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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247
It didn't survive.
The article doesn't mention it but a physicist somehow got his hands on it, took it to a taxidermist to have it stuffed, and keeps it in his office.
If they couldn't just blow air through it (to feed the string, or push a swab), what about a specialized motorized vehicle (optionally using a long wire pair cable in place of the string, if that was better than battery onboard, or just swabbing as it goes with no cable/string)? Did it come down to a $35+maintenance ferret being lower cost?
>> If they couldn't just blow air through it They could: > Meanwhile, the engineer Hans Kautzky created a “magnetic ferret” to deal with the debris in the main ring. He attached a dozen Mylar disks to a stainless steel rod, along with a flexible, 700-meter stainless steel cable—the equivalent of Felicia’s string—and a metal-attracting permanent magnet—the counterpart to the cleaning swab. He shot the device through a…
> Probably, since the guy who suggested it was brought there specifically for that reason.
Meaning it could be the creative frugal solution for which they were hired, or that it was a good faith attempt towards same, or (in some analogous business situations, I'd guess not in this one) there's incentive to do appear to be doing something.
There was also PR value, including the appearance of being frugal, if there was grumbling about cost of the facility.
Couldn't they just use pressurized air?
Early in my career I worked with a bunch of old school phone guys who told me they used to put a harness on a ferret, attached a fish tape, and sent the animal through a fairly long section of pipe in order to pull a 25-pair phone cable they were installing. They literally "ferreted the pipe" and it was no big deal. There was a rhyme they used for remembering the correct sequence of the colored pairs too. It wouldn't…
The LHC was brought down by a weasel: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247 It didn't survive. The article doesn't mention it but a physicist somehow got his hands on it, took it to a taxidermist to have it stuffed, and keeps it in his office.
The LHC was brought down by a weasel: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247 It didn't survive. The article doesn't mention it but a physicist somehow got his hands on it, took it to a taxidermist to have it stuffed, and keeps it in his office.
At CERN, the previous accelerator was the LEP. Story goes that when it was constructed and first turned on, it was shutting down due to beam not stable. They found out that someone put a glass bottle of beer right inside one of the beams tube. And the detector of Alice at today's LHC was built using steel by melting down old Soviet tanks.
Early in my career I worked with a bunch of old school phone guys who told me they used to put a harness on a ferret, attached a fish tape, and sent the animal through a fairly long section of pipe in order to pull a 25-pair phone cable they were installing. They literally "ferreted the pipe" and it was no big deal. There was a rhyme they used for remembering the correct sequence of the colored pairs too. It wouldn't…
A common technique these days is to attach the pull string to the handles of a plastic grocery bag, and then use a vacuum (shop-vac) on the other end to suck it through the conduit.
The LHC was brought down by a weasel: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247 It didn't survive. The article doesn't mention it but a physicist somehow got his hands on it, took it to a taxidermist to have it stuffed, and keeps it in his office.
At CERN, the previous accelerator was the LEP. Story goes that when it was constructed and first turned on, it was shutting down due to beam not stable. They found out that someone put a glass bottle of beer right inside one of the beams tube. And the detector of Alice at today's LHC was built using steel by melting down old Soviet tanks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At CERN, the previous accelerator was the LEP. Story goes that when it was constructed and first turned on, it was shutting down due to beam not stable. They found out that someone put a glass bottle of beer right inside one of the beams tube. And the detector of Alice at today's LHC was built using steel by melting down old Soviet tanks.
I'm presuming that the tanks were a source of low-emissivity steel?