Miscellaneous Topics

[Husky]

"Large Hadron Collider, world's largest machine, broken by 'rogue weasel who bit through power cable'"

(I don't know why we need to use adjectives like "rogue". And why do people always put a picture of an innocent specimen of the species to illustrate such stories, as if the whole species is at fault or is suspect? "That wasn't the purpose behind it." Yes I know, but if this were a human community there would be whining about stereotyping, right?)



theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/29/large-hadron-collider-fouine-chews-through-transformer-wiring

Large Hadron Collider on paws after creature chews through wiring

LHC to be out of action for a week while connections to transformer are replaced following visit from hungry fouine

Friday 29 April 2016 20.14 BST



The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator has been brought to its knees by a beech marten, a member of the weasel family, that chewed through wiring connected to a 66,000-volt transformer.



In an in-house report on the incident, managers at Cern, the European nuclear physics laboratory that runs the LHC, described the incident at the transformer unit as being caused by a “fouine” – a beech marten native to the region. The report concluded it was “not the best week for the LHC”.



The glitch echoes a similar event in 2009 when the power was cut to one of the LHC’s cooling plants leading to unwelcome temperature rises in the collider’s apparatus. That incident was blamed, at least tentatively, on a bird dropping part of a baguette on a compensating capacitor where the mains supply entered the LHC from the ground.

(Novel use for a bit of a baguette.)

But did the little weasel fry?



So, are they saying:

1 Weasel > many human eggheads.





Makes me think of Space Bat:

- www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1acf7o/its_been_four_years_space_bat_we_will_never/

("It's been four years. (7 years) Space Bat, we will never forget you")



- gizmodo.com/5173385/shuttle-riding-bat-dies-the-most-glorious-death-imaginable



Humans antropologise animals' "misadventures" way too often. None of these animals signed up for this. There's no indication "space bat" wanted to go into space "or die trying". There's every indication - from other members of its own species, as well as of other species, that it aimed to just live its life to completion and die from natural causes.





The weasel did in fact die from its 'mistake':

scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/1940160/pop-goes-weasel-hadron-collider-particle-accelerator-shuts-down

Cern spokesman Arnaud Marsollier told the BBC it would take a few days to repair the damage caused by the weasel, which did not survive its high-voltage encounter.

Even guinea pig owners know to protect their wires to prevent obsessively wire-chewing guinea pigs from electrocuting themselves.





Soon we'll see odes appear on reddit or wherever that the weasel was some kind of kamikaze, part of some brotherhood protecting the universe's secrets from mankind that's "just not ready to handle the truth yet" (a la that brotherhood in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade + Jack Nicholson's line in A Few Good Men). Web 2.0 people need something to do, after all.