The LHC is recovering from a serious overheating problem, caused by a piece of stale bread dropped by a bird onto an apparently unprotected thermal vent. Impossible, you say?
Not impossible. I used to bulls-eye whomp rats in my T-16 back home.
While it’s not about to be mistaken for a moon any time soon, the Large Hadron Collider probably is the closest thing we’ve got to the Death Star. With miles of passages, the capability to destroy a planet, and a bunch of people dressed in white scooting around inside, it’s actually a pretty good fit. So it’s no surprise that it has the same weakness. Concerned only with interference from cosmic radiation and nearby townspeople, the structure was built underground — but they didn’t count on the possibility of a small one-man fighter armed with the Force a clumsy bird with a bit of baguette making the trench run and hitting it where the least expected it.
The absurdity of this failure (though it apparently won’t affect the re-activation) makes me think that maybe the LHC really is so abhorrent to nature that the universe is contriving to snuff it out.
[via PopSci]
This was the higgs boson particle coming back in time disguised as a bird in order to prevent its own creation. Expect more of the incidents.
damn. I missed that. You already made that joke. bastard.
It was, quite obviously, schroedinger’s bird.
So there’s only ONE Higgs boson in the universe? That explains why some days I feel fat
Time to sic Schroedinger’s cat on this bird.
Sounds like the same problem I have with my Xbox
A bird hit your Xbox?
Maybe this is a omen s**t has been happening to the damn thing ever since it first made news I say give it one more try and if s**t happens again just f**k it
I think your keyboard is broken.
I think his keyboard is working just fine. It’s his brain that’s broken.
haha if you can’t swear somewhere I think it looks less dorky to just drop the words instead of s**r them o*t
Fool, it was a european swallow, not a seagull that dropped the deadly bread. check your facts!
laden or unladen ?
Laden, duh. But how do you know it wasn’t an African swallow? Was it confirmed to be non-migratory? Nooooo…
If the bird’s first name was Bin, then there’s a problem if it was Laden.
I think Merlin has been asking questions again. What is your favourite colour?
Those little sly bastard European swallows! It was probably just waiting for the right time to pounce and get some media publicity!!
Is the LHC really just the Orchid hatch? Should we hope that there’s a Desmond with a failsafe key?
This is probably the wrong place to ask this but I’ve no idea where the right place would be. Are you guys planning a Logitech G110 review anytime soon? It’s become available recently and I’m pretty anxious to get one. I know Devin reviews most big gaming peripherals and I love them but sometimes it takes a while. I would like to know if I should whip out my credit card now or hold out for a bit longer.
Likely the review has been a long time coming but so repulsive to nature that it never successfully surfaces. :)
I believe Matt has that one, actually. But yeah, we’ll have a review. Really though it’s just a G19 without the screen though right? Personally I’d buy the G110 over the G19, I think you should go for it.
Seriously what the hell? How can something be built so questionably?
LHC problems are becoming ridiculous.
Sounds like a conspiracy. Next it’ll get hit “randomly” by lightning.
I hear ya.
I reckon it doesn’t work fullstop. Now they have to come up with lame excuses why it doesn’t work so they can justify the US debt amount of money they spent on it.
I think it needs to be more obscure than lightning though. Maybe it will be “we created a Higgs Boson particle and it was soooooo powerful it destroyed the doohickey that generates the whatsamacallit!! Now can we have trillion more euros please?”
King Arthur – “The bird could of gripped the baguette by the husk”
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds – “It’s not a question of where he grips it! It’s a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound baguette.”
King Arthur: Well, it doesn’t matter. Will you go and tell your master that Arthur from the Court of Camelot is here to fix the hadron collider?
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds – “Listen. In order to maintain air-speed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?”
King Arthur – “Please!”
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds “Am I right?”
No worries I hear they have it protected with a monster power surge protector from best buy.
I’ve found the Higgs boson. It was behind my couch the whole time.
No, that was Jesus.
naw man hes in my closet with buddah
This was obviously God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, on his way to lunch.
If that’s the case,
then he must of did it intentionally to calm some Christian or Jew or Muslim who has fears about hawking radiation not working and the world being swallowed by a black hole
It couldn’t have been a mistake, or else he wouldn’t be God
(if you don’t see the partial sarcasm over Hawking Radiation then, oh well but I’m serious on everything else)
Probably.. I’m beginning to think there are some secrets to the Universe that God doesn’t want us to know just yet.
Was that a European swallow or an African swallow?
Swallow what….?
What’ the air speed of a european swallow carrying a baguette?
Idiots! Don’t you know we gotta get this thing working if we ever want to transport up to or down from the Enterprise?
Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not an ornithologist!
Forget lightning… it’ll be TIM! Someone will Tim the LHC.
As an avid listener of the Thom Hartmann talk show I’m quite certain that the bird in question had to have been a pigeon. It seems they are from the planet Xenu and are here spying on us. Want some proff? Have you ever seen a baby pigeon? Do a search on this for a good laugh.
I have lived in NYC for twelve years now and FINALLY saw a baby pigeon on October 16th… while in Las Vegas. Poor thing looked like it couldn’t have carried a petit four.
Some things like that happen, huh? Just a bad day… oh well, tomorrow can be better…
Tweet Tweet! Can’t wait to see what happens next!
My dear Watson,
The problem is between the keyboard and the chair.
What is your favorite color?
i looks a bit of a warning to me! I would look deep into this idea of knowing. it seems these scientist are approaching the subject from the wrong end. it think is logic. to understand the universe i think science needs a new logic a new way of reasoning.
operating under the current logic can be dangerous. because the lack of information and details. reason why it seems this event is a warning sign.
Now Apply the Concept that there are 2 directions on the same road of “Thru the invisible realm.”
When they Repent of Mindreading-thru-the-invisible-realm, they will also repent of Thought-Projection-thru-the-invisible-realm.
Look, everyone knows an unladen swallow couldn’t take down the LHC.
Now if you had two swallows carrying a baguette on strings attached to the dorsal guiding feathers….
Seriously though, this does appear to supply more evidence of some kind of interference from the future.
Doctors Nielsen and Minomiya must be having a great big ol’ belly laugh right about now.
What’s next, someone left the Mr. Coffee on all night?
Yes, but if it destroyed all life on earth there is no future to come back from. And if not, stopping the future damage the collider might cause is changing the future they came back from which would prevent them from coming back to change the future that they prevented from occurring. Alien interference perhaps? ; )
When we have One Large Region, and all have repented of those, then there will be a world with 2 Different Zones of Metaphysics. In My Zone, there will be Metaphysical Calm of the Metaphysical Plains, and thus Zero Accidents.
Dude, alternate timelines all the way. They came from one future to prevent that future occurring again, even though it won’t change THEIR future because it’s no longer part of the same timeline, thus they’re only preventing it in OUR timeline. So I’m sure that they won’t go back and just stay here, continuing to drop random objects on the LHC (perhaps a coconut is next?).
Or something like that.
That’s what she said!
Joe Euclid – November 7th, 2009 at 11:36 am GMT+5
Yes, but if you don’t mind me asking… what the f…..?
John – see bremont – November 7th, 2009 at 9:47 am GMT+5
Oh, good… that clears it right up……………
This is ‘breaking’ news, right?
what’s more likely:
a) a bird took out the HLC
b) the HLC has a low probability of actually working and internal scientists are sabotaging the project to prevent discovery of this truth
okay it seems to me that there is a problem with everyone getting the correct bird in order. So please tell me this…….Every story we tell our children about a baby is that a stork has brought the baby. Oh look the stork has brought a baby….well has anyone thought what takes a baby? (A: a swallow) LMFAO…..I love it!
it was a foo bird and it was not bread it was crap,if you wipe it off it corrodes anything.so if the foo shits wear it.
Next movie (and book) after “Angels and Demons” and “The Da Vinci Code” will be “Da Birds and Demons” :-)
No one there dresses in white. Why would they? Your whole blog entry suggests you’re watching way too many movies. This whole business about the bird is total silliness; if you can’t tell the difference between minor crap (or bread) and deep doo-doo, maybe journalism isn’t your strong suit.
Right. I suppose next you’re going to tell me that the albatross wasn’t present at the Yavin briefing (as the photograph proves).
And I’ll have you know, many Bosons died to bring us this information.
I can’t take credit for that one
I’ve heard the Jehovah Witnesses are once again fortelling the world will end at the end of this year. (2009.) I just wonder what they will do when January 1, 2010 rolls around??
Same thing they’ve done for the past 35 years, start at the beginning of the street.
As one of Jehovah’s Witnesses I can assure you that you have been misinformed. Jehovah’s people do not believe that the world is going to end at all.
(Psalms 104:5,
He has founded the earth upon its established places;
It will not be made to totter to time indefinite, or forever.)
(Psalm 37:11But the meek ones themselves will possess the earth,
And they will indeed find their exquisite delight in the abundance of peace.)
That certainly precludes being sucked into a black hole, no?
And while we do believe that very soon Jehovah God will intervene in human affairs and make them better, we do not claim to know the date that will occur, because, as Jesus stated, “Concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Matthew 24:36)
So, mock if you must – but now you can at least do so with accurate information.
As for January first – I expect I ‘ll start the day with a nice cup of coffee…and maybe a muffin …blueberry perhaps.
Shroedinger’s Second Law of Birds:
What is the probability the European laden swallow carrying a baguette is actually dead if the baguette comes in contact with the LHC and creates a singularity which has the probability of opening up a wormhole ?
and how would his cat react to all this fuss ?
They’ll probably get this thing working in 2012…just in time for the end of the Mayan calendar…. :)
Seriously, all you panic-stricken people need to calm your nerves….
Maybe the bird was just trying to make some toast….. LOL
i give their theory a 5% chance of being true
Spent all that money to build it and didn’t have the sense to cover exposed electrical components?
Thank you for the laughs, both the article and the comments started my day off right.
That was one sophisiticated bird, using a baguette to frame the French people as saboteurs, or would it be baguetteurs?
After 12-21-2012 it won’t matter who or what dropped whatever. In the meantime, I would suspect it was a French swallow. The French will swallow anything and not spit, but drop, now that is a different topic altogether. The have dropped the ball, their guard, their self-respect and any semblance of common courtesy. But, I digress. Only a French bird would carry a baguette. The German bird would carry a brochen. An American bird would carry a roll. A Swiss bird would carry a little knife with all those useful things attached.
And a Canadian bird would carry a moose and it would drop it from a much higher altitude onto the highway missing the LHC altogether.
I have a whole new respect for our humble toaster…more powerful than a hadron collider – able to toast bagles without tripping a circuit breaker
this string of jokes are very colorful and have put a wrong spin to this event.
I call fake. This is a fake comment section, as evidenced by the fact not one single person has blamed Obama or the Republicans.
None of this would have happened if Obama weren’t President it’s all his fault and those stupid Republicans. There you happy Steve Nov 9th @ 1:08pm.
Personally, I think they should wait until Dec 2012 to fire this up, that way if it did destroy the world those Mayans would have been right.
Could it have been a boy in a baloon ?
Supposin’ two swallows carried it together?
I discovered that story for The Register. I was the “Reg readers”.. Im not joking.. I can tell you for sure, it was a robo bird from the future sent to terminate the LHC before it discovers the Higgs.
I was the guy who told the reg about the failure. I have a cool LHC site that makes it easy to monitor the action. http://www.xymox1.com/CERN/index.htm
News update: Apparently the bird was trained by scientists in a rival country and was on a covert mission to sabotage this experiement. A baguette was purposely chosen so that it would look as if its the french who were behind the incident…originally it was supposed to have carried Hummus and Pita bread but that would be a dead give-away. However, the bird has been taken into custody and a cache of assorted items like baguette, italian bread, Indian Naans etc have been recovered from its hideout in a nearby tree. Police are looking for its accomplices who are supposed to be carrying “French Fries” and “bruschettas” too.
What is the terminal velocity of a fully ladened swallow?
I wonder if this thing will actually begin working on December 21st, 2012 :)
Darnit, just read up, someone else made that joke! BAH!
I think I see the pattern of HLC and what is to come. This is the latest in a series of attempts to get this thru a full run. I forsee the HLC making it first succesful attempt by December 21, 2012. Consult the Mayan Calender for … and as The late great Paul Harvey would say… The Rest of The Story