Winner! Round 11 - Grand Prize and Short List

Revealed! It is a Lucite Display Block of Electrical Components

I don't know what these are electrical components of, but someone at the COLLINS company was proud enough of them to do up this nice Lucite display block. If anyone out there can provide compelling evidence of what these bits are when they are assembled, I will make you an extra special GWIITB Honoree and send you a Certificate of Achievement.

Even when I don't have complete knowledge of what is in the box, there must be a Grand Prize Winner, and so there is. Here is the Grand Prize winner, followed by the short listed entries in the order they were entered.

@KT30003k: A product of the Industrial Age, reworked for the postindustrial era--e.g., the electronic cigarette (in a nice box).
- WINNER GRAND PRIZE – It is hard to conceive of a better summation of the emotions felt upon beholding this Lucite Display Block of Electrical Components. It looks a little like bits of a motor or switch, maybe a capacitor or something. An electronic cigarette is as good a possibility as any.

@icecolbeveridge: The world's first electronic calculator
- I am pretty certain this Lucite Display Block of Electrical Components does not contain any or many parts from the world’s first electronic calculator, but the world’s first electronic calculator probably had some copper wires, metal fittings, and little plastic thingies – all of which makes this a strong guess.

@TerryBain: The Internet.
- In other rounds I might have considered this guess to be a little smart-ass-ish, but with this Grand Prize, it just made me laugh and laugh. Such a non-specific guess (the Internet is a big thing) does not have the muscle to move out of the short list to the winner’s circle, especially with such a strong winning guess.

@toldorknown: A clustering of the non-statistical variety.
- The strength of this guess goes solely to the physical, rather than the essential, nature of the Lucite Display Block of Electrical Components. It is indeed a clustering.

@KT30003k: A handsome watch. Unfortunately, it insists on setting itself to a non-existent time zone.
- I like this guess very much, and it touches on the electro-mechanical nature of the Grand Prize, but there is nothing in the Lucite Display Block of Electrical Components that looks like it could go in a watch, handsome or not.

@icecolbeveridge: A packet of index cards enveloped in a laser-etched wafer-thin gold-plate wrapping.
- This guess reminded me of some things in the plot of Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle, and I had a train of thought from there to cyberpunk generally, plus the whole concept of “enveloping” and “laser-etching.”