Tell Us What You’ve Done
I’m sure everyone here has done some hands on science. For instance, I still remember a junior high teacher who walked us through a basic testing process to figure out what ingredients made Alka Seltzer fizz (it’s the combination of citric acid and baking soda).
I remember someone I knew telling the story about his high school chemistry class. They had a very jumpy teacher, so one day when she left the class for a few minutes they decided to prank her. They turned on the gas spigots for the bunsen burners and then slumped over their desks. When she came back into the room, she smelled the gas, saw the slumped bodies, and freaked out.
Do you have any stories from school, maybe of science fair projects gone bad? Maybe you’ve worked in a lab and have some stories about coworkers messing up the results. My wife had a job in college where she worked in a sleep research lab, and remembers very strict rules about avoiding doing anything that would give away the time of day and clue in subjects about how long they had been awake.
Have you participated in any college psych experiments or been a subject in a test of an experimental drug? Or do you consent to letting med students watch when a doctor treats you in a hospital?
Natural Sciences
Maybe you’ve been to a wildlife refuge and gone on a hike with a naturalist who keeps a daily record of species. Or you might have participated in the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas bird count, which has been reporting results since 1900.
But wait, there’s more! For example, there is a Hawaiian Honu (sea turtle) count. My family once went on a boat ride with a sea otter count in a California wildlife refuge. You can sign up here to record sightings of the cute little pikas that live in the Rocky Mountains. The US Geological Service regularly asks everyday people to report when they feel an earthquake, including this page for the quake that recently hit New Jersey.
Anything else?
Share some science you’ve scienced, anything from looking through a telescope to looking up a bug on a website, from a science museum trip when you were seven to something you did yesterday.
After all, as They Might Be Giants says, Science Is Real!
What about the sweet science in a science class? In junior high, I was in Mr. Bruten’s chemistry class, and Mr. Bruten left the room. A persistent bully did something (I honestly don’t remember what) that, for some reason, enraged me. I pummeled him for a good 30-45 seconds. It was noteworthy in that typically fights at that age involved pushing, shoving, and grappling. Not this one. I punched him in the face at least six or seven times. If Mr. Bruten hadn’t returned, I might still be pounding him. I do remember him saying “you’re not supposed to hit people like that!”
After I beat the hell out of him, we eventually became … not friends, exactly, but not sworn enemies. I wonder what happened to him.
No Marquess of Queensberry Rules in intro chem, I guess.
I was in electric motors lab with one of my best friends and my university crush. I wasn’t really paying attention when the lab TA told us to remove the power cables to the motor. I asked my partners if they had shut the power off. Apparently they weren’t paying attention either and said yeah sure go ahead.
ZAAAAAAPPP!
I ended up with 208V AC running thru my hand. I spent the rest of the lab staring at my hand as my labmates laughed at me.
The next year I had a roommate who was a year behind me and he came in to the apartment laughing. He mentioned that he was at his first electric motors lab and the lab TA mentioned a story about some idiot getting zapped and why you should always check the connections and don’t trust your partners. I glared at him and said I was the idiot.
He laughed more.
Motherfuckers.
I seem to recall some kind of rule about making sure you were lighting Bunsen butners the right way so they didn’t flame up like crazy, but it’s been years. I don’t think anyone actually burned off their eyebrows.
A girl in highschool checked to see if the iodine bottle was empty by looking up into it while shaking it. That’s when we found out the eyewash stations were out of commission. đź‘€
Ugh. I do not like my eyes getting messed with. I have to get them checked next week and I’m not looking forward to the dilation.
The eyewash stations weren’t working??!!! Holy shit that’s terrifying.
Yup. They used bottled water instead.
When I did archaeology fieldwork, we would be like ehhh is that a crummy old pottery sherd or a chunk of bone, lick it. Bone fragments are porous, so you can differentiate that way quickly.
In the tropics, we would toss chicken carcasses after we cooked them onto the massive ant hill near the field house to see how fast they could clean them off.
When I had a carpal tunnel flareup at ye olde call center job about a decade ago, I needed to get the cortisone shots directly in my wrists. It was at a teaching practice, and I bluntly told them I was not letting a student stick me in the wrist with that needle.
How fast were the ants? Are talking minutes or days?
If it’s a swarm of army ants, minutes. But army ants don’t stay in one spot they’re foragers out for anything that can’t get away from them. Like they’ll kill chickens in coops if the birds can’t escape the swarm.
The big ant hills near our field house? A couple of days to clean the carcass entirely. Ants and termites are natural enemies, so we’d be like ehh that ant hill is the size of a sofa but also I’d prefer them to termites sooooo.
Also every day at work I try the experiment of “can I keep my resting bitch face under control today?”
Lots of confounding variables for that.
I overhauled an old bicycle over the winter, and really, anything having to do with cables, brakes, and derailleurs is an experiment in my book. Still not dialed in the way it should be, but rideable and fun.
Every repair I make to the camper van is really an experiment. This weekend I am replacing (or attempting to replace) a turbo resonator. Sounds complex; really it’s just an air feed and sound dampener into the turbo. The mechanic who diagnosed the problem admitted, “It’s an easy fix.” Yeah, for him. So a couple hours and a couple bloody cuts on my hands should do the trick.
I’ve done my best in the past to readjust brakes and derailleurs and never managed to get them exactly right. Something is always off by at least a small percentage no matter how hard I try.
@loveshaq did you look for the Northern lights? I can see them faintly.
@HammerZeitgeist check the DOT for Saturday, I posted a couple of shots. I fell asleep but daughters woke me up to watch.