A moment of small genius spotted at a friend’s house:
It’s a magnet from a disemboweled hard drive, mounted right underneath a bottle opener. Snags the bottle cap like a charm.
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Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
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May 15th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Brilliant!
May 15th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Excellent! I’m going to get one of my own. Now, all I need is a hard drive to disembowel…
May 15th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
@Jeremy
You mean to say you don’t have a study with old computer(s) and a box full of ancient hard drives and stuff sitting in a corner. How unusual.
May 15th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Now if only those used hard drive magnets could be hooked up to encase a controlled fusion reaction, we’d really have something!
May 15th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
You’re thinking in the right direction, Ed, but with the volume of magnets available, I’m sure we could whip up a Wicked Cool ™ railgun, which would be far more entertaining. Until it blew up horribly. Actually, these two ideas have more in common than I thought…
(“,)
May 16th, 2008 at 2:42 am
The only reason I’d use a railgun is to aim it at congress and tell them to allocate more billions for energy research.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Hmmm. Clever…I suppose. You could make one of these and still have to pry off the top and toss it in the trash. Or you could just hold your hand underneath as you pop the top and let it fall in your hand, then toss it in the trash. Or you could put a small trash can under the opener and let gravity do its best.
Just sayin’.
May 16th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
True mk, but it wouldn’t use magnets. And better yet, super-strong magnets from computer surplus!
The target market are those of us who would forego driving to the supermarket if a rocket powered jet pack were available.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:29 am
Did no one hear my appeal for help regarding the misalignment of the dark margins on the threads at CV ? Am I the only one who has this problem ?
On another note, I understand Sean is on vacation.
Nevertheless, I trust he has no doubt followed with great interest the rapidly breaking & fading story regarding the auctioning of an Einstein letter (in German script) in the UK, which contains the most specific denuciations of religon AE has EVER made, which should finally eliminate any waffling about his viewpoints on this subject.
Sean, make like Paul Revere, and get to your laptop about this.
May 17th, 2008 at 4:59 am
How can he make like Paul Revere if there is no church left to hang lights in?
May 17th, 2008 at 6:19 am
Jimbo: what browser?
May 17th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Julianne…ah, sorry, I get it now. I sometimes envy you jetpackers and your enthusiasm for all things techy. Cool, though.
May 17th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
@The Almighty Bob
“Jimbo: what browser?”
Just tell him to switch to Firefox (or any other Gecko based browser) like most civilized people and that will cure his problem.
May 18th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
True. (“,)
May 18th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Oh hell yeah. I have about a billion dead hard drives in a box (it’s a big box). I’m going to have to go tear the rare earth magnets out for this.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
A friend and I have used those hard drive magnets for another project – a stir plate to get beer yeast to reproduce for home brewed beer.
computer junk + beer = *thumbsup*
May 20th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Responding to mk’s criticisms, this a highly practical drinking enablement and regulation device. When you’re too drunk to catch the bottle cap, you can keep on drinking without worrying about potential profanity-inducing results of having bunch of pointy debris rolling around on your kitchen floor. And when you’re too drunk to pry the bottle cap off the magnet and put it in the trash, you know it’s time to stop.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
These are strong magnets, so maybe “once the buildup of bottlecaps you’re too drunk to remove blocks the use of the opener, it’s time to stop”?
Or to switch to cans… “,