MIT: when electrocuting one pickle is not enough.

Sometimes, all I can do is sigh and think, “Oh, Poseidon. These are my people.” If the caption is to be trusted, this was filmed during the 2007 Campus Preview Weekend, the occasion in the springtime when overachieving high-school students the world over come visit MIT to decide if they can make the Institvte their home. It’s rather Darwinian: the ones who can’t handle the idea of electrocuting pickles and detonating soda cans as a form of recreation go somewhere else. (Or at least they live in a sterile, prison-like West Campus dormitory where I never noticed them.)

I saw Neil Gaiman’s talk last night; it was good, but will take more time to write about intelligently. Until then, therefore, here is a capacitor bank being used to detonate a soda can:

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