Today, this last day before winter break, I had to go to school on Friday for the first time in over two years. My school never has classes on Fridays. The purpose of this unusual action was to make up for days lost to Hurricane Wilma in October. About half of the people didn't show up; some (like my sister) were sick, others had plans, and the rest were too used to having four-day weeks to go. I, however, went to school. The day was really uneventful, but I got a lot of candy.

Over the semester I've been working on a project in chemistry class -- I might call it a "science project," but others would call it a "science fair" because you usually display them at a science fair. Anyway, my project was to test how well various salt solutions would conduct electricity. To do this, I put in different metals in the water and hooked them up and stuff to a battery and a meter. My dad and my mom, who are both pretty technical about those sorts of things, had a hard time figuring out how to set it up. I tried multiple times, but it didn't seem to have much of a charge or whatever. The last time, the metals reacted with the water; it turned blue and yellow and gave off gas until I cut the connection.

My chemistry teacher had me bring in my materials so that she could try the experiment herself. She was pretty sure that I had it wrong, but she wasn't sure how to fix it either. So she called in another science teacher to help out. With the help of his knowledge (and meter), they actually got it to work. A battery wasn't necessary at all: just a good meter (apparently my dad's is bad) and some wires. And he said it would be better to measure amps rather than volts; that helped too. When I had done the experiment, I had to keep stirring the salt into the water. But my teacher had this really cool device that did all the stirring. You put the container onto the device, which has a flat surface, and then you put a little rectangular thing in the container so it rests on the bottom. Then when you turn the machine on, the rectangular thing inside the container spins, and the machine has a knob to control the speed. It's amazing.

As we put in more salt, the water reached saturation (you could see that there was too much to be dissolved), and the amount of amps dropped off. Also, I used distilled water thinking that it would be pure H₂O. But the other science teacher surprised both me and my teacher by saying that it contains ammonia, so it wasn't truly pure water. You learn something new every day.

Wikipedia has a list of strange units of measurement. My favorite is their definition for the "helen": "The amount of beauty that can launch one thousand ships. Usually used as the millihelen, the amount of beauty that can launch one ship." It would be interesting if there were an objective scale to measure beauty. But of course, it's in the eye of the beholder.

Not really related, but also interesting: mathematical coincidences.