Engineering News

Soon the story will be.

What happen to the LHC, we sent a reporter there to find out. What do you see?.....

Reporter: I see a very large hole......as far as the eye can see.....

Oh come now. The baguette wasn't that large.

The baguette wasn't that large, in fact, it was small and short, actually a bug, but that was too short for report and so newspaperman expanded it :-)) Must be that bird was trained to catch bugs in system, just this one was unfortunately dropped in process of being thrown out.....

Makes me wonder what would some middle sized hail shower do to so unprotected systems, or just common downpour of rain?

As usual, scientists concentrate on their esoteric formulas and ignore everyday reality :-((

But, what can they do? Nobody has yet invented formulas for such things, therefore they are not in their calculations......

Anyhow, all those stories are so unbelievable, that to anybody with half brain must be clear that they are just that: stories to cover up some real problems and unplanned delays..........

For instance, who can believe that coolant leak can destroy magnets?

Was that coolant so corrosive? At worst it would freeze them temporarily, and if it was not liquid Nitrogen and if someone did not use sledgehammer on them at once, they would just warm up after some time, and that would be all. Only if they were under power and are electromagnets, then such cooling them down to nearly absolute zero would probably shortcut them........

This story about piece of bread making short circuits is no better, since all cables are insulated anyhow, specially if it is high voltage transformers capable of producing big electric arcs by themselves........

It is more likely that someone discovered misplaced sign or some wrong Greek letter in some formula, a typo made by secretary to whom it was dictated :-))

If that is the case, would that Hadron collider ever start, and if it would start, would perhaps results be kind of unexpected?

Well, perhaps Mayans knew that it would finaly start at end of 2012 and flip back current of Time?

"Makes me wonder what would some middle sized hail shower do to so unprotected systems, or just common downpour of rain?"

You'd think in that vast sea of raw genius there'd be an island of common sense, however modest, somewhere.

I don't know how they do things at the LHC, but here in Texas if you've got something really expensive that you need to protect from birds, baguettes, rain, hail, snow, sleet and just plain ol' hadron-collider-variety bird shit, you build a roof on it. Texas and everywhere else. Well, almost.

Right!

If I recall it corectly, they made it underground, so maybe that is the reason they ommited roofs from their plans?

The article says "The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery"

Yes, I know... but if 99% of installation is underground, it is easy to forget about roofs for that 1% that is outside :-))

Perhaps someone forgot to specify that this particular equipment would NOT be underground, so factory produced it just like rest ordered, without roof........

Technicians just put it in place, thinking perhaps someone else would build the roof, since they did not get any to install........

I remembered in Skopje, capitol of Macedonia long ago, they have built hotel without stairs and front entrance, and nobody questioned architectural plans until day for ceremonial opening came and guests found out they cannot enter........

Fred: Hey Joe, what do you do on your lunch break?

Joe: Oh, I go outside and feed the pigeons bread crumbs on top of the collider. Its funny watching them fight for the crumbs.

Don't scientists realise that birds drop things from both ends. They were lucky that the local vermin didn't get to the bread first and really screw the system up!

Maybe the Mayans were right! 2012!

The Mayans are callin' the shots, eh?

Who'll be calling 'em next year? Hallmark? They make calendars, too, don't they?

Makes you appreciate our astronauts even more.... Sitting on top of one of the world's largest firecrackers, composed of 1.2 million parts, all made by the lowest bidder, just waiting for the hydrogen and oxygen valves to open and the igniters to fire up a few million pounds of solid propellant which happens to be contained in robust metal containers. I always remember one of the astronauts said of the lift-off firing: You don't really know where you are going, but when it's lift-off, you better believe you know you're going somewhere!

I'll bet anyone that the baguette sensitive piece of equipment was designed by an experimental scientist and not an engineer.

But scientists are so smart, they think they can design anything. They can also back up their silly designs with an enormous flurry or irrelevant cryptic mathematical equations.

I wonder what their doing with that big hole in the ground in Texas?

We are going to fill it with Democrats.

There aren't that many Democrats left in Texas. I heard they're going to fill it with Republican whining.

Maybe they should be looking for the Baguette Boson!

God works in mysterious ways.

I dunno, dropping a baguette into a hadron collider seems straightforward enough.

Blue Jays crapped all over my pickup truck one morning, but I was still able to drive to work. Maybe Ford should've built this thing.

They deserve it, IMHO. If these folks would wise up a bit and stop calling the Higgs Boson the "God" particle, maybe God will also stop insulting them and their egg-faced project.

Amen.

Manna from Heaven.

More than once on this website I've had the impression that engineers and theoretical scientists are at odds. Turf wars? Theoreticians, paranormalists, artists - worst out of three? Actually engineers and artists have a lot in common, except that artists, seemingly, are willing to accept wider varieties of "grist for the mill".

I'm wondering how dried out and hard was this baguette, how large was it and how far did it fall? (Songbirds' migratory altitude is above 10,000 ft.)

Would those be unladen African or European songbirds?

"More than once on this website I've had the impression that engineers and theoretical scientists are at odds."

Not only engineers vs theoreticians, but applied scientists vs theoreticians. For a thorough and enlightening take on this schism, please read Veblen's The Leisure of the Theory Class.