Caption CERN Contest – Smile!

July 18, 2015 by Adam Fabio 11 Comments

Week 23 of the Caption CERN Contest has been laid to rest. Thanks to all the entrants who stopped by to pay their respects and leave captions for the dearly departed SC-1. CERN engineers and scientists are a crafty bunch, so we’re betting that SC-1’s spirit (and many if its components) lived on in newer CERN projects. We have to thank CERN’s unnamed photographer for capturing these events. It’s always great to see the people and the personalities behind the science.

The Funnies:

“After many years of ignoring the pitiful meows, it was finally determined that Schrödinger’s cat was, in fact, dead.” – [Josh Kopel]
“We gather here to mourn the deaths of all those brave and noble components that left this world surrounded by magic smoke to reside forever in great the parts bin in the sky.” – [Kid Iccurus]
“CERN’s annual Halloween parade was a huge disappointment that year, which was probably due to the fact that they held it in June.” – [DainBramage]

This week’s winner is [Scott Galvin] with “Services were held today for SC-1. SC1’s life ended earlier
this week after a devastating head on collision” Scott describes himself as “Just a visiting Geek with dreams of universal domination”. We’d suggest you start small, [Scott]. Maybe dominating a Bluetooth personal area network with your new LightBlue Bean from The Hackaday Store is just what you need to set your plans in motion!

Week 24

The scientists at CERN always take a personal stake in their work. Pushing mankind’s knowledge of science and high energy physics takes a special breed of person. Thankfully this special breed always seems to have a fun side as well. Here we see a CERN scientist posing behind a … a device. It looks to be some kind of coil or beam line part, though the actual use is thus far a mystery even to CERN’s own staff. We do know this photo was taken in June of 1973, the same month as one of the longest solar eclipses on record – over 7 minutes of totality! Was this part of some CERN solar experiment? Could it have been a section of a particle accelerator? Was this scientist just working on his latest art project – perhaps part of a dodecagon exploration? You be the judge!

This week’s prize is a Teensy 3.1 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. As always, if you actually have information about the image or the people in it, let CERN know on the original image discussion page.

CAPTION CERN CONTEST – Saying Goodbye To An Old Friend

July 9, 2015 by Adam Fabio 4 Comments

The tangled web woven by Week 22 of the Caption CERN Contest has come to a close. It’s been another bumper week with 112 comments. Thank you to everyone who submitted a caption! We realize it may have been hard for some of the network engineers out there to type through their tears, but thank you for persevering! While we don’t know exactly what these two CERN scientists were wiring up, [rwells97] did figure out that the scope in the image is most likely a Tektronix 545/A, which was a popular scope back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The weight on a beast like that was around 70 lbs!

The Funnies:

“Dude, this one’s full of wires too! Every single one of these is full of wires! Why would anyone need so many wires? What in the name of God were they DOING down here?” – [The Green Gentleman]
“Getting to blinky” required a whole lot more work then the engineers realized…” – [Kieran Paulger]
“I think I lost an electron back here, Bob. I’m positive.” – [Christine Hampton]

This week’s winner is [alan] with “Daft Punk was actually two of CERN’s best acoustics researchers prior to forming the band. Here they are after hours working on the track that would later be named ‘Da Funk'”. [Alan] is a Computer Science PhD candidate with focus on computational biology, specifically population genomics. Hopefully he has some hardware in the mix somewhere, because we’re sending him a Stickvise from The Hackaday Store!

Week 23

Something a bit different this week. CERN is probably best known for the various particle accelerators they’ve had over the years. One of the first units was synchrocyclotron SC-1, which operated from 1957 to 1974. According to the album page on CERN’s servers, SC-1’s last day of operation was celebrated with a funeral procession. Scientists, and staff walked the grounds with flowers, top hats, and even a shrouded coffin. We can all related to decommissioning a well-worn piece of equipment. Be it a computer, a machine tool, or even a synchrocyclotron, there are always the mixed feelings of thanks that it did a good job, and relief that it will no longer need to be maintained.

Even though we have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in this image, we’re going to caption it anyway! Give us your best captions of what you think is really going on here! 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 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.