Do you have a collection of CD ROMs from assorted ISP's?  Tired of wasting precious land fill space?  Turn them into artful curiosities with your microwave (note: there is a chance you'll damage your microwave if you try this, so use someone else's!).  Place a disk on top of a drinking glass or yogurt cup in the center of your microwave and close the door.  Set the controls for high power and 10 seconds.  Hit cook, place your finger on stop and wait.  In a few seconds, an amazing electrical discharge will flash across the surface of the disk.  Hit stop and remove the disk (careful, it will be warm).  You will be left with something that looks like this:

If you let it cook for a while longer, you'll get something like this:

 
Note that there are more, wider, tracks vaporized through the aluminum coating.  The next scan (at 9600 dpi resolution) shows a small section of the data side of a nuked disk in extreme close up:

 
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