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Nutty Professor Destroys 'Student's Laptop' to Prove Point

by Amar Toor on February 22, 2010 at 09:10 AM

No one ever said college professors weren't a bit crazy, but few would go so far as to call them vandals. After a recent physics lecture at the Unviersity of Oklahoma, though, some students were ready to do just that after a professor went all Office Space on a kid's laptop.

Fed up with his students paying more attention to their laptops than to the finer points of his general physics lectures, professor Kieran Mullen decided to send a message they surely wouldn't forget. During a lecture last Monday, Mullen suddenly grabbed what appeared to be a regular student's laptop, and submerged it in liquid nitrogen. As the school's paper reports, he told his bewildered audience, "This is just liquid nitrogen, so it alone won't hurt the computer. But this will." He then proceeded to smash the laptop on the ground, as you can see in this video.

As some students suspected, the whole thing turned out to be a hoax. Mullen planted a defunct, decoy laptop in the lecture hall ahead of time, with this exact demonstration in mind, and apparently performed a similar stunt five years ago with a cell phone. The idea, clearly, was to not only send a message, but to do so with the kind of style and shock value that would make it stick.

While he acknowledges that the stunt was "silly and ostentatious," Mullen hopes it "drives the point home that if you're in class, you really need to be here." Some students, however, are now considering testing the limits of their professor's insanity by bringing in their laptops as a group. Others, like freshman Lindsay Brinkworth, are a bit more wary. Brinkworth admitted that she might bring her laptop in if she's sure that the rest of the class is doing it, but added that "my laptop is pretty expensive, so I'm not sure." Mission, it seems, accomplished. [From: OUDaily; via: Engadget]

Tags: college, funny, laptops, lectures, liquid nitrogen, LiquidNitrogen, oklahoma, professors, top, university of oklahoma, UniversityOfOklahoma, video

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