Saturday, December 22, 2018

Porch Pirates vs. STEM Stars

In the event you've severed all your social media ties, you might have missed this week's viral video. So allow me to present Mark Rober's "magnum opus" as a public service.

Package Thief vs. Glitter Bomb Trap


Students might—at times—question the value of learning about centripetal force and such. You just never know when you might use it to your advantage.

Here's Sean Hodgins' less viral video detailing the build.

Building the Glitter Bomb with Mark Rober


The notion of delivering a modicum of justice to porch pirates strikes a chord in most of us. I'm confident that simpler solutions cannot be far away. With luck, this project will soon be an amusing tale of "back in the olden days".

Some viewers were skeptical of some of the reactions. Rober confessed to being too aggressive in seeking glitter bomb reaction footage and pulled a few of the clips after determining they were not genuine. I saw one YouTube "skeptic" who seemed a few marbles short of a full deck ranting that the whole enterprise was paid for by Amazon. This guy seemed to be hoping that making a vile video would generate viral video revenue. And no, I'm not going to link to it here.

Of course, one takes some risk slapping back at porch pirates. They cast themselves as sociopaths by their criminal conduct to begin with. And having their poor judgment highlighted to them may not set them on the right path.

Still though, a nice story of using STEM skills to deal with a common, real-world problem. STEM coursework isn't the easiest, but mastery of some of it can make you powerful, indeed.

[Here at The Blog of Phyz, our favorite viral video is still Dan Burns' Gravity Visualized.]

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