My dd has 2 science classes. 1 is regular Earth science and one is a Research class. She has to come up with an idea for a Science project that she will do next term and the project is done in school where she has access to everything in the lab. They have a kick butt lab and i'm sure the possibilities are endless. Her project this term was the effects of Nicotine on these lil water creatures she has to get her idea approved by the dept head. So she has to have several different ideas in case the teacher says no to a cpl of them. No Human experiments allowed. she can have humans subjects she just can't test any kind of chemicals on them. (she was bummed) So far she has come up with 2 ideas. One was The effects of Subliminal Messages on the human brain. she's not sure if that falls under the human experiments and the other is Paternity Tests. she needs some more ideas cause she's stumped. So anyone got any cool ideas?
Quoting Msgme:So anyone got any cool ideas?
Calculate the speed of light by cooking chocolate.
Quoting Msgme:she can have humans subjects she just can't test any kind of chemicals on them. (she was bummed)
If you want to get really ambitious, look at some of the mass experiments done by the BBC:
come up with something similar, announce it on Kickstarter, and use the resulting money to validate the results via the Mechanical Turks.
Test the school's waterfountains for germs - ecoli, strep, etc (after one of the middle schoolers did this at my kids' old school no one used the waterfountains again).
Test an urban legend.
For example:
Regarding the Beach Boys, one of the things that made Brian Wilson reluctant to finish "Smile" was a fear that he had created a Brown Note entirely by accident. He and his musicians had recorded a very creepy instrumental called either
"Fire" or "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow";
to get the atmosphere in the studio right, they had worn toy fireman's
helmets and lit a firepot to emit smoke. The very night of the recording
session, a building down the street caught fire and burned to the
ground; someone later mentioned to Brian that an unusual number of fires
were breaking out in Los Angeles that summer. The coincidence struck Brian as extremely creepy, and he became hesitant about working on the album.
This prompted him to not release the album for 35 years and
bury the original tracks in the vaults in a fit of panic, refusing to
finish the album until 2004. Some other tracks of the original song were
destroyed. Brian Wilson went into seclusion for decades, fearing that
his hallucination-induced music would cause more fires.
Looking back at the song, Brian Wilson states that he thinks, "The chords were weird, sick, not the straight eight. I ran the miniorchestra through twenty-four takes before I was satisfied. Still, during each version, I thought, Oh God, I'm flipping out to have written such stuff. The weirdest was the crash and crackle of instruments smoldering for the final time. Listening to the playback, I began to feel unnerved by the music, strange and eerie. I liked the music. But it scared me."[citation needed] According to Brian, "It created a disturbing picture that mirrored the screams that had filled my head and plagued my sleep for years."[citation needed]
Brian continues that, "On the way home, I remarked, 'You know, I think that music just might scare a whole lot of people.' No one was more scared than I was. The following day I learned that a building next door to the studio had burned down the night of the recording session. Several days later, I was told that since the session an unusual number of fires had broken out in Los Angeles. It was exactly as I feared. Instead of positive spiritual music, I'd tapped into a dark source, an extremely powerful fire music that emitted bad vibrations, which I decided were too dangerous to release into the world."
Play at your own risk. :-)
If you had to go 90 days without
- Msgme
on Jan. 9, 2013 at 9:18 AM