Science!
Tue Sep 26, 2006 17:37 (UTC -5)Guitar news: A couple of weeks ago, my Epiphone Dot stopped working. It just wouldn’t make any sound. So I put it aside for a while as my dad considered our options. We took it to the store where I got it, but they said that they weren’t doing repairs until Monday (it was a late Friday afternoon, I think). Finally, my dad decided to check it out himself. He asked for my mini-amp, which I was sure didn’t work, and he plugged it in. Behold: sound. He flipped the switch and it worked erratically, so he knew that the problem lay in the switch. After a quick spray, it was all better. Good thing we didn’t pay to have that fixed. I’ve been satisfied with how well the guitar has held up since I bought it about three and a half years ago. It really stands up to a beating.
Everything else news: It’s science fair time again! All right! If there’s anything I hate more than anything, it’s doing science projects. I would love to do something nice and simple like seeing how music affects plants or finding out which laundry detergent works best, but I’ll never be allowed to do something so basic. It’s a shame, too, because I’ve only ever done one real science project, and that was last year. I decided to find out about the conductivity of various salt solutions. I had to experiment and everything. In junior high, I could just get away with writing about stuff and pasting it to a board. (Or, in the case of my mold project in seventh grade: leaving bread out in the kitchen, putting it in plastic bags, and stapling them to a board. And writing a paragraph or so.)
Since we’re a year older, we’re expected to do something better, or so my Anatomy and Physiology teacher says. I really, really, really couldn’t think of anything, so I asked the teacher for suggestions. She suggested I expound on the project that I did last year. I figured it was just as good a suggestion as any. But did that project go over well? Not really. The experiment took forever and was a disaster, so I needed the help of my then-teacher, Mrs. Zambrano, big time. She, in turn, needed Mr. Marchand’s help for getting some of the instruments that we would need as we performed the corrected experiment in her classroom with lots of nifty scientific gadgets. It was very brief.
My current science teacher, who is like BFFL with Mrs. Zambrano, suggested that I talk to Mrs. Zambrano about it. So one day last week after class, she came in, and I reminded her about what I (or, rather, we) had done. She suggested that I vary the metals of the electrodes used to transmit the current. She said that she had different metals that I could use, so it sounded good to me. Now that I think about it, I guess that means that I can perform the experiment with her help again. I hope I can, anyway. Those gadgets were really neat. There was a thing that you would put the beaker on, and it sort of vibrated, so if you poured salt into the water, it would be mixed in automatically. Other tools were absolutely necessary to the experiment, for example, the device that measured the current. I think the machine I used at home didn’t exactly work because we weren’t measuring the right thing.
So, I have to have the first part, including five pages of research taken from 10 to 15 sources, done by Tuesday. And I thought the last project was hard…
Check this out. It’s the Vinyl Killer, a tiny, tiny record player. It’s basically like a toy car with a stylus underneath and an amplifier inside. You just have it drive around the surface of the record (at 33 RPM) and a speaker plays the sound.
It turns out that American theists’ conceptions of God differ vastly. Is God involved in people’s everyday lives? Does he get upset easily? These factors may even be responsible for their broader worldview, for example, their political leanings, in ways that you might not expect.
One year ago: “On Saturday some guys in a truck came over and brought in a big chair.”
Two years ago: “We here in Florida don’t have to worry about blizzards, tornadoes, wildfires, or earthquakes.”
Three years ago: “Next semester, though, I’m going to get hammered with all the bad classes and weird teachers.”
