I went down once into the [particle] accelerator at CERN in Geneva and we were driving around the accelerator ring in an electric golf cart and the guy was explaining that they’re out pursuing the pi meson or whatever. And he said “Quite often we have accidents down here because people are driving the 27 kilometer line of this tube and they just zone out and crash into the wall.”

So I said, “Why don’t you put in some murals to break the visual monotony?” And then he just stared like I’d come from Mars.

I said “Look, it’s lit 24 hours, right, why don’t you put in some houseplants? Just kind of humanize the interface a little bit. I mean, this is so punishingly monotonous that you’re actually harming people.”

The guy’s brain just couldn’t go there.

“It’s a physics instrument! You can’t paint it!”
– Bruce Sterling in MIT’s Technology Review