
Weasel Apparently Shuts Down World's Most Powerful Particle Collider - dctoedt
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/29/476154494/weasel-shuts-down-world-s-most-powerful-particle-collider
======
captainmuon
Great, I skip reading the daily run meeting slides once, and then find _this_
in the news (I work on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC [1]).

There are a couple of nasty images in the (internal) presentation. That poor
weasel tried to eat a cable or something and got completely fried :-(. For
those wondering how this can happen, it looks to me like a normal outdoor
transformer station, like there are many all around the world. I actually
wonder why you don't hear about power outages like this (not at CERN, but in
regular cities) more frequently. Maybe public power supplies are more
redundant?

([1] Note I'm only posting as a private person and not in any official
function. Disclaim disclaim yadda yadda.)

~~~
walrus
Squirrels accounted for 28% of fiber cuts in 2010 for Level 3
Communications.[1]

[1] [http://blog.level3.com/level-3-network/the-10-most-
bizarre-a...](http://blog.level3.com/level-3-network/the-10-most-bizarre-and-
annoying-causes-of-fiber-cuts/)

~~~
noobermin
Is there any reason for this? Do cables seem appetizing to squirrels?

~~~
duaneb
I can't speak for squirrels. However, owning a rabbit, you quickly learn that
rabbits like to "clean up" the cables (roots) in their den—so you have to
carefully guard the cables so the bunny doesn't get fried.

~~~
noobermin
Oh dear, I was planning to adopt a rabbit soon. Lesson taken: keep him/er away
from the computer.

~~~
colanderman
You want this stuff: [http://www.amazon.com/Install-Bay-Split-Loom-
Inch/dp/B005V9U...](http://www.amazon.com/Install-Bay-Split-Loom-
Inch/dp/B005V9UU1O) Of course they chew through that too, but it takes them
just long enough that you can move the cable/distract them before they get to
the cable itself.

Also, our rabbit tends to ignore cables that are flat along the ground. Only
diagonal ones that cross her path ever seem to draw her attention.

------
abruzzi
I love the last paragraph:

> Of course, small mammals cause problems in all sorts of organizations.
> Yesterday, a group of children took National Public Radio off the air for
> over a minute before engineers could restore the broadcast.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
I was even more amused that they linked to Gawker for the story about
themselves.

Feel bad for the TD who brought his kid to work and was rewarded with 73
seconds of dead air, though. That would be enough for the average radio
engineer to put that little troublemaker up for adoption. You think people
take an outage on your site seriously? Dump about fifteen seconds of silence
onto an operating radio station, much less a network, and people _lose their
minds_. Executives run out of offices shouting. Phones light up. It's amazing.
My record was 46 due to a router failure and I had the station's general
manager riding my shoulder before I could restore air.

I've heard of firings for a minute, so joking aside, hope everything worked
out. If they're joking about it on a listserv I'd assume so.

~~~
nocarrier
These stories of kids breaking things at work reminded me of ultimate kids-at-
work-gone-wrong story when a Russian airline pilot let his kids fly the plane.
Such a tragic story.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593)

~~~
jsmthrowaway

        2393 Kudrinsky: We'll come out in a sec. Everything's all right ...
             Gently [unintelligible], gently ... Pull up gently!
        2400 [Sound of impact, end of recording]
    

The end of those transcripts always get me. No kidding, tragic.

------
hinkley
When I was a kid my town had three blackouts caused by substation failures.
Once by mylar party balloon, and twice by squirrel. Turns out having a bushy
tail can be a liability.

Later I was reminded of this when I was reading a biography of Tesla, who was
doing the calculations for the arcing distance on his equipment and was
building the largest coils that could safely be placed into his workshop(s).
One day he accidentally turned on the equipment while he was on the wrong end
of the room and he had to army crawl across the floor to get to the shutoff
switch without turning into one of those squirrels.

[Edit] The point: Maybe we're designing the safety margins on these systems a
little too tightly. Maybe a Squirrel radius should be added to these things.

------
Grue3
Well, obviously it had to happen. All the universes where the weasel didn't
stop it ended up being destroyed.

~~~
DennisP
While they were still trying to start up the LHC and having weird failures,
some guy calculated how many failures we'd have to see before taking that
hypothesis seriously. He came up with about 30.

Shortly after that, it failed because a bird dropped a biscuit in precisely
the wrong place. It was like living in a Douglas Adams novel.

------
zamalek
> The Higgs is believed to endow other particles with mass

 _Please_ correct me if I'm wrong, but after digging into things a bit I've
determined that the Higgs Boson is nothing more than _evidence_ of the Higgs
Field - which is the thing actually responsible for mass as a result of energy
moving through it. Is this a common misconception or is it me that has the
misconception?

~~~
21
As another non-expert which investigated this, there are two Higgs related
things which give mass.

One of them, the Higgs mechanism, gives mass to bosons (force carrier
particles) by direct interaction between the Higgs field and the bosons
fields.

The other one gives mass to fermions (matter particles). This one is more
related to the Dirac equation. There are basically two kinds of all fermions,
a left kind and a right kind (chirality), and one electron for example
constantly "oscillates" between these kinds. At each such oscillation it emits
or absorbs a Higgs bosson.

------
idealform01
"There have been previous incidents, including one in 2009, when a bird is
believed to have dropped a baguette onto critical electrical systems."

Animals be trollin

~~~
username223
It sounds like a caricature of a French person was involved: "Euh... c'etait
un oiseau avec le pain. Vraiment!"

------
zkhalique
First birds dropping bread, now this?

[http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1937370,0...](http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1937370,00.html)

Perhaps the animals are trying to tell us something...

~~~
jonah
I had no idea about Nielsen and Ninomiya's theories and multiple publications
on them. I love the serious way their (I assume trolling) ideas are taken.
Good fun in the high energy physics communy.

~~~
zamalek
Is that the one where tachyons are produced, travel back in time and
ultimately interfere with their own creation? Fascinating stuff, although I
struggle to believe it myself, I think that science's best ideas have
historically come out of the blue - more attention to _" the blue"_ is
something that I would like to see more of from modern science.

~~~
jonah
Yes. And interestingly the GP's article spends a lot more time on that than
the bird/bread. (Though that bird may have come back from the future as a
saboteur[1].)

[1] Even though it doesn't have wooden shoes.

~~~
zamalek
There's quite a few consequences, though - wrong as it might be. Regardless of
how preposterous it is, imagine it to be true. What would that do to our
concept of "science: the art of disproving falseness"? Science already
struggles with the precision of components (telescopes, as an example) and,
what's cognitively pleasing, is figuring out how you would devise an
experiment for _that._ It doesn't matter if it was not true, how would you
_prove_ that? How do you say, for certain, that particles are _not_ travelling
back in time?

That's the wonder that science has seems to have lost.

------
Filligree
Seems like an opportune time to link to this:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/1eh/hamster_in_tutu_shuts_down_large...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/1eh/hamster_in_tutu_shuts_down_large_hadron_collider/)

;-)

------
martincmartin
"It is unclear whether the animals are trying to stop humanity from unlocking
the secrets of the universe." Ok, that made me smirk.

------
linker3000
Somewhat uncannily, I am currently in Switzerland (from the UK), working on a
project to install a 13PB object store for the Montreux Jazz archives
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11040853](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11040853)).

Last night, we had a meal out in Lausanne with our hosts and when walking back
to the car, we saw a small animal dash across the road. Our hosts, in French,
described this 'animal who eat cables', and we ended up translating this into
'ferret'. Maybe our 'ferret' was on his or her way to/from the scene of the
crime.

Regrettably I cannot give a description that will aid in its capture for
interview.

PS: We completed the initialisation of the object store today (Friday 29th
April) and will be testing with the customer on Monday for handover on Weds.
We started work within one hour of flying to site last Saturday (I have two
colleagues over from the USA) and we worked some 8am-11pm days to make it
happen. We are knackered!

~~~
jdminhbg
Given that the investigation turned up the charred remains of the perpetrator,
he probably wasn't on his way _from_ the scene of the crime...

~~~
linker3000
That appears to be a reasonable assumption!

Unless of course there's a plot twist.

------
robbrown451
They are now saying it was probably a marten, not a weasel.

But the possibility remains that it is an elusive mammal that has been
conjectured since the 1960's, but has yet to be confirmed to exist.

------
sizzzzlerz
Was Ted Cruz anywhere in the vicinity?

------
linuxfan2718
when I read this headline I thought "Weasel" was a hacker crew I hadn't heard
of before.

~~~
rootbear
And I first saw it as Weasley and thought sorcery was involved...

------
towlejunior
Lol, I read "Weasel" and assumed it was the name of a startup or a python lib
or something... I need to get outside more.

------
nrjames
It's almost just like this children's book! Weasels: Elys Dolan

[http://www.amazon.com/Weasels-Elys-
Dolan/dp/0763671002/ref=s...](http://www.amazon.com/Weasels-Elys-
Dolan/dp/0763671002/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1461954961&sr=8-1&keywords=weasels+elys+dolan)

------
nxzero
>> "Mounting evidence suggests a hacker trained the weasel to take down a
particle collider."

Right, that's believable - what's next, killer dolphins that take out
submarines?

------
gamesbrainiac
When we finally get quantum computers, bugs will be called weasels.

~~~
userbinator
Maybe LHC workers should adopt the term "deweaseling" for troubleshooting
problems.

------
danellis
Oh, a literal weasel. I was picturing someone like Walter Peck.

------
nxzero
Reminds me of why software bugs are called bugs; ironic give most software
bugs are caused by humans.

------
siliconc0w
Weasel was obviously sent by advanced alien race to 'lock' our technological
progress.

------
gm3dmo
Weasels don't get sucked into jet engines. But they do get fried in large
hadron colliders.

------
Aelinsaar
It must be Mustelidae, not Friday.

------
molmalo
Always remember to debug and deweasel your systems.

------
stuaxo
Pop goes the Weasel ?

------
ChuckMcM
Fortunately the weasel in question wasn't struck by the beam turning it into a
hyper intelligent creature with unusual powers and great manual dexterity.

[1]
[http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/marvelmovies/images/2/25...](http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/marvelmovies/images/2/25/Rocket_Cutout_Render.png/revision/latest?cb=20140627191149)

~~~
jahewson
Alternatively a weasel stuck by the beam may simply _go pop_.

------
hyperion2010
Good time to repost the classic:
[http://cybersquirrel1.com/](http://cybersquirrel1.com/)

~~~
mzs
another classic, Felicia the Ferret:

[http://history.fnal.gov/felicia.html](http://history.fnal.gov/felicia.html)

