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WY Teen Cut From Science Fair For Entering Too Many

Posted by timothy on from the you-can't-science-in-here-this-is-the-science-room dept.

An anonymous reader writes " A Wyoming high school student who built a nuclear reactor in his dad's garage was disqualified from the International Science and Engineering Fair this month on a technicality.' His crime: competing in too many science fairs."

47 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. How? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've heard of several teens building nuclear reactors in their garages it seems. How are they accomplishing this, when foreign states seem to have such difficulty?

    1. Re:How? by istartedi · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Almost anything is a nuclear reactor if you play with the definition. There are isotopes decaying in my thumb right now. It's a nuclear reactor. I seriously doubt these things are producing net energy beyond curiosity wattage. You can probably do some interesting betavoltaic stuff that would generate power at the cost of $50/milliwatt. If you tried to scale it up and generate any significant power, the Feds would eventually find you... probably. I've often wondered if anybody has set one up for "off grid" power. I think there's a 50-50 chance that one back-woods dude is powering his cabin on a huge parcel of land somwhere where it woudln't attract attention. Dangerous as all get-out though. It's so much easier just to use wood stoves, solar panels, etc.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    2. Re:How? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I've heard of several teens building nuclear reactors in their garages it seems. How are they accomplishing this, when foreign states seem to have such difficulty?

      Farnsworth Fusors are fusion reactors that aren't net energy positive. They're just fascinating.

      The kids who build fission reactors aren't building them on a large enough scale to risk harm to anyone but themselves. By way of analogy, anyone can make a model rocket engine out of firecrackers, at the risk of blowing their fingers off. Making a solid rocket engine that can boost something into orbit an entirely different story.

    3. Re:How? by Mister+Transistor · · Score: 4, Funny

      Farnsworth Fusors are fusion reactors that aren't net energy positive. They're just fascinating.

      Good News, Everyone! My latest reactors are getting much better now, and yes - yes, they ARE fascinating!

      --
      -- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
    4. Re:How? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I've heard of several teens building nuclear reactors in their garages it seems. How are they accomplishing this, when foreign states seem to have such difficulty?

      Farnsworth Fusors are fusion reactors that aren't net energy positive. They're just fascinating.

      The kids who build fission reactors aren't building them on a large enough scale to risk harm to anyone but themselves. By way of analogy, anyone can make a model rocket engine out of firecrackers, at the risk of blowing their fingers off. Making a solid rocket engine that can boost something into orbit an entirely different story.

      What I find amusing about this story is that the kid's name is... wait for it... Farnsworth.
      Yes, really.

    5. Re:How? by Lehk228 · · Score: 2

      a wood fired stirling engine can be power generation, water pump for a well, heat for home, heat for hot water, grill for cooking and oven for cooking all at once. and it won't kill you and you can grow your own fuel

      --
      Snowden and Manning are heroes.
    6. Re:How? by GameboyRMH · · Score: 2

      Some lighthouses in Russia are powered by RITEGs about the size of a large fridge...good luck collecting enough nuclear material to build such a thing though.

      --
      "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
    7. Re:How? by camperdave · · Score: 2

      How are they accomplishing this, when foreign states seem to have such difficulty?

      Two different definitions of nuclear reactor. The teens are not building nuclear reactors in the nuclear power plant sense - a sustained, large scale reaction with a net energy release. They are building reactors in the technical sense - a device that can produce nuclear reactions. They're not worried about sustaining a reaction, or about net energy production, or about industrial scale production. They're just worried about did a reaction happen or not.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    8. Re:How? by HairyNevus · · Score: 2

      Yes, there's a book about him called "The Radioactive Boy Scout". David Hahn

      --
      You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
    9. Re:How? by Xiph1980 · · Score: 2

      You don't need a stirling engine for that. Just some ammonia, water and stuff, and you can use the heat directly to cool your house...
      How stuff works - gas burning refridgerator

      --
      Manuals are your last resort only
    10. Re:How? by Xiph1980 · · Score: 2
      In what universe is nuclear energy free energy? There's no such thing as free energy. There's such a thing as usable energy, and as you say he might not even have reached that point:

      Granted I get that this kid probably didn't exceed the energy output needed to make this plausible, <snip>

      Nuclear energy generation isn't something "magical" or especially difficult per sé. What makes it difficult, is the containment you need to prevent radiation from escaping and measures put in place to prevent the reaction from going out of control (something you also need by the way for conventional power sources) and I seriously doubt that he got hold of such pure radioactive materials that a runaway reaction was any danger. Anyway, all you do for the rest is replacing the heat source of burning wood, coal, oil or anything chemical / mechanical with a radioactive source of heat. The rest of the system, whether that be a peltier pad, stirling engine or steam turbine is pretty much the same.
      Now, about that "free energy" you mentioned... As I said, there's no such thing. There's only usable/functional/however-you-wanna-name-it energy, i.e. where you gain more energy from the reaction than you expel to mine and collect the materials and to start and monitor the reaction. Wood is an easy example of that. Takes relatively little energy to chop down a tree, and you gain a lot when you burn it in a fireplace.

      --
      Manuals are your last resort only
    11. Re:How? by doublebackslash · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It does not take talent to waste power.
      It takes talent to build a fusor from scratch.
      It takes talent to build scintillators, or even use existing one, to get a spectrum from your reaction to know the exact reactions that are occurring and in what proportions.
      It takes talent to keep yourself safe using such a device.
      It take drive and motivation and a damn side more vision than most people have to attempt such endeavors. This is the Hello World for a nuclear physicist and I encourage such behavior.

      If all you can see is someone "wasting" electricity I think you've missed out on a much larger picture.

      --
      md5sum /boot/vmlinuz
      d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e /boot/vmlinuz
  2. All the better.. by Hans+Lehmann · · Score: 4, Interesting

    He won't lose any high school credit because he wasn't able to compete in his nth science fair. But just think how good his resume after college will read when it says that he was disqualified because he entered too many science fairs in high school.

    --
    09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
    1. Re:All the better.. by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Insightful

      disqualifying someone just because they failed to win too many times is low

      That's not why he was disqualified. He was disqualified because he failed to advance to the next level and then jumped over the state border to try again with the same project in another state. Without this rule, you could have kids entering a dozen different state competitions with the same project, just hoping to get the right set of judges to advance you.

    2. Re:All the better.. by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, that's what the rule's for; to prevent students from milling through county fairs in order to qualify for the state fair. (Perhaps the idea is that it would let a student with a lot of funding go into a low-income county and exercise an unfair advantage? Although that would just even itself out at the state level anyway...) In this case, though, the student was entering into fairs in two different states, (if you consider Wyoming and South Dakota different) and the rule wasn't worded in a way that considered that. The person responsible was quietly let go, though, so... yeah.

      This story has nothing to do with the kid's project, if anyone was wondering.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    3. Re:All the better.. by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      disqualifying someone just because they failed to win too many times is low

      That's not why he was disqualified. He was disqualified because he failed to advance to the next level and then jumped over the state border to try again with the same project in another state. Without this rule, you could have kids entering a dozen different state competitions with the same project, just hoping to get the right set of judges to advance you.

      While what you say is technically true, the way you say it implys that he did this to circumvent the system. From the article itself, it was his high school that entered both the Wyoming and the South Dakota events and they, along with the people at both Universities involved were unaware of the rule. It seems like this was one of those rules put in place to prevent cheating that had unintended consequences. Even the article states the rule is looking at being rewritten because of it.

    4. Re:All the better.. by nick_davison · · Score: 5, Informative

      “The South Dakota fair is close and gives our kids another opportunity to present their work,” Scribner said. “I think that was some of our motivation, and it did give our kids another chance to qualify.”

      The school absolutely used multiple fairs to get extra chances to qualify - they outright say so. And that's exactly why the rule's in place.

      They put the rule in place to stop people failing at one using other fairs as a chance to succeed at another. He failed at one then used another to succeed. The school uses the second fair for exactly that purpose. And then they're shocked when they discover there was a rule to prevent the loophole they thought they'd discovered. That's not an unintended consequence. That's the intended consequence.

    5. Re:All the better.. by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      “The South Dakota fair is close and gives our kids another opportunity to present their work,” Scribner said. “I think that was some of our motivation, and it did give our kids another chance to qualify.”

      The school absolutely used multiple fairs to get extra chances to qualify - they outright say so. And that's exactly why the rule's in place.

      They put the rule in place to stop people failing at one using other fairs as a chance to succeed at another. He failed at one then used another to succeed. The school uses the second fair for exactly that purpose. And then they're shocked when they discover there was a rule to prevent the loophole they thought they'd discovered. That's not an unintended consequence. That's the intended consequence.

      You left out the part about the school not being aware of the rule and the officials not being aware of the rule and the colleges involved not being aware of the rule all because the rule was not enforced in the past. If it is an obscure rule that nobody is aware of, it is hard to cry foul with an intent to cheat. If it is enforceable, why was only his project disqualified and not all of the duplicated projects? If it was correct, why was the chairwoman dismissed over this?

      Maine has a law about how many pounds of cherries must be in a pie before it can be called a cherry pie. Not a pie sold today meets that standard, but the rule is on the books. Missouri doesn't allow margerine to be sold, or at least for it to be called that and yet grocery stores are full of it. There are all sorts of rules on the books that are old and obsolete, just like the rule in question with the science fair. The question people should be asking is why was it enforced all of a sudden and only selectively and if it was all on the up and up, why was the director let go?

    6. Re:All the better.. by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Informative

      It was not enforced in the past because nobody doing the state fair jumping had qualified for the ISEF before. It's in the article.

      The US science fair system is poorly organized, which is why things like this happen. It's disappointing for the kid but he did not qualify at his own state fair anyway.

    7. Re:All the better.. by Solandri · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They put the rule in place to stop people failing at one using other fairs as a chance to succeed at another. He failed at one then used another to succeed. The school uses the second fair for exactly that purpose. And then they're shocked when they discover there was a rule to prevent the loophole they thought they'd discovered.

      This story is the round-robin vs. single elimination argument. From what I gather, the ISEF use a single elimination system. That means (to use an extreme example) even if your science experiment is the second best in the world, you can be eliminated in the first round if the eventual winner happens to also go to your school. The "you can only enter one science fair" rule enforces that possibility. That's what happened to me - my best friend in high school was #1 in math and the sciences and I was #2. He won all the awards, scholarships, accolades, and recognition. I got... nice pieces of paper congratulating me on my 2nd place finish. Until I moved and went to a different high school, and easily beat out all the other students in math and the sciences.

      When practical, a round-robin system is much better as it allows you to appraise a wider range of competitors head-to-head. Then you can take the top 2^n candidates from the round-robin and put them into a single elimination "finals" if you wish. What you call a "loophole", others could legitimately see as a mechanism to bypass this inherent unfairness of the single elimination system.

      All major sporting competitions use round-robins before the single elimination final rounds. Tennis appears to use purely single elimination, but they track each player's win/loss ratios against different opponents (equivalent to round-robin results) to give them a ranking, then use the ranking to seed the single elimination tournaments to make sure the top seeds do not meet each other early in the tournament. Another approach is to use single elimination, but have a loser's bracket for everyone who loses once. Then the final is between the person who goes through undefeated vs. the person who wins the loser's bracket.

      All of these systems were designed to overcome this inherent major flaw of the single elimination system. So it's a bit naive to declare this story over and uninteresting simply because the student/school broke a rule apparently designed to enforce that flaw. Unless they have some mechanism to allow outstanding runner-ups to enter the next level of science fair competition, I'd say it's a bad rule.

    8. Re:All the better.. by Smallpond · · Score: 2

      The International fair is sponsored by Intel. That means that the rules are probably 45 pages long in tiny print and if followed exactly would disqualify 95% of the projects that were entered. At least that's the way their chip specs read.

  3. Definitely somebody to watch... by fustakrakich · · Score: 4, Insightful

    People who take an "unusual" interest in knowing things are dangerous.

    --
    “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
  4. It'd be great by memnock · · Score: 2

    ... if the faculty could figure how to get this kid to coach others.

    Regardless, it does seem like he'll have a bright future if he's that motivated.

    --
    "To stop the terrorists."
  5. Re:A Fusion Reactor? by Kavli · · Score: 2

    Could it have been some development of the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, perhaps?
    He's got the right surname, for sure. Maybe a descendant?
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

  6. Bureaucracy wins again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    But hey, he's wearing a lab coat. Can't he go on TV to sell Viagra?

  7. Re:And yet... by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That has nothing to do with this story at all. He entered different lower-level competitions with the same entry in order to maximize his odds of making it to the next level. The problem with allowing this would be that to even the odds, everybody would have to enter every competition, where the same set of projects would be re-evaluated over and over.

  8. Re:A working fusion reactor??? by Analog+Penguin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We can achieve fusion without too much trouble. The elusive white whale so far has been a sustainable fusion reaction that puts out more energy than you have to put into it.

  9. Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor by mbone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor is decades old, relatively easy to build (I know someone who built one in his garage), available commercially (as a neutron source) and is generally considered to be not a candidate for fusion power.

    Given that the name of the student is Conrad Farnsworth, I have to wonder if there is a family connection, but the article does not go into that.

  10. Re:And yet... by jlechem · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This right here, TFS is so distorted. He didn't make it past round 1 in his state, so he jumped the border (with his schools's permission) in order to try again. They had rules against this for a very good reason.

    --
    Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
  11. This isn't because he is doing too MORE Science. by dmomo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The summary makes it look like he is being held back by bureaucracy, while he's really just using it. He entered ONE project in many fairs. Each of these fairs were lateral contests in a larger competition. Effectively he entered multiple times in the over-all road to the International Fair.

    What he did would be like a NCAA team losing in March Madness multiple times, only to move position in the bracket, to try again on each defeat. Sorry, I couldn't think of a car analogy.

    The kid was taking the same project to different fairs after failing to qualify. Nothing is stopping him from doing Science. He was more interested in being successful. He wasn't doing this so he could "do more science". He was doing it so he could basically enter more times, giving him an unfair advantage. Say I ran a science fair for a bunch of inner city kids. They worked really hard on their projects. When time for judging comes up, some AP, college-bound kid with a rich ( anything white-collar, to these inner city kids) dad comes in with his garage-built project. He didn't qualify in his home town, but blows these kids out of the water. I would be livid.

    However, by seeing the way he plays ball, we know he will fit right in in Academia.

  12. Re:And yet... by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's not quite accurate.

    He went to the science fair in Wyoming, conducted by the University of Wyoming, which is a 'State Level' fair. He didn't place.

    His school also attends a 'Regional Level' fair, sponsored by the South Dakota School of Mines. He did place at that one.

    He get disqualified from the International Science and Engineering Fair because he went to a regional fair after attending a state fair.

    If those two events had simply happened in the reverse order, he would have been fine. It's not his fault the two events are scheduled the way they are.

    Also, his town is only 3 miles from the South Dakota border, so it's not like he crossed five states to try to cheat the system. For all we know, students who live in South Dakota attend his high school.

    --
    If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
  13. Re:Fusion Reactor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A Farnsworth Fusor is a fusion reactor and can be built at home with a little electrical engineering prowess. Someone needs to do some research before making claims that it can't be done. The problem with that device is that the containment is too good. It's not possible to add fuel once the reaction is started and the reaction produces less energy than is required to start it.

    If teleportation of protons (ionized hydrogen, not photons) becomes practical, it may achieve breakeven.

  14. Re:And yet... by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 2

    This right here, TFS is so distorted. He didn't make it past round 1 in his state, so he jumped the border (with his schools's permission) in order to try again. They had rules against this for a very good reason.

    From TFA the school did not know it was a problem. The events did not know it was a problem. The kid in question did not know it was a problem. Not included in the article but elsewhere online, it was not the same "experiment" but modified based on feedback from the first science fair. (Isn't that how science advances?)

    There was no intent to cheat here, just a well meaning rule to prevent cheating that was erroneously applied (the director who singled him out has been fired). What the real story is that has not been answered is that there were several other kids that had equivelantly the same experiment, as the high school entered both events, but only he was disqualified. As TFA states, the director is no longer employed with the institution after this and the rule is being rewritten to keep this from happening again.

    The nice thing is that he took the high road and didn't blame anybody. His only regret is that he didn't get to discuss his project further with the judges to gain more insight (again from TFA). He's been accepted at the South Dakota School of Mines for college. Hopefully they gave him a scholarship.

  15. Re:Fusion Reactor by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 3, Informative

    > If teleportation of protons (ionized hydrogen, not photons) becomes practical, it may achieve break-even

    It is extremely unlikely that any non-equilibrum reactor will ever reach break even. This includes the fusor, Forward's design, focus fusion, and many other designs. The bremsstrahlung is simply too great for any realistically sized reactor to stop thermal transport out of the core more rapidly than the reaction rate can replace it.

  16. Re:Fusion Reactor by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's the kid's own website, right?

    No, it's not. You may have been confused because his name is Farnsworth, which isn't a particularly common name; as another poster said, it would be interesting to know if there's a family connection with the Farnsworth the fusor is named for. Fusor.net, AFAICT, is a site run by and for fusor hobbyists, people who like to tinker with the kind of machines this kid built.

    And for those who are saying "Oh, he just downloaded some tutorials off the net"--well, if you could or would have done something like that as a teenager, good for you, but most people couldn't or wouldn't. It's not groundbreaking research, but putting together a working fusor is a pretty neat accomplishment for a high-school kid.

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  17. Re:I got banned for ONE project by Nyder · · Score: 2

    I made a stink bomb in chemistry class, and not only did I get banned, I also got the black plimsoll across my backside! (c. 1973).

    If you did that today, you'd get visited by the feds, put on a no fly list, and expelled from school.

    --
    Be seeing you...
  18. Bad comparision by nuckfuts · · Score: 2, Informative

    Almost anything is a nuclear reactor if you play with the definition. There are isotopes decaying in my thumb right now. It's a nuclear reactor.

    But it's not a fusion reactor. If you want to trivialize what the kid did, at least compare apples to apples.

    1. Re:Bad comparision by meerling · · Score: 2

      The article stated FUSION reactor, not FISSION reactor.
      All the nuclear reactors and batteries you people are talking about are FISSION reactors.
      You know, Uranium or Plutonium or some other radioactive material breaking down in to lighter elements.
      A FUSION reactor takes light elements, like hydrogen or helium and fuses them into heavier elements like helium or lithium, etc.

      Fusion is currently only experimental. I wonder if the article got it wrong and he was actually doing fission, but fissionable materials tend to make the feds go ballistic, so who knows. (Other than the kid.)

    2. Re:Bad comparision by jythie · · Score: 4, Informative

      Nope, fusion is right. If I recall correctly he built a 'fusor', a type of fusion reactor that does not even come close to producing more energy then you put in, but does preform the actual reaction. Quite a few people have been building them as hobby projects, though I believe they are also being looked into as a way of producing medically useful isotopes.

    3. Re:Bad comparision by nuckfuts · · Score: 2

      I don't understand why you're replying to my post telling me that the article is about a fusion reactor. That is precisely the point I was making. Perhaps you meant to reply to the parent?

    4. Re:Bad comparision by tragedy · · Score: 2

      Having a nuclear fusion reaction, in other words a nuclear synthesis reaction, is orthogonal to having break even energy production.

      Sorry, why would that be? At the level of individual collisions, a collision producing a fusion reaction is pretty much guaranteed to be break even (if there's more energy in the collision than would be released by the fusion it's probably too energetic to produce fusion). If fusion doesn't occur, the collision is elastic, and, depending on the setup, the same energy can end up in another (or a billion other) collisions, one of which may produce fusion. The basic idea behind promoting fusion is creating a situation where there are a sufficient number of collisions, with sufficient energy, to make fusion statistically likely before the energy diffuses away. Stars achieve this with gravitational confinement and they produce break even fusion. Laser ignition and Farnsworth Fusors and sonoluminescence try to accomplish this with intense, concentrated energy and, typically, are not break even (although I think laser ignition has managed to achieve this in some experiments now). Other ideas like magnetic confinement try to copy stars by creating intense pressure and heat and insulating it so that the same energy is used over and over and over to generate collisions.

      In any case, there are clearly methods that produce nuclear fusion reactions, in other words nuclear synthesis reactions that are break even and others that are not breakeven. Given that both types exist, it seems odd to claim that that nuclear fusion reactions are orthogonal to break even energy production.

    5. Re:Bad comparision by sjames · · Score: 2

      Given the kid's name, a fusor was nearly inevitable.

  19. Yeah, I'll think about that for you. by tlambert · · Score: 2

    It takes absolutely no talent to waste power like this. Well, perhaps it does, to use so much power while getting so little useful result.

    Think about carefully next time you're driving down the road in a vehicle that gets around 12% effeciency from the gasoline it burns.

    I'll think about that, and I'll think about the fact it could probably be 30% more efficient than that, if it wasn't for all the crap additives like ethanol and MTBE they are stuffing into it to keep cars manufactured prior to 1981 (prior years did not have oxygen sensors to control fuel mixture) from polluting.

    Then I'll wonder exactly how many pre-1981 cars are actually still on the road, and I'll wonder about the percentage of total fuel usage by all cars which is accounted for by pre-1981 cars.

    Then I'll start in again with my sneaking suspicion that the reformulation lobbying by Chevron in California is less about a concern for pollution, and more about a concern for Chevron to have their markets there protected from imports from out of state refineries unable to keep up with California's frequently changing reformulation requirements. You know, for the children, not so that they can have a higher profit margin due to sole-sourcing or anything.

    1. Re:Yeah, I'll think about that for you. by isdnip · · Score: 2

      Check your math. Gasoline sold at retail typically has 10% ethanol (usually corn-derived) and 90% actual gasoline. So if they did away with the alcohol, the price would go, well, probably nowhere, since alcohol's price isn't zero, and it has less energy per gallon than gasoline. It's there because the corn states and ethanol producers lobbied to require it. It is a net waste of energy since growing the corn and turning it to alcohol consumes more energy than it creates.

    2. Re:Yeah, I'll think about that for you. by mysidia · · Score: 2

      A big loss would be the ethanol manufacturing plants, quickly reduced in value to scrap: all in all, a good thing.

      You really think so? What about Ethanol for human consumption?

      Given the future of the economy.... I think there's going to be a lot of demand for it.

  20. Nooo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    "disqualified from the International Science and Engineering Fair"

    I'll show you! ...I'LL SHOW YOU ALL!!!!!

    Muahahahahaha...

  21. Math is hard by chrismcb · · Score: 3, Informative

    Both TFS and TFA make it sound like the kid competed in LOTS of events, and kept entering until he won. He did no such thing. He competed in two events. One a regional, the other a state. Just like the rules said he could. He just entered the state one first. Because he qualified from the regional to the international, it doesn't even sound like it is a case of regional qualifies for state which qualifies for international. Especially since he went straight to the state, and then qualified from the regional. The rule allows for two fairs, he went to two fairs. It just happened that one of the regional fairs, was in a different state (yet closer than apparently regional in his home state)
    If you can qualify for the international straight from a regional, then the rule is stupid.