return for refund

I was sitting on the bus on the way back and I somehow got to thinking about Science Fair projects I'd done over the years. I had no concept of science in the early grades, including an extremely poor understanding of the scientific method. I remember Justin Wu and I worked on this floating hotel concept and he did all the art and I did all the writing and we presented it to Mr. Turner and he asked us, disbelievingly, "Where's the science behind it?" I knew Justin was a different person because he had worked out all the finances behind the hotel like what it would cost to make a decent profit on room rentals, but we hadn't even talked about things like buoyancy. I think we got one of the worst marks in the class.

I remember working on a project late at night with M. (he shall remain nameless because he's a gaywad), and he went home and left me all the work to do. We had this concept that we'd make this vehicle catcher for those movie cars that drive off of cliffs and stuff, in the effort that in making an invention like that, it would save money for movie production companies and they could reuse the cars. We built this model out of some cut up 2x4s that had a "catcher" made up of folded duct tape, and we used this Hot Wheels Mustang that was launched manually off a ramp. I could never get the thing to catch the car, so I figured we would be failures when it came to showing the class what we'd devised. The next day in class it was our turn to present to Ms. Harrington, and of course M. wants to take all the credit so he launches the car off and surprisingly he catches it. We got pretty decent marks for the project as a result, which is about the only time that my friendship with M. has paid dividends. Otherwise, I would gladly walk past him if he was getting beat up in an alley, and might even throw in a kick myself.

I remember this other project I did in Grade 5 for Ms. Bean where we were all given these tiny motors and had to learn to rig them up to make something useful out of them. My ability to play with circuits is extremely poor, so naturally I just had this motor with some wires that weren't hooked up to anything the night before I had to hand it in. I ended up going to bed while my dad spent all night figuring out how to make a conveyer belt, which I subsequently took to school the next day and claimed it as my own. He gave me this whole speech to say about how if you reversed the wires you could reverse the polarity and make the conveyer belt run the other way, and I got an A for it.

That being said, I'm extremely surprised that I even ended up as a science student. It wasn't until I took BIOL 208 (Ecology) that I really understood the meaning of the scientific method, and found beauty in its eloquence and simplicity. It's one of the most powerful protocols that is out there, and allows you to test anything that's materialistic in nature. If I hadn't taken that course, I would probably think completely different, and still be the same loser I was in years prior to second year. I owe my life to the few biology courses I've taken because they've given me such an in depth understanding at how the world can be looked upon in metatheory. Biology is so divisible - you can speak of things in systems, branches of biology, in dichotomies - this helped me divide my world into organizable components that I could handle and distinguish. I understand now where I fit and how I interact and who I am; a realization of the self through Lotka-Volterra equations and survivorship curves.

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"Yesterday we looked for little bits of a few things in some things; today we look for less of more things in anything; tomorrow we will look for nothing in everything."

-Dr. Francis Gunther (pesticide residue chemist)