Weasel Apparently Shuts Down World's Most Powerful Particle Collider | Hacker News Reader

Weasel Apparently Shuts Down World's Most Powerful Particle Collider

npr.org

166 pointsdctoedt98 comments

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.)

I was wondering about that: Birmingham UK we have outdoor transformers at various points around the outskirts of the city and plenty of wildlife (including ASBO squirrels and nonchalant foxes) but no history of power outage.

Perhaps the trips are set really sensitive given the value of the equipment being run from the supplies?

Hah, "ASBO squirrels". ASBO is a Britishism I hadn't heard in so long.

ASBO: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour_order

The first time I visited UK, I found funny that the hotel close to Hyde Park, had signs warning to close the windows otherwise they would get into the rooms.

One might speculate that the collider lacks redundant power supplies, which is surprising to me.

> 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?

Happens pretty frequently, they just don't get reported beyond local news unless it affects something noteworthy. http://cybersquirrel1.com/ maps a lot of these "Cyber Squirrel Operations".

Mainly squirrels, birds, raccoons, snakes, and rats.

Squirrels are notorious for chewing on anything.

My neighbor was digging in his front yard and thought he nicked some Comcast cabling. It was exposed so he called them and they said they'll be out tomorrow to inspect them and make sure its ok.

Before they could get the there the following morning, two squirrels had eaten through the cable, got electrocuted and shut down the entire neighborhoods internet.

I was lucky since I was using Century Link, but man do people get pissed when they don't have their internet working.

You'd think that there would be a sort of temporary wrap sold at hardware stores, covered in/inundated with a bittering agent, to protect any wires you were going to temporarily leave exposed.

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...

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

A squirrel made its nest in my shed once. Believe me when I say, everything seems appetizing to them. Just like a baby, except a squirrel will destroy it instead of drooling on it.

Babies destroy things. You only have to scoop vomit out of a shoe, cheese out an electric window mechanism and fish DVDs out of the inside of a DVD player 6 or seven times to begin to get it.

I recall hearing that some of the plastic/insulation may have used peanut oil (or something that at least made it smell/taste that way).

Might be something like this:

http://pets.stackexchange.com/questions/23/why-do-cats-lick-...

My cat is mad for a good lick and a sniff of a plastic bag. She doesn't actually chew them but does this strange chewing motion with her mouth, a bit like when cats practice their kill bite or chatter when looking at potential prey from a window.

Most plastic bags are polyethylene, and new ones in particular may contain small traces of ethylene, which has a pleasant fruity smell.

From wikipedia:

"Rodents (from Latin rodere, "to gnaw") are mammals of the order Rodentia, which are characterized by a single pair of unremittingly growing incisors in each of the upper and lower jaws"

Essentially, life as a squirrel is an 'unremitting' quest to chew s%%t up.

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.

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

It's not as bad as you might think if you use e.g. pipe insulator to encase your cables.

Owning a rabbit isn't hard or dangerous to them, but yes - letting them have free reign of a room means completely bunny-proofing it. I've lost so many cords...

You want this stuff: http://www.amazon.com/Install-Bay-Split-Loom-Inch/dp/B005V9U... 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.

Fwiw, after our rabbit ate through the insulation on a power cord, we looked for stories of rabbits being actually hurt by electrocution. There's a lot more stories of them getting zapped and freaked out than suffering any permanent injury.

> stories of rabbits being actually hurt by electrocution

You won't find any, because electrocution is deadly by definition ;-)

Joke aside, I think when they reach the wire the contact surface is not very large, so they probably get a sensation similar to touching an electric fence rather than an electric shock.

Source: we had a rabbit when I was very young. I learned quickly not to touch some of the electric cords laying on the ground.

Porcupines go crazy for salt:

http://blog.nature.org/science/2015/03/30/believe-porcupines...

I guess there's any number of reasons animals chew on things.

Sounds like a job for the security apparatus.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05...

Along with the associated network ops person's answer to the classic "what would you take with you on a desert island" question:

A nice length of fiber optic cable. Once you're on the island, just bury it in the sand, wait a few minutes for the man in the earth-moving machine to come cut it, and then ask him how to get off the island.

A telco worker told me that squirrels chew lead sheathing because corrosion makes it sweet. That's also why kids eat chips of paint containing lead oxide. I believe that it's the acetate salt.

Indeed. Something ate through the little squeeze bulb that's for priming the carburetor on my gas powered lawn mower, and the spark cable and fuel hose have been gnawed too.

That's probably some component of the rubber/plastic. Maybe a plasticizer. Maybe endrogenic. Or maybe, as others have noted, peanut oil ;)

I used to work in the IT department of a steel mill. A racoon once got into a power transformer station behind the mill and managed to ground something that shouldn't have been grounded. The mill was down for 12 hours as a result. It was both extremely annoying and highly entertaining.

I guess it was accompanies with a very loud pop and a very fried squirrel.

A squirrel knocked out power for about 50k people in my area recently. Lasted about 8 hours. Happens often enough, but I'm guessing our system is somewhat mismanaged.

I worked for energy companies (workforce management systems, business intelligence). Accidents like this happen more often than you think. Usually they are isolated because its less likely to happen to larger grid units. Small incidents don't make news and are mitigated within hours. Unless human error is involved or accidents with human victims (traffic accidents, workplace accidents).

Because this PR piece is about getting in the news and guerrilla marketing.

Are you a passionate engineer who is at ease with powerful high voltage equipment? Are you ready to become a key player in the design, development, production, installation and commissioning of some of the largest power converters in the world? Take part!

http://jobs.web.cern.ch/job/11871

Blaming a bird or a small mammal makes cute propaganda. This wasn't always the case: in 1999 three breakdowns have occurred in 18 kV transformers, causing major power cuts and beam losses totalling 3.5 days. Animals didn't take the blame in 2008 for the failure of a power transformer on one of the surface points of the LHC.

And a warning to non-western members:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264

On top of the above treatment, the usual package for prospective employees:

Resolution of the CERN Staff Council

- the Management does not propose to align the level of basic CERN salaries with those chosen as the basis for comparison;

- in the new career system a large fraction of the staff will have their advancement prospects, and consequently the level of their pension, reduced with respect to the current MARS system;

- the overall reduction of the advancement budget will have a negative impact on the contributions to the CERN Health Insurance System (CHIS);

http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2015/46/Staff%20Asso....

Pensions which will be applicable to new recruits as of 1 January 2012; the Management and CERN Council adopted without any concertation and decided in June 2011 to adopt very unfavourable mesures for new recruits. http://www.gac-epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin....

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.

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.

I don't understand why you are being down voted so I clicked the upside triangle.

Thanks. I don't really pay any attention. It's not worth it. Mobile mistakes, people who don't like me, meh. Giving downvotes time of your day is mismanagement of your well-being because nothing good comes of it, and people like you usually correct it anyway.

I brought my daughter to work with me once when she was three years old. She managed to turn off our main UPS, back before everything was virtualized. Restarting 30+ physical servers while everyone else was losing their minds was a learning experience.

I can't say I blame my employer for instituting a strict "children are not welcome" policy after that, but I'm still rather annoyed.

As a kid, I put a big Grass Valley video switcher into snazzy effects mode during a break in a show. When the show resumed, with several thousand visiting officials in attendance, the first slow video transition used was not the normal quiet fade between cameras as expected, but involved really cheesy moving, expanding star shape that belong on bad cable advertising. There was yelling in the remote truck. They still let me back in though.

When I was in television we wanted that star wipe for a parody thing we were making and nobody could figure out how to do it. I recall us spending about an hour digging around in the switcher manual and its menus until we gave up and did it in Avid.

Where were you when we needed you?

Fun Grass Valley trivia: look closely next time you watch the Death Star firing sequence in Star Wars.

I just looked up that scene on YouTube, and there's the switcher. Thanks for the chuckle.

At least on the Grass Vally switchers, I think you just had to press the star from the group of black and white wipe effect buttons in the upper right, the press "wipe" next to the program fader. You could use the little black joystick in the upper right corner to make the effect move.

At least so I remember from being eight.

The term "molly-guard" for a cover over a Big Red Button or other dangerous control is said to come from a device improvised after a computer operator's daughter, named Molly, hit the e-stop on a mainframe twice in one day.

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

    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.

> "We feel your pain, NPR. We had an office full of kids at Gawker today, too, and it is only by the grace of the blog gods that the place didn’t come tumbling to the ground. Mostly, we just talked sports and politics with them, and pretended to roll over dead when they pointed their Nerf guns at us.

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.

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

maybe it was sent by this guy: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/man-arrested-at-large-hadron-col...

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.

> 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?

You are right. The Higgs boson is a particular resonance in the Higgs field itself.

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.

This is a little like asking whether observing a grain of sand is evidence that beaches can exist. (Yes, but its really not the sensible thing to ask.) The Higgs particle is to the Higgs field as the photon is to the electromagnetic field, or the electron is to the electron field. You've heard of the electromagnetic field because it's a boson and so can pile up into macroscopic amounts such that the particle granularity is negligible. (Electrons are fermions so they can't.) In principle the Higgs can do this too, but presumably the energy required to create a macroscopic Higgs field is unimaginable.

"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

They be rollin

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

First birds dropping bread, now this?

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1937370,0...

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

It's going to be one of those SciFi situations where:

(a) Gaia or The Planet is sending her children to stop what's about to kill the rest.

(b) The time travel implications of the black holes it might create are having the future push back on it 11/22/63 style.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, it can be linked to the more serious Everett's many-worlds explanation and quantum immortality ... we don't live in a world in which we successfully fired up the LHC and the black hole destroyed everyone on Earth, because in that world, there is no life on Earth. So we live in one of the other worlds in which, by whatever improbable means, the black hole never materialized.

Why is this not a serious topic?

See also the "Doomsday argument". It makes similar arguments in a different context without resorting to many worlds. Just the fact that we are alive at a certain time affects the probability that we are part of a doomsday scenario.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

These things come up and are always amusing (my favorite was the "video" of the LHC starting up). I wonder though, assuming no supernatural world-ending phenomenon, what is the worst that could happen given the energy involved? This is high-energy particle physics, using magnets to guide collisions? How high is the energy? Can we put a value on the intensity of a complete and 100% efficient conversion of the particle collider energy to kinetic energy? Would it be like a 1 megaton nuclear bomb? Not even that? 1000x that? Do all concerns involve some unknown-maybe phenomenon like a runaway black hole? If we assume conservation of energy, what is the worst? Anyone know?

> what is the worst that could happen given the energy involved?

The beam alone carries enough energy to melt a tank, that's why they need those massive, water-cooled beam dumps.

All the magnets combined store 11GJ of energy, which is 2.6 tons of TNT energy equivalent. Considering that they're distributed along the accelerator I guess it would result in a spectacular destruction of equipment, but no fireballs on the surface or anything like that.

The whole tank? Or did you mean it can make a teeny tiny hole all the way straight through it?

Now that I looked it up, the analogy used was "could melt half a ton of copper". So it's less than your average car.

Still a lot of energy to get rid off at short notice, in case of emergency shutdowns. If I recall correctly they modulate the beam with steering magnets so it sweeps through an area and water-cool the target material. And its absorption can't be too high so the energy gets deposited over some depth.

Or from wikipedia:

> Each of the two beam dumps, in case, for instance, of a dipole magnet quench, must be able to dissipate 362 MJ of beam energy in the 90 μs circulation time, which equates to a power of 4 TW.

Yes. The LHC has a beam dump off to the side, tonnes of concrete and steel buried underground, specifically for the purpose of dissipating the entire beam energy if needed. It's about the same as the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier stopping from speed:

https://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreac...

http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach...

Seems like an opportune time to link to this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1eh/hamster_in_tutu_shuts_down_large...

;-)

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

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).

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!

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...

That appears to be a reasonable assumption!

Unless of course there's a plot twist.

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.

Was Ted Cruz anywhere in the vicinity?

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

We all attribute different initial meanings to common words. When I read "weasel" I at first thought politician. (No, I'm not making a joke).

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

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.

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

http://www.amazon.com/Weasels-Elys-Dolan/dp/0763671002/ref=s...

>> "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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

It must be Mustelidae, not Friday.

Always remember to debug and deweasel your systems.

Pop goes the Weasel ?

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...

That is fortunate.

Alternatively a weasel stuck by the beam may simply go pop.

Good time to repost the classic: http://cybersquirrel1.com/

another classic, Felicia the Ferret:

http://history.fnal.gov/felicia.html

How has this masterpiece eluded me.

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