I spent about a decade as a researcher at a highly regarded technical university in the northeast, known by its three initials. This was in the sixties and seventies. I loved working there because there were probably more interesting people per square meter than any other place I ever worked. Interesting and eccentric. The place had a high tolerance for eccentricity, at least of a certain kind. I mention the time period because the tech nerds of the day had to make do with more primitive technologies than now. They loved to screw with the phone system and I remember watching some kid call a neighboring phone booth in a whole row of booths (something you don't see any more) by routing the call first around the world. I watched as he dialed in at one phone (or did something, anyway; I'm not sure "dialed" is the correct word, since he was using some kind of homebrew device he attached to the phone) and could here what sounded like a series of clunks as connections were being made at stations somewhere else. After a time (I can't remember if it was just a few seconds or a minute or so) the other phone rang. This gave him a great deal of satisfaction ("thrill" would not be the right word).
There was a lot of stuff like that. I was once chatting with a guy, who by then was a fairly prominent bioengineer. I asked him how he got interested in it. He said when he was a freshman he heard Norbert Weiner give a lecture where he said that if you flashed lights at a certain frequency you could induce grand mal seizures in some people. So he spent his entire Christmas break trying to modify the lights at his dormitory to flash 3 times a second. It turned out that high voltage switching of that kind wasn't so straightforward and he couldn't do it but he became so interested in the problem he wound up becoming a Professor of Electrical Engineering doing research in bioengineering.
I thought of both of these guys when I saw this. These people have gone to a lot of time and trouble to do something utterly pointless with microwave ovens. Play jingle bells:
Education & Careers
Comments
Very cool. Thanks for sharing !
Posted by: gilmore | December 20, 2008 11:44 AM
I spotted this last night! It made my geek husband (EE) very happy.
Posted by: maryn | December 20, 2008 3:42 PM
Ah, creativity.
Unfortunately, the university system these days discourages students from doing anything like the stuff described in your post because it is either "dangerous", a "waste of resources", or "irrelevant".
My opinion is that if it gets people interested and stimulates new ideas, as long as no-one gets hurt, what's the problem?
Posted by: attack rate | December 20, 2008 5:26 PM
Now any student/trainee who explores limitations can get into serious trouble -- I think development of innovative ability has been decreased accordingly. Some of the current restrictions are because some explorations are now hostile in intent -- and good geek explorations are now viewed as suspect. That reflects a major change in our national mindset that is troubling.
A few more examples of good geek explorations:
An IBM unit used to ask their newbie EEs on their first day to make a CPU walk off a desk -- the solution was a program to make all of the HD heads syncronize (and I suspect you need to lay the CPU upside down to remove desk contact with feet or large side case surface) to repeatedly slam the CPU over the edge bit by bit.
Chemistry scientists often were fascinated by setting explosions when they were young -- my aunt and uncle (nurse and orthopod surgeon) took great pride in the blast marks on the tile walls of their pool from my cousin's attempts to move greater amounts of pool water onto the patio. I.e. shaped charges. His behavior is now considered a serious psychiatric sx. When he became a geophysicist, and studied the San Andreas fault - the experimental aspect of his discipline took on new meaning for me. For those of you who live there, he moved on, so you can rest assured.
While in grad school, I wrote a computer program that obtained greater mainframe efficiencies with the major statistical analysis packages - SPSS and SAS were wrong when they said it was not possible to hack into their packages. Based on that success, I wrote a program to add speed and efficiency to our research file maintence routine -- a unique three-line program that exploited a system-wide function programmed for another purpose. I accidently inverted a sequence, and my 3-liner brought down the house, literally. It chewed through three mainframes on a national 5-mainframe installation before operations understood the intrusion and pulled the plug on the remaining two. This was twenty years ago -- today if someone ran such a destructive program they would probably be fired and face legal problems. Instead, I was commended for having repeately memoed operations to rescind their sloppy assignment of 'super' access to my account. My program should have been stopped cold when it usurped adm-level resources. Operations accepted responsibility for having ignored my memos, which they admitted they did because I was a woman. (Few women worked in IT in those days.) Would anyone be so forthright to accept blame these days? I doubt it.
We need to get back to a time when geeky explorations are not only tolerated, but appreciated. But maybe that will not happen, because the malicious incidents of some have tainted perceptions of all.
Posted by: CC2 | December 20, 2008 6:28 PM
well said CC2
great lead in to the video
Posted by: wisdom | December 20, 2008 9:11 PM
where is the innovative spirit ?
this is just fun, playing around.
No chance that anything useful
will come out of this.
Posted by: anon | December 21, 2008 12:47 PM
Phone Phreaking
Posted by: Trin Tragula | December 21, 2008 2:34 PM
Trin: LOL. Yes, that's what it was called. I had forgotten.
Posted by: revere | December 21, 2008 2:52 PM