12 Days of Thermal Riddles

[capt bullshot]

I will guess it's a circuit board with some liquid cooling system for whatever chip is under the bright spot. The other small warm spots around are not pee drops but other small chips that also get a bit warm.

Yes, now with your description, I'd second that. It's another view inside the PC, looking at the liquid cooler of the CPU, and some warmer spots around probably beeing the inductors and transistors of the power supply.

[Ultrapurple]

I am finding this quite fascinating because to a certain extent we are seeing ourselves as others may see our hobby.

Whilst we may think that a brightly-coloured image very clearly shows an overheating widget, to a layperson it's just an abstract arrangement of pixels. I realise of course this is true for many specialist areas but to me it was revealing that the (high resolution) image of the tin of sweets was spotted immediately, whereas the lower resolution images have been the subject of mystery and debate. So even we can't always interpret results as well as we might like.

I'm not quite sure what the moral of this story might be, but it remains interesting.

[Cerebus]

The tin of sweets was easy because

• The tin has a characteristic shape.
• The purple sweets (brazils?) have a characteristic shape.
• The green sweets have a characteristic shape.
• It's almost Christmas, and tins of "Quality Street" are a British Christmas staple.

:

[Vipitis]

You need to work together and you will find the answer.

It is a circuit board from a radio that I repaired for a secret santa present.

You can see the freshly soldered antana wire that I held with my hand so it appears warm and the heat spread from soldering it.

The red dots in the background are other solder dots that reflect my own body.

[Vipitis]

9/12

[tautech]

Easy, spiral wound low energy mains lamp.

[Spirit532]

Definitely a CCFL.

[frenky]

Yes, this one was easy...

[capt bullshot]

As we say here: Energiesparlampe

[Ultrapurple]

From Cartoonstock:

[SeanB]

Phillips tornado, most likely. That fused join there is one of the things that they have over other lamps, plus the more even phosphor distribution.

[Vipitis]

Feels like this was way to easy. But it just looked cool to me. I got some harder ideas for the final.

[Vipitis]

10/12

[tautech]

10/12

Adding the attachment could help.

[Vipitis]

Must have been an issue on my end. I edited it back in. Sorry about that.

[T3sl4co1l]

Flashlight and illuminated spot?

Tim

[Cerebus]

Does anybody know if this forum (SMF) supports any of the variants of a 'spoiler' tag? I wanted to post an answer (which I think is obvious) and didn't want to spoil it for others. Here's a disemvowelled version: t's  trch (LD  thnk) nd th rflctd bm frm tht trch.

[Spirit532]

It's a focusable torch on full power heating up a surface.

[Ultrapurple]

disemvowelled

I like that word - a new one to me.

[capt bullshot]

disemvowelled

I like that word - a new one to me.

That would be "entvokalisiert" in German ...
And for the image: A torch been focused on a spot for a while

[Cerebus]

disemvowelled

I like that word - a new one to me.

Picked up from a lass called Theresa who moderates a forum I used to read regularly. She moderates comments by disemvowelling them, that way threads aren't broken, you can't easily read a disemvowelled comment but you can read it if you are determined and really need to read it to get the context of a thread. "Behave yourself or Theresa will disemvowel you."

[Vipitis]

The palette gave it away

[Vipitis]

11/12 you wanted harder

[tautech]

Petri dish

[Cerebus]

A bowl of soup.