Oh hey, my alma mater. Seems kinda weird anything cryogenic could be “unplugged,” since there’s a fuckoff-massive tank for liquid nitrogen outside the Low building… the tallest building on campus. Though I’m pretty sure it pipes over to Walker Laboratory, a thousand feet away and a hundred feet lower. Neither building being the Ricketts lecture hall and nameless gymnasium shown in the video thumbnail. When was that picture even taken? I think '86 Field is all crisscrossed with desire paths now.
Oh hey, my alma mater. Seems kinda weird anything cryogenic could be “unplugged,” since there’s a fuckoff-massive tank for liquid nitrogen outside the Low building… the tallest building on campus.
The article explains it. The freezer was wired through a disconnect box that was locked to prevent anyone from turning it off, but the janitor found the circuit panel and turned off the circuit breaker.
… yeah, and it’s kinda weird circuits were involved, when we have a mad-science supply of liquid nitrogen. I would have assumed that was the mechanism for keeping anything extremely frozen for decades on end.
I would have assumed that was the mechanism for keeping anything extremely frozen for decades on end.
Boy you’d think, right? Gravity-powered liquid nitrogen just makes too much sense. No, we’ll make it so it won’t fail unless the circuit box gets opened!
That is a bit over my head (my degree is in CompSci), but the research samples only had a 3C degree margin for error (77 to 83C) so I am assuming they had a good reason for using the setup that they had. Or maybe they were forced to accept that setup due to financial limitations.
Either way, privatization was 100% at fault here. The university wanted to cut costs (avoid paying benefits) so they outsourced the cleaning job to a private company who hired the cheapest guy they could. The outsourced company didn’t understand or respect their research and the guy they hired obviously didn’t either.
Something very similar actually happened:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/27/us/janitor-alarm-freezer-rensselaer-polytechnic-lawsuit-new-york/index.html
A janitor unplugged something because the alarm was annoying, and it destroyed decades of scientific work
Oh hey, my alma mater. Seems kinda weird anything cryogenic could be “unplugged,” since there’s a fuckoff-massive tank for liquid nitrogen outside the Low building… the tallest building on campus. Though I’m pretty sure it pipes over to Walker Laboratory, a thousand feet away and a hundred feet lower. Neither building being the Ricketts lecture hall and nameless gymnasium shown in the video thumbnail. When was that picture even taken? I think '86 Field is all crisscrossed with desire paths now.
The article explains it. The freezer was wired through a disconnect box that was locked to prevent anyone from turning it off, but the janitor found the circuit panel and turned off the circuit breaker.
… yeah, and it’s kinda weird circuits were involved, when we have a mad-science supply of liquid nitrogen. I would have assumed that was the mechanism for keeping anything extremely frozen for decades on end.
Boy you’d think, right? Gravity-powered liquid nitrogen just makes too much sense. No, we’ll make it so it won’t fail unless the circuit box gets opened!
That is a bit over my head (my degree is in CompSci), but the research samples only had a 3C degree margin for error (77 to 83C) so I am assuming they had a good reason for using the setup that they had. Or maybe they were forced to accept that setup due to financial limitations.
Either way, privatization was 100% at fault here. The university wanted to cut costs (avoid paying benefits) so they outsourced the cleaning job to a private company who hired the cheapest guy they could. The outsourced company didn’t understand or respect their research and the guy they hired obviously didn’t either.