Here’s what happens when dumpster-diving and physics club combine.
Here at Wesleying, we’ve got “Wesleyan University” on Google Alert, and every once in a while something magical and unexpected pops into our inbox. Like this video of a Society of Physics Students meeting in 2001 or 2002, when your friendly neighborhood physics nuts used liquid nitrogen to blow a Macintosh Classic into smithereens on the second floor of the Science Tower.
The video appears courtesy of a rather prolific YouTuber by the username of “sturmovikdragon,” whose credits include a handful of other “zany stunts” by the Wesleyan-based physics club. “sturmovikdragon” (possibly not hir real name) gleefully identifies this event as “perhaps the greatest achievement of the Wesleyan University Chapters of the Society of Physics Students,” noting that the group went so far as to use extension cords and work lights to illuminate the scene and that “SPS President Adam took the valiant role of arming the bomb and properly orienting the Mac Classic for the experiment.” Damn, that’s commitment.
According to the YouTube blurb, the videographer obtained this and various other Mac Classics by dumper-diving. Others suffered similarly violent fates, like being dropped down the smoke shaft:
Thanks to my dumpster diving the SPS chapter had obtained many Mac Classics and after several semesters of dropping them down the same smoke shaft or turning them into aquariums we thought of this rather grand finale. Adam poured in a rather excessive quantity of LN2 which resulted in a blast that shredded the Mac’s chassis. We were so impressed with the results that the Classic was given a new home on a shelf in Physics Room 216…until the room was remodeled my Sr year.
This and the three other videos are all the documentary evidence of the many zany stunts our SPS chapter pulled during my tenure as a member and officer. Our club was poorly served by the lack of either YouTube or high quality digital video cameras. This was shot on a Sony Hi-8 Handicam and transferred to digital format by the folks in the media lab. It was their bonehead move of encoding the CD with an Apple HFS+ file system which lead me to believe that the CD’d had both gone bad and thus explains why these video clips became “lost” for so long.
Thanks for the souvenirs, Wesleyan Society of Physics Students of 2001! (Does anyone know if this club is still active?) For further amusement, here’s SPS shooting computer mouses and Coke bottles with an air rifle:
Hey if you have any questions about the videos or the back in the day Society of Physics Students you can always ask me directly or post a comment on the video. Thanks for picking up the video as being able to entertain the wider community makes it all worth it, even a decade later. It’s a shame so much of what made SPS meetings great was lost due to inferior recording technologies.