This morning I was fumbling with one of those little pink packets of Dr. Frankenstein’s sugar, hoping to direct most of it into me coffee, and unsure, as usual, as to whose loss was whose gain.
(Speculating metaphysically at 7 a.m. is likely a bad idea anyway, since so far as I know nothing worthwhile has ever been discovered much before 9, maybe 9:30 earliest. They say Einstein never even got out of bed before noon. Or maybe that was Reagan.)
I was distracted, anyway, is the point, and before I got around to any productive wondering the packet had come apart a bit more abruptly than I might have liked, sending the contents cascading down through all of those nicely regimented vent holes on the top of my monitor.
In a short but spectacular battle of crystalline sciences, both technologies both won and lost. At the end of one inning the score stands at 1 -1 and 0, the zero representing the human element. Kind of a mutually assured destruction on a silicon scale.
The gentleman who brought the replacement monitor this afternoon was as stumped as we are, and thus my question: Any technical folks out there have any idea what in the blazes happened inside there?
By way of diagnostic help, the outward symptoms were a gigantic crackling noise, a tremendous amount of smoke, an odor akin to a hand-grenade blast in a plastics plant, and what appeared to be an internal send-off fireworks show. One of my folks concluded that it just didn't want to face the new year, and decided to commit monitor-cide.
Considering you just shorted out the highest voltage component on your computer, I’m not too surprised by any of that. Basicly 20,000 volts just arced somewhere it shouldn’t have. Hmm… I’ve got a 17 incher that is on the verge of death… that sounds like a spectacular way to push it over.
http://www.madpoet.com
Computers have let mankind make mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns.
You can do the same thing with iron filings. Crystalline sugar doesn’t carry a current as well as iron, but it carries enough to let the LARGE voltage in your monitor jump and short out.
– Sylence
I don’t have an evil side. Just a really, really apathetic one.
I have absolutely no scientific wisdom to offer on this one, Crick&etc., but it sounds like it was pretty cool in the pyrotechnic sense.
Have you considered forwarding this information to Dave Barry? He has an equally unscientific but juvenile appreciation for creative ways to blow things up, e.g. exploding Pop Tarts, the Sparking Barbie Doll, etc.
Sincere sympathy for your mishap, I’m not trying to make light of your computer getting trashed. But it sure is one of the most interesting ways of causing a computer blowout I’ve ever heard.
Obviously I’m no electronics visionary, but it seems we have consensus – sugar substitutes created in food laboratories do indeed conduct electricity. And just when I thought I couldn’t be surprised anymore . . .
The monitor was of no particular sentimental value, but I’ll grant ye that having what amounts to a 19" TV overdose on 'Sweet ‘n Low’ and go into meltdown on yer desk at 7 a.m. is the kind of thing that tends to define the rest of yer day.
Dr. Watson
“Is it Y2K yet?”
Obviously I’m no electronics visionary, but it seems we have consensus – sugar substitutes created in food laboratories do indeed conduct electricity. And just when I thought I couldn’t be surprised anymore . . .
The monitor was of no particular sentimental value, but I’ll grant ye that having what amounts to a 19" TV overdose on 'Sweet ‘n Low’ and go into meltdown on yer desk at 7 a.m. is the kind of thing that tends to define the rest of yer day.
Dr. Watson
“Is it Y2K yet?”