• mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    Oh hey, my alma mater. Seems kinda weird anything cryogenic could be “unplugged,” since there’s a fuckoff-massive tank for liquid nitrogen outside the Low building… the tallest building on campus. Though I’m pretty sure it pipes over to Walker Laboratory, a thousand feet away and a hundred feet lower. Neither building being the Ricketts lecture hall and nameless gymnasium shown in the video thumbnail. When was that picture even taken? I think '86 Field is all crisscrossed with desire paths now.

    • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      Oh hey, my alma mater. Seems kinda weird anything cryogenic could be “unplugged,” since there’s a fuckoff-massive tank for liquid nitrogen outside the Low building… the tallest building on campus.

      The article explains it. The freezer was wired through a disconnect box that was locked to prevent anyone from turning it off, but the janitor found the circuit panel and turned off the circuit breaker.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        … yeah, and it’s kinda weird circuits were involved, when we have a mad-science supply of liquid nitrogen. I would have assumed that was the mechanism for keeping anything extremely frozen for decades on end.

        • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          I would have assumed that was the mechanism for keeping anything extremely frozen for decades on end.

          Boy you’d think, right? Gravity-powered liquid nitrogen just makes too much sense. No, we’ll make it so it won’t fail unless the circuit box gets opened!

          • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
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            3 months ago

            That is a bit over my head (my degree is in CompSci), but the research samples only had a 3C degree margin for error (77 to 83C) so I am assuming they had a good reason for using the setup that they had. Or maybe they were forced to accept that setup due to financial limitations.

            Either way, privatization was 100% at fault here. The university wanted to cut costs (avoid paying benefits) so they outsourced the cleaning job to a private company who hired the cheapest guy they could. The outsourced company didn’t understand or respect their research and the guy they hired obviously didn’t either.

        • blackstampede@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          If you find a reliable cryonics group, that’s exactly what they do. Alcor, for example, stores bodies upside down in tanks of liquid nitrogen so that if the power and backup power go out, it will still take a lot of time before the corpses defrost down to the head.