Creativity
Today was the day for the Santa Cruz Science Fair. I was a judge for Physics in Juniors division - trying to rank all these eager students with their project is alot more difficult than I had expected, though it was still good to see lots of kids putting their mind to work on projects like the ones I saw today. The biggest difficulty I was having is trying to put myself in their Grade 6 to 8 shoes - coming in with close to 20 years of education under my belt, for the most parts, I was able to see where they had excelled, but also where they made some missteps. Specifically, for some of the projects, if they had made that last theoretical leap, it would be something that would’ve been really interesting and gave much better understanding of the world around them… but alas, not many made that final breakthrough.
There were some very interesting projects, though. Since I probably shouldn’t talk about projects that I judged, I’ll talk about other interesting projects that I saw. One of them was search on whether you can teach old dog new tricks. Their conclusion? For tricks, age of the dog didn’t really matter. Some 10 years old dogs learned tricks on the first try, while some puppies had difficulties picking it up after 10 times. There was a report about having office plants (conclusion: office plants help if they can get direct sunlight. Otherwise, not enough oxygen gets generated to matter). A project on hooking up (girls hook up because they’re lonely, boys hook up because they’re drunk… And boys most likely break up because the girl cheats, and girls most likely break up due to losing interest), and another one in difference in creativity and destructiveness between guys and girls (conclusion: inconclusive, as you’d expect :p ). The quality of projects varied wildly but there were many interesting topics being pursued, which made judging and perusing a joy.
Lately, I’ve been pondering about possibly attending Burning Man (more info here). I think it would be an interesting experience, but that’s really not the reason why I started thinking about it. I think the actual reason why it’s drawing me in is the fact that I’ll get to build something. I think that’s one of the things that I miss about solar car - not having something physical to work with, ponder about, and lose sleep over. Some of the ideas I’ve had is giant LED lighted screen (not feasible, it’ll need too many LEDs which are fairly expensive), giant rotating LED screen (more interesting engineering problem - you have to turn them on and off at the right point, and you need less LEDs… but you now need a way to supply power to a rotating apparatus), or an old style telephone network with switching area (which will be fun project to hunt down the old phones).
But it seems like no matter what gets done, it’ll take whole bunch of time, effort, and money which is different from solar car in that it’ll be my own money. So for the time being, I think I’m going to try to express my creative urge by trying to design t-shirt designs for Threadless. Much cheaper, and if I crash and burn, I can always Ctrl+Z.