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posted by martyb on Sunday November 02 2014, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the 120,000,000-words-in-pictures dept.

The Guardian has an article on the recent release of CERN Photo Archives, and how they (CERN) would like help in figuring out what some of them actually are.

The Geneva-based laboratory for particle physics has released a vast archive of photographs dating back to the mid-1950s. The problem is that many of them have no captions — so scientists at Cern [sic] are asking the public for help

This refers to the CERN Mystery Photo archive update from a couple of weeks ago:

Some 120,000 black and white images from the period 1955-1985 are currently being digitised, with files being uploaded in batches of several hundred per week. They are then automatically sorted into albums based on the existing information.

In most cases, at least some descriptions exist, allowing us to identify the pictures.

However, many albums are still in need of titles, the names of the people in the photos, descriptions of equipment, etc., and we believe that much of this information could be crowd-sourced from the CERN community.

Also covered at Gizmodo and Petapixel. Originally spotted on Scientific American's Physics Week Review.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Sunday November 02 2014, @03:57PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 02 2014, @03:57PM (#112423)

    What everyone's talking about that not linking to:

    http://cds.cern.ch/collection/Photos?ln=en [cds.cern.ch]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @05:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @05:31PM (#112442)

      They all look like a bunch of stills from the beginning of a bad porno.

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @04:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @04:51PM (#112429)

    Mmmm (open) Data???
    IBM's unsuccessful punched broadsheet product for mainframe I/O. Bandwidth was great until the thing jammed, which it did on a regular basis.

    Decorating a wall with a honeycomb? Unlikely
    Wall chart for enforcing minimum height and reach for prospective IC manufacturing workers

    A pair of anodes/cathodes
    Martini shakers that took major abuse at the office Christmas party, as did some of the VPs

    Some simple shapes. But what are they for?
    Shape sorting toys for engineer's 2 year old kids, and the kids' parents

    Who is this man, and why is he paying such close attention to
    Infamous incident where a disgruntled IC factory worker held out against police with a pair of revolvers, crouching behind million dollar equipment to discourage return fire

    We have no sense of scale for this.. is it some kind of pipe?
    Crooked shot of barstool at an upscale lounge in Zurich

    An extreme closeup of ... something
    More bad architecture from the Brutalist period.

    A clamp of some kind.
    Hello! My name is Robby! How can I help you, Dave?

    A flywheel from a car? Surely not.
    Innards of a roulette wheel.

    No idea.
    A holder for billiards cue sticks, a popular holiday gift item among CERN employees.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @08:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @08:39PM (#112470)

      That first picture is a time machine. I imagine it got discontinued because they could never figure out how to return anything back from the past to the present. Or maybe whoever built it traveled to the past and got stuck and no one else knew what it was, how to use it, and where the scientist working on it went. Eventually someone else experimented with it and figured out what it was. Too bad it was too late by then and now that person is stuck in a technologically primitive past posting comments on what you call blogs.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @09:08PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @09:08PM (#112476)

        After looking at it a bit longer I just figured what that second picture kinda looks like. It looks similar to a primitive flux capacitor used in intergalactic spaceships. IIRC these types of flux capacitors were discontinued due to safety concerns. Spacex (at least that's what they're called now before they changed their name) was sued for two billion space coins (a futuristic version of Bitcoin) in damages in a class action lawsuit. Chump change for them and the lawers ended up getting almost all of the winnings.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 02 2014, @11:02PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday November 02 2014, @11:02PM (#112498) Journal

      All wrong.

      The first image is a memory dump of the matrix. It crashed when one of the experiments triggered a bug. Apparently the cleanup after the bugfix/restart was not complete, and this memory dump had been overlooked.

      The second image is actually a picture from Area 51 which a visitor accidentally left at CERN. It shows a structural element of an UFO. The person is there to get a measure of size.

      The third image is part of an early voting system. The left part was used for upvotes, the right one for downvotes.

      The fourth image shows parts for a simple robot face. You see an eye a nose, and part of a mouth.

      The man on the fifth image is a time traveller, and the device he's paying such attention to is a part of his time machine which he is currently recalibrating.

      The sixth image is from the fitness room; it's a barbell with the weights removed.

      Next follows an extreme closeup of a warp code.

      The clamp is part of an antigravity device.

      Next comes a prototype of a star gate.

      And finally we have an early NSA spy device.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 2) by BradTheGeek on Sunday November 02 2014, @06:23PM

    by BradTheGeek (450) on Sunday November 02 2014, @06:23PM (#112452)

    However, could they be used to storyboard a fan mand half-life prequel? One where Gordon get born during an accident at CERN?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @06:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @06:31PM (#112453)

    It wouldn't let me post anything, not authorized or some crap. This photo https://cds.cern.ch/record/1764794 [cds.cern.ch] I've seen somewhere. I think it was some sort of antenna with a sensor or phased antenna array of some sort.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @06:42PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @06:42PM (#112455)

      Would've had to be in the GHz range (microwave) being so small and that close together.