Physics

Last Friday my coworkers had a small sendoff party for my boss who's going to be away for the next month on an Eisenhower Fellowship.  Lucky guy.  Well, smart guy really.  Anyway, in honor of Halloween as well, they got a cooler full of dry ice for making party tricks and spooky drinks etc.  By the time the sendoff wound down at about 12, there was still 3/4 of a cooler full of solid CO2 left, and I decided that I might need to take some home with me.  I filled a Tupperware with the stuff and then headed back home.  When I got back, I thought, "Won't this stuff stay frozen a lot better if I put it in a thermos?" 

Check out the dented metal cap.  Probably where it destroyed the light fixture.

Getting out my trusty stainless thermos and dropped in the dry ice cubes.  I sealed the cap nice and tight to make sure that the air didn't get in to warm up the cubes and then Jennifer and I headed off to bed.

Glass Shards EVERYWHERE

At about 1:30 in the morning we were awoken by a giant exploding thud followed by some broken glass shattering down stairs.  "What the hell was that?"   We headed down and found exactly what anyone who has half a brain and understands physics just a little bit would have known.  The plastic cap from the thermos had failed (thankfully) and blasted the top of the thermos off, up through the light fixture and through the drywall into the ceiling.  We never found much of it, just a ton of glass and plastic shards as well as the metal cup/cap thing.

3 inch hole in the ceiling.

Soooo, I spent my evening picking glass shards out of the ceiling and did a full kitchen sweep.  Not like I should have been surprised by this, since I spent much of my teen years thinking of ways to make things explode, I should have known better, or at least put the thermos in someone else's house.