Slashdot Mirror
Home Chemistry An Endangered Hobby in U.S.
Disoculated writes "Wired is running an article entitled "Don't Try This at Home" discussing how that increasing paranoia about terrorism and liability is making it nearly impossible to become involved in any chemistry related hobby in the United States. Sure, the innovative will try to work around these types of limitations, but are we teaching our kids to be afraid of science?"
I recently looked into buying a dc-dc converter to run my laptop in a plane. These things are pretty expensive and my guess is that I could build one for $20 AUD or so.
The problem is that airport security people are not going to believe that my bundle of components in a jiffy box which I soldered up myself is not a bomb, whereas the proper device from the shop at four times the price at least looks legit.
Then I wondered what it is going to be like in the near future where the flight control system probably runs windows CE or similar and I rock up to business class and start some software which I wrote myself.
Software may be a terrorist weapon soon. Will people who roll their own be viewed with suspicion?
Which takes me back to a trip to Adelaide last year with my family. Coming back I put my laptop in the checked in baggage (inside a suitcase), probably not a good idea. I carry it on these days. Before boarding an announcement came on that they had to change a wheel or something. This is Adelaide and you can see the plane right outside the windows and I didn't see any wheel changing going on.
To cut a long story short when I tried to boot up mandrake at home in Melbourne that laptop was flat as a 20 year old leaky dry cell. No way would it show any lights without a power supply.
Now the airlines tell you not to run your laptop while landing and taking off. Did this laptop run for three hours in the terminal + plane + terminal + my place because some security guy didn't know how to shut down linux?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It was probably the early '80's or so when I think chemistry sets were at their peak of popularity. I used to get up on Saturday morning, grab my bike, and go yard-sale hunting looking for chemistry sets. In my mind, I figured no one set would give you enough stuff to do anything dangerous, but if I were clever enough to get multiple sets from multiple companies, then maybe I could actually find a good chemical combination that would be more interesting than turning blue looking water to green looking water. On a good day, I could come home with 2 or 3 nearly-complete sets.
Sadly, I was never able to find a combination that was truly worthy. About the worst I was able to do was to give the bathtub a purple stain that no amount of scrubbing was going to get rid of (and believe me... Mom had me try).
It is kind of sad to think that my son will probably never do anything similar (of course if he does, I'll smile and my wife will be making him scrub the tub).
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
In the last year, I have done a few very fun "mad scientist" things with my siblings (no kids yet). At least once per month I try to come up with something that they won't get at school, or elsewhere. Anything to try and teach them to not fear science.
We play with dry ice a lot. The kids are young (all around 7), so our projects are often very simple. Just having a pail of water with a few pieces of dry ice in the bottom bubbling up was enough to scare most of the neighbors and adult family members. They think I am endangering everyones lives. Luckily my elementary teacher wife explains to them all that everything is fine (in terms most of them can understand)
Last week we played with borax and elmers glue. It makes for some fun textures. They are a bit young to fully grasp some concepts of what is happening on a molecular level, but I think they do get the general idea (I like Lego analogies).
Now that summer is here, we can probably do some fun stuff outside. Maybe blow up some pop bottles with dry ice. Hopefully I don't end up in guantanamo considering it is now classified as a terrorist weapon. Lucky for me, my stay at guantanamo can be endless and without a trial! Wahoo....life in prison for playing with liquid c02!!!!
Anyone have any other simple, cheap, and education little home ideas (for my crew targetted at age 7-10, though anything would be nice)?
In this same vein, I came across a torrent for a great book just a few days ago (perhaps on Boing Boing): 1960's "The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments" -- which is a phenomenal read. It's just what it sounds like: a children's chemistry text book. But it tells you how to do all the basic science that freaks out the government. It's an interesting slice of the era, too. It's all "yea, pesticides" and the nuclear future. It is, apparently, the book that inspired that kid in California to try to build his own breeder nuclear reactor.
I view this with great alarm.
One of the things that has bothered me for a long time is that educators and policy-makers don't seem to understand the crucial educational role of unstructured, unsupervised, childrens' activity, from, say, about age 7 to 14.
Teachers think they're doing the teaching, when really they're building on a foundation that the child has laid on his- or her-own. You have to develop the readiness yourself Only when you're interested in something and have tried to figure it out for yourself and failed, are you ready to absorb "the answer."
This applies to all fields, of course. Athletics coaches can't do much for a kid who didn't spend hundreds and hundreds of hours in the backyard tenaciously pitching a baseball over and over and over and over and over again.
But it's particularly true in the sciences.
A lot of the stuff kids do is dangerous and would be frowned on if adults really knew what they were doing. When I crushed vacuum tubes in bench vises, I could have cut myself on the broken glass or got something in my eye. God only knows what that sticky goop was--sort of combined the properties of Vaseline and rubber cement--that was inside some potted telephone transformers my buddy and I opened. We used to throw it at each other because it was so darned hard to get off.
Even the stuff that is not dangerous, at the exploratory stage seems so non-educational and misguided that no supervising adult would be let a kid pursue it. I read the explanations of how a transistor worked in "Popular Electronics." From everything I read, it seemed to me that, well, a transistor was just two diodes back-to-back, right? And, well, a battery was basically like a diode, right? (Wrong, of course, but at a certain age it seems plausible. I mean it made current flow in one direction, right?) Like an alchemist or a perpetual-motion inventor, I spent literally weeks tinkering with 1.5-volt batteries connected plus-to-plus with 9-volt transistor radio batteries, adding resistors and so forth, and trying to get my lashups to amplify. I was certain that I was on the brink of a new discovery and that I was about to get it to work any day now. I even had a name for it. I was going to be the inventor that gave the world the "Chemistor."
I probably learned more NOT getting my "Chemistor" to work than I did building Heathkits which did work.
A few months ago NPR was doing a restrospective of "Fresh Air" interviews, and Terry Gross was interviewing Grandmaster Flash, the rap artist. Holy cow! He was a nerdy basement tinkerer just like me... sort of. He would prowl the alleys for thrown-out radios and audio gear, and spent a lot of time building his own audio consoles that had the features he needed for what he was doing.
I often thing the most underrated social injustice is the different self-educational opportunities available to kids who live in a house with a basement versus kids that live in an apartment.
Biology? I never really "got" biology. Why? Because I was doing my basement tinkering with batteries and wires.
My wife, well, one day when she was a kid, her mother comes into the kitchen. There is a dead chicken on the kitchen table. There is a bottle of preserving fluid. My wife is using a pair of tweezers and is picking lice off the chicken and dropping them in the bottle. My wife's mother says, "Oh, dear. Sweetie, couldn't you manage to be interested in butterflies instead?"
My wife, she "gets" biology.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Since when is sulfuric acid 'regulated?' It's the most used industrical chemical in existence, and I can get all I want from autoparts stores (or car batteries themselves). I've ordered cases of the concentrated stuff from suppliers and never had to fill out a form (though it has been a few years since I've done so).
Computational Chemistry products and services.
I don't know how is the trend on the other side of the Atlantic, but here, in Paris, last time I went to a Fnac (a bookshop akin to Virgin Megastore, with less music and more books) asking for a mathbook (had to re-read some courses) I was given a strange look and redirected toward the 'science' books, in the 'philosophy' shelves. Gaaah!
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Yes, I made gunpowder. Went to the local drug store as a nine year old and got the stuff. Not sure if the pharmacist even knew what I was up to... Also threw calcium carbide in a paint can of water and set off. Boom! Played with benzene, mercury, and God knows what else. Gilbert chemistry set had a lot of interesting stuff in it. BUT - this was probably not a good thing, and I certainly wouldn't want kids doing this nowadays, given what I know about safety and missing body parts. HOWEVER - all is not lost. It is very possible to do things with "kitchen chemistry" type experiments. Inks (water soluble) can be chromatographed on paper towels. Lipstick (sic) can be chromatographed (components separated) on napkins... (There is an interesting story in Primo Levi's The Periodic Table about this.) So the bottom line is that clever highschool teacher science wannabes have to learn how to make the excitement of science clear to students by using a little ingenuity and thought about safer way to do this than in the good/bad old days.
Why is that?? I believe it is because colleges have to compete with each other.
Maybe that is a factor. The larger factors are 1) Generally folks in college want to be in college. If a person doens't like school, he generally won't enroll in college, or will get himself flunked out quickly. 2) With college, it is your money, coming out of your pocket in many cases. My experience hass been that students who are paying their own way outperform (as a whole) over those who have mommy and daddy paying their way (as a whole). Competition, in my mind, is a tetrary reason for colleges getting a bigger bang for the buck.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
It's almost funny, reading this article and the comments today. Here in the UK, the media are making a big thing about knife crime just now, after a couple of high-profile stabbings. The comments in the forums on places like BBC News are full of people saying we should raise jail sentences for carrying/using/killing with a knife (what, again?) and other similar knee-jerk reactions. Those suggesting looking at why we have such a problem (and indeed whether we really do or it's just media hype) make up a small minority of those posting comments, as do those suggesting that there may be a better answer and proposing a response other than much harsher penalties for those caught in posession of or using a knife.
I see clear parallels there with the discussions about home chemistry, and for that matter with discussions about writing computer programs for various purposes often mentioned in these parts.
It's sad. We used to tell kids about being responsible, teaching them that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, and disciplining those who abused their freedoms at others' expense. Then we'd know that most people would grow up to be responsible adults, and focus on those that weren't. These days, it's more about telling people they can't do something in the first place, and imposing draconian penalties if they even think about trying.
We never used to deny people opportunities to learn about things and enjoy them for their own sake, just because they had some small potential for abuse. I remember being inspired at around the age of 14 by a public presentation at a local university, explaining how fireworks were made. I went along with my dad - a scientist himself by trade - and he found it interesting as well. I went on to study chemistry for several years.
But today, that sort of thing is probably frowned upon. I drive a car that can go very fast, so obviously I'm a dangerous driver and need five speed cameras to check up on me on the way to work. (And yet friends who ride with me often describe me as one of the safest drivers they know, and I've never been so much as pulled over by a police car in over a decade of driving.) I've spent much of my life studying various martial arts, and lost count of how many ways I know to seriously injure or kill someone, so perhaps I should go register myself as a lethal weapon. (And yet the last involvement I had with a mugging was giving first aid to the victim afterwards - something I'm also trained to do.) Post-Dunblane, a friend of mine who used to shoot for sport had to give up his Olympic-style pistols and his hobby. (And yet, he never fired a gun outside a supervised range in his life, while gun crime in general has gone up since the ban.) You get the idea.
What happened to everyone having freedoms and taking personal responsibility for exercising them in an ethical way? I'm not sure whether it's big brother, the nanny state, or some bastard child of both, but whatever it is, I liked society better the old way.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I am acquainted with a couple of people who live in rural areas and grow orchids in their basements under lights. This is actually a pretty common practice for hobbyists and professional growers, as basements provide a nice, controlled environment and they are often humid. Apparently, the police have showed up at their homes on more than one occasion because someone in town noticed their basement lights are on nearly 24 hours a day and that they have a huge number of plants down there. Apparently, growing high quality blooming plants to exhibit at shows sponsored by your local garden club is now a suspicious activity, while sneaking around in the bushes and peeping into your neighbor's windows at night is okay.
If you grow orchids from seeds, you need to have a laboratory setup because the seeds are microscopic and difficult to propagate. You need stuff like an autoclave to sterilize your tools and agar as a growing medium. Sales of some of the tools you need, like flasks in which to start the seedlings, are being restricted now according to the article. I know other people, myself included, who grow orchids in semi-hydroponic media. All perfectly innocent and harmless uses of these materials. I worry that thanks to people who grow other, less innocent plants using these methods, gardening and having houseplants are soon going to be considered criminal activities.