I converted my microwave into a laser oven [video]

This isn't a clickbaitey video. This is styropyro, one of the most knowledgeable YouTubers when it comes to lasers and the related engineering. He's not just some dude who hooks up lasers to a wall outlet. He knows very well what he's doing. He always makes a point about proper laser safety.

Another one is Photonicinduction, an electrical engineer that plays with insane voltages in his attic basically. I'd never want to replicate anything he does because I would surely kill myself doing it.

That doesn't mean we should censor such channels. They're insanely educational, insightful, and fun. If some idiot thinks they're god and wants to emulate something they're clearly not capable of doing safely, that's not the fault of all of the rational viewers who know better.

> If some idiot thinks they're god and wants to emulate something they're clearly not capable of doing safely

It can be difficult to know if you’re capable of doing something safely. Unfortunately you only find out that you’re not capable when it goes wrong.

There’s a reason why labs and engineering firms force people through long detailed safety training courses. There’s a lot of things out there that can kill or serious maim you, which look completely innocuous at first sight. Additionally there are many naive safety protocols that create the appearance of safety, without actually protecting people. Normally people only recognise poor safety setups because they’ve either been shown why it’s bad (plus accompanying horror story), or they’ve suffered the failure personally.

Simply opening up the side of a microwave while it off and disconnected exposes you to a shock risk capable of killing. Unless you take specific steps to make the microwave safe, it’s not hard to imagine someone taking the side of a microwave off after watching this video, without realising the danger within.

If you think these laser vids a bad, don't look at the chemistry ones. A laser might blind you or give you a nasty burn, but it won't kill you. Chemistry will see you, and potentially some of your neighbors, dead on the floor very quickly.

And those skydiving wingsuits channels. That is very dangerous. And the skiing ones. And don't even talk about all the crazy drifting/stunting/driving channels. I once saw a kid on a snowboard break his arm attempting a trick on that he had seen one youtube ... or was that the olympics coverage? Either way, such stuff is far far too dangerous to be allowed on the internet.

03:11

> Now I gotta say it, poking around in a microwave is not for the inexperienced. When electronics hobbyists get killed by their projects, it's almost always because they're messing around with microwave parts like these.

> Not really. Opening up electronics, fiddling with them, and then plugging them in, is pretty typically considered dangerous.

With a microwave, just opening it up and fiddling is dangerous. No need to plug it in. The main capacitor inside stores enough charge at a high enough voltage to kill you. Unless you take explicit steps to discharge it, it’ll hold that charge for hours to days.

> It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained.

I’m not advocating for censorship. But there are plenty of other YouTubers out there doing similar videos, but they do a substantial better job of explaining the risks and danger, and do so in an entertaining way. I think it’s reasonable to expect YouTubers like this to place appropriate warnings in their videos to make it clear how dangerous their work can be. Those warnings don’t need to be boring or distracting to be effective, it just requires some imagination to integrate them well into a video.

> Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves!

People encounter knives on a day-to-day basis. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone knows that knives can be dangerous when misused. The same can’t be said of lasers and microwaves.

Lasers and microwaves are particularly dangerous due to reflections and refractions, and can pose a significant danger to more than just the experimenter. Lasers bounce around a room, if that room isn’t properly sealed there’s the potential for escaped light to blind someone outside your lab. If you don’t have proper access control on your lab, then you can accidentally blind someone entering it without the correct PPE. If someone grabs a cheap high class 4 IR laser off the internet (which really isn’t hard) and plays with it in a bedroom or garage, there’s an extremely high risk they’ll blind family members. If they’re wearing the wrong type of laser goggles, then they also risk blinding themselves. With an IR laser, you can’t even see the beam. You’ll only know you’ve walked into it when your retina starts burning.

With microwaves, the signal can easily penetrate walls and other non-metallic objects. If you don’t have a faraday cage, or it’s not properly tuned for the frequencies you’re working with, then those microwaves can travel into other rooms and cause significant interference with other electronics (including pacemakers) and cause metallic objects to accumulate significant voltage potential.

All of these risk are non-obvious because the electricity, and RF radiation behave in extremely non-intuitive ways. We have no natural fear or understanding of these phenomena because they’re only dangerous in purely artificial, man made, conditions.

Knives, mountains, fire etc we’ve got thousands of years of evolution telling us those things are dangerous. Laser, electricity and microwaves only became a danger a human is likely to encounter 100 years ago.

> It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping".

I don’t think people have ever been very good at evaluating these risks and acting appropriately. If we were, then safety courses would be unnecessary. The only thing that’s changed in the past 100 years, is that we’ve figured out how these technologies will kill and maim us. Now we have the knowledge, it seems stupid to make further blood sacrifices to relearn it.