#fuck you esd you have no control over me any more

[floatingwithlaura]

i ate some pretty yummy food today wtf.

[seat-safety-switch]

As you may be aware, electrostatic discharge (ESD) is the most dangerous threat that our technologically-advanced civilization has faced thus far. For those of you at the back of the class who maybe slept through a couple lectures, let me get you up to speed. When you shuffle your feet across the carpet and then touch a metal doorframe, that electric shock fucks up microchips. Sure, there’s some chips that are a little more resilient to it than others because their designers didn’t have a two-speedball lunch before their tape-up, but at the very least you’re going to make their little silicon day really miserable.

Now, a lot of people have called me paranoid just because I carry around a high-powered ESD testing gun at all times. This is because our increasingly computerized society and lax software-engineering standards mean that, statistically, something around you will act fucking weird today. And if that “something” is a self-driving car, and “fucking weird” is defined as “running some pedestrians over,” it’s probably best that you have a tool on hand to give it the ol’ ctrl-alt-delete. HERF-ing the ECU shielding is going to both provide a valuable bug report for home base and keep the thing from going all Johnny Five on a pack of Boy Scouts. If “they” didn’t want you to do it, then they’d spend some engineering time putting in safeguards against it, right? Right.

Although extremely primitive by modern standards, my own cars are no exception to needing the occasional wake-up call from Louie the Lightning Bug. My Volare was made in a time where “software” referred to Garanimals, its engine control “logic” effectively runs on half-understood Victorian-era steam technology and contains no integrated circuitry, but its radio acts a bit dicky once in awhile. I could clean the volume dial, but Deoxit costs like twenty bucks a can. Forty-five thousand volts does a pretty good job of burning out any oxides that show up on the faders, trust me. On top of that, if I bang it on the body a few times, the antenna will shoot a cool Jacob’s ladder, which I’m convinced is the future of modified cars. Sure wish I could turn my headlights off again, though.

So go out and do your part for the advancement of humankind. Just don’t go around shocking people. There’s an awful lot of folks with pacemakers inside them, and we really don’t want to find out how bad the exception handling code is inside Uncle Grandpa’s cardiovascular system.