Virtual shock

This post was inspired by a spoof article by Isaac Asimov. In the 1940s Asimov was working on a rather thankless Ph.D. at Columbia University. Part of his work involved investigating the properties of compounds which were highly soluble in water. Some of these chemicals were so highly soluble that they seemed to dissolve almost instantly. This behavior encouraged Asimov to pen a spoof article titled "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" about a compound that actually dissolves before it hits the water. Recent articles on new explosives that seem to literally detonate as soon as they are formed lead me to similar thinking... The Raspberry Pi computer sat innocently in the glove box. This particular glove box was military-grade, enclosed on all sides except one by an inch of reinforced steel, with a narrow porthole made from Pyrex for viewing and manipulation. A robotic arm allowed you to punch the keys. We gratifyingly thought of the $35 units that we had purchased for this project; there's only so many octa-core Dell Precision Towers that you can blow up every day. [More]