The Original Helium Head

[beamjockey]

The new Symmetry has an article on creative hacks in pursuit of particle physics. My favorite master of klugemanship, Todd Johnson, gets a fleeting mention. The whole thing plays like those "Tales from the Tech Shop" panels that are so popular at SF conventions. A sample:

Another giant figure in physics, founding Fermilab director Robert Wilson, is the hero of a widely circulated tale.

Ernie Malamud, a physicist at Fermilab, remembers working with Wilson during his graduate studies at Cornell. The pair wanted to use helium gas, often used to fill balloons, to locate a leak in the glass vacuum chamber; but they discovered the hose from the helium supply wouldn't reach the area where they perceived the leak to be. Wilson filled his mouth with helium from the hose, ran to the tank and blew on a gasket to find the leak. He turned to Malamud and grinned.

Comments

[erikvolson.livejournal.com]

Even Todd's most bletcherous hacks are too well built to be kludges.

Hmm. Firefox's spelxekker accepts kludge, but not kluge.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I think old-line physical-object hackers sometimes spell it Bill's way, but software guys always include the d.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I think old-line physical-object hackers sometimes spell it Bill's way, but software guys always include the d.

I beg to differ. Check the Jargon File/New Hacker's Dictionary entries on "kludge" and "kluge." The Jargon File founders were software guys and their heir, Eric Raymond, is unquestionably a software guy as well. Eric comes down firmly on the side of "kluge," but the controversy is well-described in the entries.

(I ought to stick a link to the book version in here as well.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

To the best of my recollection (which these days means it probably hasn't happened in the last week) no software guy I've ever worked with, or discussed actual code with as opposed to vocabulary, and no comments in any code I've worked on, have ever spelled kludge without a d. But I will admit to living in a fairly small corner of the software world.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Hey Bill, have you seen this quiz?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

No-- it's good fun!

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I got Op I. Not bad for an astrophysicist, I'd hazard.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

He turned to Malamud and grinned.

...and then, in pure Foglio fashion, went Bwahahahah!!! ?

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Only it sounded more like "Bweeeheeheeheee!"

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah... And after I posted this, it occurred to me that a Mad Scientist who sounds like a denizen of Munchkinland just wouldn't be taken seriously. Unless he's Michael Dunn.

Central Drift Tubes

[(Anonymous)]

When we were building the Central Drift Tubes for CDF during the mid-80s, they fit directly inside the superconducting solenoid. We were "assured" during our manufacturing period that the temperature at this position would be close to ambient.

Unfortunately, when they fired up the solenoid the first time, it turned out to be about 40 below zero inside....

So, we hot-glued toaster wire onto the detector between the separate tubes and put a current source attached to a thermostat on the ends. As far as I know, it worked like a charm.

I'm pretty sure that Will Johns, who currently is a HEP professor at Vanderbilt (he was an undergraduate then), along with Steve Errede came up with the idea and I and a whole team of undergrads spend six weeks putting down the wires.

TC Trumpinski

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

I wonder how many facilities are thorough about documenting the klu(d)ges they make to get or keep things running. It always becomes an issue later on when "institutional memory" fails (e.g., earlier workers move on, retire, pass on) and later personnel need to know what that strange thing* in the equipment cabinet is...

*Why is that watermelon there?


I worked in a place where there had been a power spike that blew most of the fuses all through the station. They were three days getting everything back up again, partly because they ran out of fuses and had to wait for more, and partly because they kept opening boxes and finding fuses that weren't on the blueprints.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

My in-laws just bought a house that was something like that. It was used by a religious group, and the going theory is that, over the years, additions were made to the electrical system by "helpful" congregation members who possessed, shall we say, varying degrees of competence.

Our own family electrician is reverse-engineering the mess, and undoing some of the more egregious code violations.