Comment by sophacles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sophacles | Hacker News Reader

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Oh cool, glad you were smart enough to learn rather than doubling down and getting hurt!

My version of this story is from high school chem class. Somehow a lab partner and I convinced our teacher to let us test "which gunpowder mixture burns best". This was a several week long "student run experiment" type project, culminating with presentations in class. One component of the presentations was a demo - we chose to show the difference between the worst performing mix and the best performing mix. The "slow mix" made a ton of smoke and stunk up the whole wing of the school w/ suphur. The fast mix cause enough thermal shock to shatter the crucible we used - pieces went everywhere doing a little damage to the audience even: one kid's notebook caught on fire because some of the power landed on it. Another kid had a freshly melted hole in his big pants (it was the mid 90s) - I'm glad no one was hurt. We got an A, but younger folks told me that in later years fire experiments were banned.

The only lesson I managed to learn was: It's important to do bold stuff before everyone else, because you either get to have fun or deal with the rules that the fun people caused.

I'm not sure that's a great lesson, but I have yet to see it violated.

Ah chemistry class.

Our teacher would do a simple demonstration every year with a small piece of sodium and water. The plan was to have the small piece of sodium fizz around in the bell jar of water. He kept pulling off pieces of sodium that were too small, and they just went “pfft”. After the 5th failed attempt, he was mad and pulled off a large chunk, and he tossed it in the water. It didn’t dance around, it went <BOOM>, big <BOOM>, two feet from the students in the front row. I was 12 feet away and got wet and was hit with glass. He barely kept his job. It was awesome!

Exact same thing happened at my highschool, scene of the crime was a very muddy ditch. I wonder how many chemistry teachers the world over have made that exact same mistake.

I'm beginning to think I was lucky to have the chemistry teachers that I had. I recall my main chem teacher saying that we students could not do this experiment ourselves as we'd likely blind ourselves. He was very particular in the amount he selected and mentioned it'd go off like a bomb if too much was selected.

BTW, the lab table in our tiered lecture room was nearly 6ft/2m from the first row of seats and for the exercise the teacher had a sheet of perspex in front of the experiment (perhaps it'd happened to him with an earlier lot of students).

This reminds me of a chemistry experiment our teacher ran where we put dry ice in a sealed plastic container so that as it warmed, it would increase the pressure which would let us see some of the co2 in liquid form (under pressure dry ice will go from solid -> liquid rather than solid -> gas).

Halfway through class we figured out if we put enough in the plastic container, it would create little dry ice bombs that would explode due to the pressure. So we started doing that and tossing it at people around the room.

Not quite as bold, but there were similar results to me and my friends being the first ones in our school to build a functioning railgun during school hours, and dissolve lunch trays in PCB cleaner...

(No injury or [unintended] property damage incurred, but The Adults quickly realized that we hadn't actually broken any rules, and there definitely should have been rules to be broken.)

"there definitely should have been rules to be broken."

Oh man, I dread this - as kids, my parents would ride random horses they found in a field and come hone late,I walked to school alone at age of twelve before mobiles ,and kids these days have no freedom at all

Knowing the enormous freedoms that I had as a kid, I cannot conceive how bad it must be to be a kid today. I could write a long list of activities that were considered normal for kids of my era to do that if their parents permitted them these days then the do-gooders would accuse them of child abuse.

I'm firmly of the belief that keeping kids walled up behind glass and protected from life's knocks when young is one of the significant reasons for why many later lack resilience and develop emotional problems.

At school my chem teacher would run lunchtime demos of explosives, safety shield around his desk and all. The shield always blew off and we learnt not to sit in the front row

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