer standing on? Most importantly, is that a keg of beer hiding under the table to the right?

Add your humorous caption as a comment to this project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the project log, not on the project itself.

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!

Caption CERN Contest Is A GO For Week 9

Thanks for another week of great entries in the Caption CERN Contest over at Hackaday.io! We still aren’t sure if our CERN staffer is looking at that machine pensively, amorously, or with a bit of confusion, but you all found some great words to go with the image!

The Funnies:

  • “Dr. Breman’s early attempts to create the perfect robot woman had some early success, but was later scrapped do to a tragic input/output error.” – Terry Davis
  • “You were supposed to be intelligent, my dear. What do you mean by segfault?” –elias.alberto
  • “CERN’s pioneering computer dating service didn’t quite work out as expected.” – Nick Johnson

The winner for this week is Stripeytype with the quote seen in the top image of this article. Stripeytype will be sporting a CRT head T-Shirt From The Hackaday Store at their next hackerspace meeting.

cern-9-smWe’re not done searching out they mysteries of CERN’s history. Week 9 of the Caption CERN Contest has just begun! 

Some of CERN’s experiments take place in the miles of tunnels below their labs in and around Meyrin, on the border of France and Switzerland. It looks like this image was taken in one of those tunnels. It’s definitely an interesting shot. CERN’s documentation for the image has been lost to history, so it’s up to you to explain what’s going on here! Add your humorous caption as a comment to the project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the log, not on the project itself. 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!

Caption CERN Contest Enters Week 8

The Caption CERN Contest has been going great guns thanks to the community of users over on Hackaday.io. The contest just finished up its seventh week of finding funny captions for images which CERN has in their archives. CERN has decades of great photo documentation of their projects. Unfortunately they don’t know which project each image goes with, or who exactly is in the image. We’re helping them out where we can, by letting CERN know any information we can find on their photos. We’re also having some fun along the way, by giving out a T-Shirt for the best caption each week.

Here are some of the best quotes from week 7

The Funnies:

“Are Socks and Sandals acceptable safety equipment for the Demolition Pit? Yes, because these are Kelvar socks and Zylon sandals being testing. Quite uncomfortable, but these feet will survive a close proximity blast.” – [controlmypad]

“Check it out! One tube for each Ninja Turtle” – [OzQube]

“Before the LHC, hunting for the Higgs was much less glamorous.” – [Tachyon]

The winner of course is [Tim] with the featured image at the top of this article.

week6winrarIf [Tachyon] sounds familiar, that’s because he came up with the best caption back in week 6. Runners up for week 6 were:

“Damn Mario Brothers ….. ‘gotta save the princess’ How about watching where you’re going for once. – [Scott Galvin]

“Here at CERN, you don’t get shafted. You get tubed.” – [Rollyn01]

“Thank god the separator caught him. Another 50 meters, and he’d be nothing but quarks.” – [Curtis Carlsen]

Click past the break to check out this week’s image!

Continue reading “Caption CERN Contest Enters Week 8”

Caption CERN Contest Rolls Into Week 6

The Caption CERN Contest has been rolling along since the first week of February. We’re in our 6th week now, and the users over at Hackaday.io have given us some great captions!

Here are the results from Week 5:

The Funnies:

Guy #1 “Pay close attention: If anything goes wrong, press this BIG RED BUTTON. Then count to ten.”
Guy #2″ What does it do?”
Guy #1 “Absolutely nothing… it just gives you something to do while you’re dying a horrible, painful death.” – [Lorin Briand]
“We’ve miniaturized the mainframe – only 21,480 tubes!.” – [Tim]
“Watch my finger…now, you are getting very sleepy…fund this project…sleeeeepy…” – [Erik Ratcliffe]

The winner this week is [johnowhitaker] with the following caption:

‘Any moment now…’ An elderly visitor waits skeptically for the ‘funny tingling’ experienced by anyone within 3m of the machine as it runs a specific program.

Congrats  [johnowhitaker], you’re getting a free CRT Android T-shirt from The Hackaday Store!

Week 6 just started! Caption the image for your chance to win a T-shirt of your own!

cern-6-smCERN scientists and engineers often find themselves in interesting positions. However, we’re not sure if this CERN staffer ever expected to be quite where he is now!

The only hard information we have to go on is the album this title of the image: “SEPARATEURS ELECTRO STATICS MONTAGE DES ELECTRODES”. Our French isn’t as good as our C++ or x86 assembly, but that sounds like electrostatic separators. Which separators, on which beamline, and in what decade? Your guess is as good as our’s, or CERN’s for that matter.

Add your humorous caption as a comment to this project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the project log, not on the project itself. As always, if you actually have information about the image or the people in it, let the folks at CERN know on the original image discussion page.

If you really want to see what’s happening at CERN, enter The Hackaday Prize! You could win a trip to Geneva, Switzerland to visit CERN yourself (not to mention a trip to space)!

Good Luck!

 

Ball Balancing Robot Uses New TOF Sensor

By now, you’ve most likely have seen or even played with an ultrasonic distance sensor. They work by emitting a sound, and then listening for the “ping” to return. The sensor can then tell how far an object is away by calculating the time in between. With sound waves traveling at 343.2 meters per second (768 mph), it’s no small task to measure the short time it takes for the sound to be emitted, then hit something a few feet away, and return. Now, imagine trying to do that with light.

Light in comparison moves at a whopping 299,792,458 meters per second (or about 671 million miles per hour). You’re going to have to have a pretty fast finger on a stopwatch to measure the time it takes for light to bounce back from an object a few inches away.

[Paul Bristow] is doing just that with the use of a new Time of Flight (ToF) sensor called the TeraRanger One. Developed in cooperation with CERN, this sensor uses a very narrow beam of light (listed as +/- 2 degrees) to accurately measure the position of an object to a resolution of 5mm, with distances up to 14 meters away. It boasts an impressive update rate of >1000 samples a second, and is very micro-controller friendly with UART, I2C, SPI, and PWM output.

[Paul] and his fellow hackers at the Post Tenebras Lab Hackerspace in Geneva got their hands on this sensor, and in a short time had a ball balancing robot up and running. The crude program is not running a PID controller, so the results seen in the video after the break aren’t that impressive. Also, the sensor isn’t exactly cheap at about $180 USD. Despite that, it will be interesting to see what applications these sensors will be used for. If you have any ideas, leave them in the comments below.

Continue reading “Ball Balancing Robot Uses New TOF Sensor”

Caption CERN Contest Turns Out Big Brains And Comic Brilliance

Week 1 of Hackaday’s Caption CERN Contest is complete. We have to say that the Hackaday.io users outdid themselves with funny captions but we also helped CERN add meaning to one of their orphan images. First a few of our favorite captions:

The Funnies:

If you adjust that scope again, when I haven’t touched the controls, I’m donating you to a city college. – [Johnny B. Goode]

SAFTEY FIRST – The proper way to test a 6kv power supply for ripple on the output. – [milestogoh]

Dr. Otto Gunther Octavius – R&D some years before the accident. – [jlbrian7]

The prize though, goes to Hackaday commenting superstar [DainBramage], who proved he knows us all too well with his Portal inspired caption:

Here we see Doug Rattmann, one of Aperture’s best and brightest, perfecting our neurotoxin prior to delivery.

Congrats [DainBramage], enjoy your shirt from The Hackaday Store!

The Meaning of the Image:

8106409Funny captions weren’t the only thing in the comments though – the image tickled [jlbrian7’s] memory and led to a link for CERN Love. A four-year old blog entry about robots at CERN turned out to be the key to unraveling the mystery of this captionless photo. The image depicts [Robert Horne] working with a prototype of the MANTIS system. MANTIS was a teleoperation manipulator system created to work in sections of the CERN facility which were unsafe for humans due to high levels of radioactivity. The MANTIS story is an epic hack itself, so keep your eyes peeled for a future article covering it! We’ve submitted the information to CERN, and we’re giving [jlbrian7] a T-shirt as well for his contribution to finding the actual caption for this image.

Get Started on Next Week:

The image for week 2 is already up, so head over and see for yourself. We’re eager for your clever captions. Ideally we can also figure out the backstory for each week’s randomly chosen image.

Caption CERN Contest

To say Hackaday has passionate folks in our comments section would be an understatement. You’ve made us laugh, made us cry, and made us search high and low for the edit button. From the insightful to the humorous, Hackaday’s comments have it all. So, we’re putting you to work helping out an organization that has done incredible work for science over the years.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has quite a storied 60 year history. CERN has been involved in pursuits as varied as the discovery of neutral currents, to Higgs boson research, to the creation of the World Wide Web. Like any research scientists, CERN staff have always been good about documenting their work. Many of these records are in the form of photographs: hundreds of thousands of them. The problem is that no one kept records as to what each photograph depicts!

The folks at CERN are trying to remedy this by publishing over 120,000 unknown photos taken between 1955 and 1985. The hope is that someone out there recognizes the people and equipment in the photos, and can provide some insight as to what exactly we’re looking at.

Here at Hackaday we think these photos should be seen and discussed, and we’re going to have some fun doing it. To that end, we’re hosting the Caption CERN Contest on Hackaday.io. Each week we’ll add a project log with a new image from CERN’s archives. If you know what the image is, click on CERN’s discussion link for the photo and let them know! If you don’t know, take a shot at a humorous caption. Hackaday staff will pick the best caption each week. Winners will get a shirt from The Hackaday Store.

Here’s how it will work: A new project log will go up every week on Tuesday night at around 9pm PDT. The project log will contain an image from CERN’s archives. You have until the following Tuesday at 9pm PDT to come up with a caption, and drop it in the comments. One entry per user: if you post multiple entries, we’ll only consider the last one.

The first image is up, so head over and start writing those captions!

Good Luck!