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2004-04-03 - 10:02 a.m.
experiments
i first set up this diaryland page last october with the intent that i would write about experiments and things like that (whatever that means) and that is why this place is called pauls-lab. however, the fact is all of that stuff has been deleted because it was very poor and i was trying to be funny and it did not work at all. still, there is something to be said for conducting your own experiments into things which seem like fun or are interesting to you.
ok, so when i was at university i studied physics and that meant spending a lot of time in the lab with lots of good equipment that is worth a lot of money (one time i was using something worth �250000) but perhaps the best substance available to physicists is also the cheapest: liquid nitrogen. a pint of liquid nitrogen costs less than a pint of milk and at university scales it comes in a tanker which then fills up a big storage thing out the back. so i was using liquid nitrogen for some semi-conducting experiment i think when i devised a very simple experiment i called the orange crush. the experiment was to see what would happen if i put a segment of orange in liquid nitrogen to freeze it and then smashed it to pieces (the title sort of also contains the method).
so, i tried to gently lower the orange into the flask of liquid N2 but i dropped it and so had to pour out everything onto the floor. it is ok because all the nitrogen vapourises pretty much as soon as it hits the ground. i was left with a frozen piece of orange just sitting there. i had no luck trying to break it by hitting it with things because my aim was not too good from spending three hours sitting about in the lab so i decided to jump on it with my big clown size feet. the frozen orange smashed into hundreds of pieces that went all over the floor and then quickly melted so the floor was now covered in hundreds of tiny pieces of orange sludge. as far as i was concerned the experiment had been a complete success but i did not write it up for the professors because most of them would not know a good publishable scientific paper if it jumped up and bit them on the ass.
another experiment i did was to do with gambling. i was sure that i could beat the system by betting on english football matches because they are usually pretty easy to predict. however, it is true what they say about gambling being a mug's game. the system cannot be beaten because, no matter what you do, gambling is still seriously fucking boring unless you are a moron who bets more than you can afford. i mean, after about a months work i had managed to turn my �20 stake into about �65 but i would have made more money if i had bought a baby ostrich and fed it to become a big fat adult for market.
next update: monday or tuesday i expect
paul.
(from www.pixelbee.co.uk)
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