Just read the comments following the blog post, and find out what crazy things people did in labs in the past. I think this one takes the biscuit, courtesy of one Moshe Yudowsky:
In the very old-school days, so I’ve heard, people tuned cyclotron beams by placing their heads into the beam, closing their eyes, and tracking the beam size by looking at the Cerenkov radiation as the electrons passed through their eyeballs.
