I think I got his point.

I had a similar highschool teacher.

My favourite thing he did though, was he let you work in his lab during lunch/eat in the lab. But if you left any cutlery behind, he threw it in the tank with his piranha.

The piranha was 90% blind, and they don't eat live meat anyway, but lots of highschool kids don't know that

yea he looks like a teacher.

Freakin' Toshiba laptops! It had it comin'!

So the video doesn't show if this was a random laptop, or as implied a confiscated one... kinda makes a difference in the tone of the video...

>> ^ponceleon:
So the video doesn't show if this was a random laptop, or as implied a confiscated one... kinda makes a difference in the tone of the video...


I'd bet it was a fake, or an old one he was using to make an example.

If that was actually someones laptop, as soon as it was smashed you'd probably hear a very loud "WHAT THE FUCK!?" from the (former) owner.

Infact, from youtube:


"In an effort to make a point, a professor freezes a student's laptop with liquid nitrogen then smashes it. NOTE: THIS WAS STAGED! the laptop was not functional at the time."

all in good fun.

He smashed some kid's laptop? That's freaking ridiculous. I guess he's tenured. Also, the video fails to deliver the money shot.

Nobody laugh I have not studied Chemistry since I was in High School and Public Education sucks. Anyway can anyone tell me why the Liquid Nitrogen has such an effect on a laptop but not the Styrofoam container? Just curious.

Styrofoam is an insulator. You can freeze the inside of the container and the outside will remain close to room temperature. However, if you put little chunks or thin sheets of it in the liquid nitrogen, it would probably still freeze and become brittle, like the plastic shell of the laptop. But when the liquid nitrogen is gone, the Styrofoam container will warm back up to room temperature unharmed.

Was anyone else struck by how much he looks like Egon (Harold Ramis)?

LOL I was going to write that same thing.
>> ^MaxWilder:

Was anyone else struck by how much he looks like Egon (Harold Ramis)?

>> ^MaxWilder:
Was anyone else struck by how much he looks like Egon (Harold Ramis)?


haha, yes; was going to mention it.

Cameraman fail.

I thought he was going to run the laptop cooled by the nitrogen... Wouldn't that make it faster or something? For the whole video I was thinking "Cool, he's actually gonna try it... but it says destroy in the title... the screen must crack or something... but I don't hear cracking... this is never gonna work... it would be so awesome if it did though... my head is itchy... something's gotta go wrong... how fast would it actually be?.. he didn't even immerse it evenly?.. yeah, cooling half and not cooling the rest probably broke it... ... ... ... oh. Okay then."

>> ^lampishthing:
I thought he was going to run the laptop cooled by the nitrogen... Wouldn't that make it faster or something?


Very precisely controlled doses of ln can assist in overclocking efforts. Check out the folks at www.xtremesystems.org/forums for more info. ;-)

When I read the title, I thought the laptop said something which the professor disagreed with, to which the professor made a rational and emotional response.

Here is the article about the incident: http://oudaily.com/news/2010/feb/18/professor-shatters-distracting-l
aptop/

>> ^lampishthing:
I thought he was going to run the laptop cooled by the nitrogen... Wouldn't that make it faster or something?


If it still worked after being frozen like that (unlikely) then it would be no faster than normal. You have to change the speed settings to run it at higher clock speeds.

Running a computer faster produces more heat, especially if you increase the voltage. This extra heat can limit the maximum speed that the computer can run without calculation errors or instability. Overclockers sometimes use extra cooling for the hot components to counteract the heat-limiting effects at higher speeds.

Cooling won't make it faster, but it can be set to run faster without overheating (assuming the cooling method doesn't kill it first).

When I was in college, students were poor, and we all had to share the same 486 desktop. I was under the impression that kids these days took lecture notes on a laptop/tablet preferably in a sunny class room filled with good looking students of many ethnicities. Is this not the case?

Have Apple and Microsoft lied to me?!

I hope none of his students require a laptop to take notes. I had a friend with dyslexia who couldn't hand-write fast enough to keep up with the lectures, so had to use a laptop. I would hope he would take that into consideration when making his heavy-handed point.