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An activity I enjoy doing in Engineering merit badge is the neutral buoyancy contest.  Scouts receive a collection of wires, cork pieces, and washers and attempt to create a device that’s neutrally buoyant, failing that, one that falls the slowest.  Today’s youth are quite clever but sometimes fail to grasp how the challenge works, like when I said the device must be free-floating and can’t touch the container, one kid thought that making a wire hook on the side was “free floating” or another that made a compression pin that held the device fast against the sides of the container.

Groups would drops their devices in the test column and watch in wonder thinking they’d reached neutral buoyancy as the downward force of gravity and upward force of Brownian motion and a density difference cancelled out.  “Terry, come quick while it’s balanced!”  If it’s neutrally buoyant now, it should be neutrally buoyant 10 seconds from now.  The containers slowly grew cloudy from many unwashed hands and the children learned the importance of contaminating ones test environment.  These budding astrologers were also quick to blame the pseudoscientific ,from air bubbles stuck to the side of containers to my mere presence one kid saying “you did that” followed by the angry glare.  I’m not sure if there were commenting on my carriage or my ownership of an anti-physics gun.

The winning group fell 14 inches in 30 seconds and proved that kids could be competative about anything as the gaggle of winning 12-year olds went over to older kids and started chanting “In your face!  In your face!”  I imagine Nobel laureats have a similar ritual.

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I was asked to run a session on teach Cub Scouts Science and one of the points I try to drive home was that most kids have some sort of “Wow” moment.  Mine were viewing the rings of Saturn on a camping trip and learning about some absoludicrously old rocks in Canada.  I use the pillars of creation in the Eagle Nebula and some very small pictures.

I quickly determined that I had a lot of work to do after the following:

  • One person asked if a magnetized quarter would still work (I’m not sure how they were planning to magnetize it)
  • Someone declared that a jet engine and a flying hoop operated on the same principle
  • Someone kept referring to how she was going to have her kids “make science” which sounds like a euphemism biologists use
  • After deploying a water bottle rocket someone asked if a foot pump would work instead of a bicycle pump and if one could use another fluid besides water which begs yet more questions

One fellow seemed to be bent on oneupsmanship and rattled off 6 activities he’d done with his Scouts asking after each “have you tried that?”  To all 6 boring milquetoast ideas that Mr. Wizard couldn’t make fun, yes.  I felt like a bit of a dick and thought I should go into blackface and thank massa for showerin’ learning on me. Luckily most of these folk will be dead by the time I enter science advocacy 45 years from now.  If only I could stop their children.

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The Office 2007 interface has been much maligned despite what I think is its GUI splendor.  Despite having some installation problems, I’ve come to love the way the ribbon interface rewards exploration and cuts click-paths from 1-7 clicks to 2-3.  At the lodge executive board meeting, the uphill battle faced by UI designers hit home as I was trying to help someone change some things about the lodge minutes.  He’s a normally sharp kid but apparently had been enraptured by the hatred of the ribbon.

Him: How do I change the margins this way?  Everything’s so hard.
Me: Click over a tab.
Him: What tab?
Me: See that thing at the top.
Him: Yeah.
Me: Where there’s a bunch in a row that correspond to large categories of document modification.
Him: Yeah.
Me: Where if you hit tab you move over one.
Him: Yeah.
Me: That’s a tab.
Him: Oh.  Okay.  So how do I change the margins in this “print tab” (he actually used air quotes)
Me: Click margin.  And pick the one you want, you can even preview what it’ll look like by doing a mouse-over.
Him: Oh.  Why didn’t I know this before.
Me: Fear.  Fear of the unknown, fear of the new.  Embrace it, and you shall become an Office Ninja.
Him: One day, Terry.  One day.

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Instructing Engineering merit badge has its emotional highs and lows.  One of those moments is when I review the Willow Island catastrophe where 51 workers were killed when improperly engineered scaffolding collapsed.  At near the height of this section when I review how the caterpillar scaffolding failed one of the kids pulled a pair of boxers out of his jeans.  A F*&#ING PAIR OF BOXERS.  He procedes to verify their cleanliness by putting them over his head and puffing up the legs by blowing on them.

My best recovery was using the systems investigations method to figure out what happened.  Apparently, when he put his cloths away, he didn’t notice a pair of boxers in his jeans.  How do you wear jeans for a day and not notice a ball of cloth somewhere?

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I’d unwittingly volunteered to do a Webelos Weekend and spent far more time preparing for it compared to any program I’ve ever run.  The theme was “Mad Scientist Training Weekend” and kids completed the Science related activity pins.

Highlights:

  • A fight between the Scout professional and the event staff over the breakfast drinks between water and juice.  The compromise: Tang
  • A leader asked if I could leave the pavilion light on as he graded papers saying he was a college professor.  I checked back and he was grading papers titled “and now you try: identifying nouns”
  • The evening meal for the kids was a mini-pizza and pasta for the adults.  A leader asked if he could bring out his propane stove to cook something and the administrative head shot it down.  He later approached me and offered me an Omaha Steak in return for some black-market grilling.
  • My dad was pressed into running a station after a station lead texted out sick.  Normally he doesn’t smoke on Scout trips as the outdoors calms him, apparently Cub Scouts don’t as he decimated cigarettes between groups in about 8 seconds.
  • The evening presentation involved five rapid-fire demos that Joe and I did involving Newton’s First Law of Motion and atmospheric pressure.  Joe and I made up a neat presentation where he breaks a brick over my hand with a hammer without injuring my hand to which no one responded.  HE BROKE A BRICK OVER MY HAND.  But when I used a playing card to seal a graduated cylinder everyone was stunned.  After the presentation no less than 5 kids approached doubting the card’s efficacy until they tried it.  Each was completely uninterested in how a brick broke over my hand.
  • I had to drive home to grab a broom to clean up the next day and picked up Max so he could go for a run in the park.  He was very interested the trip until he arrived, took a massive dump and ran back to the car.  I think my family’s dog may be responsible for a series of shit-n-runs.

Go Webelos.

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Boring training notes:
8:00 – Start. Already bored
8:10- falling asleep.
8:25 – ripped out hang nail. Now awake.
8:45 – inatructor says semper gumby. I laugh much louder than appropriate.
8:50 – Bored
8:55 – joke no one got.
9:00 – diatribe on the role of the district
9:15 – good presentation. Yea!
10:00 – guy with flipchart does presentation. Everyone in awe of fact that guy still uses flipchart. He points out that chart never runs out of battery and then marker dies.
10:30 – long line of characteristics of the form “is (adjective)” with the last item being “can empathize”. Is empathetic too uncommon a word?
10:45 – made “a preposition is a horrible thing to end a sentence with” joke to which everyone just nodded and said yes.
1:00 – “I love roleplaying” “no that kind”. “oh”

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I’m slowly becoming more active in Playwicki District and was tapped to head up a Webelos weekend.  It’s a bit of a weak weekend which lasts less than 18 hours, but hey they’re kids.

I’m reasonably good with Publisher and combined with Google image search one can create a reasonably snazzy form with a little knowledge of fonts.  So, I made a form for the event and passed it out at the district committee meeting and the response was stunning.  I had no less than three people go “this is good”.  The professional was impressed it was in color.  This is from the man who sent me a form by printing it out in color, scanning it to black and white, and sending me the pdf of the original publisher document.  At the end of the meeting someone said to me “you’re doing a great job”.  How!? I just made a fucking form and people are using it as a proxy for the success of the event.  I have almost no service corps, I don’t have a budget and the patch won’t be in by then but I have an awesome form that apparently covers that.  This is the equivalent of judging the fiscal soundness of a nation by how nice its money is.  Which, if it were the case, Zimbabwe would be in a lot better shape.

Duckets of security

Duckets of security

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So, the day started out great, with crispy bacon in the Dining Hall and everything.  I thought I could slip away from the shackles of karma, but I couldn’t.  One of the provos destroyed his ankle while waving at Andy Clarke.  Injury often stalks those who wave to the Briton.  I, being the only one with a car, got to drive the fellow to the hospital but with the caveat that it was after a pit stop.  The Economist’s Technology Monitor had been updated so about 45 minutes later I made the 200 foot walk to take the kid to the hospital.  I was worried that he was faking his sprained ankle so I made several jarring stops, based on the volume of the screams he wasn’t faking it.

On arrival, we sat in the ER waiting area surrounded by people with funny conditions.  Funny uh oh, not funny ha ha.  We played hide and go seek with our radios in the waiting room.  After a two hour wait, he went to get an x-ray and we tried for a group shot but weren’t allowed.  Andy and our next got our charge a large collection of Hannah Montana stickers for being such a brave little Scout.  I look forward to seeing how this ends.

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So, this week there’s actually a siesta period after lunch and as an assistant Scoutmaster for a unit of provos, I stepped up to the plate and we began jumping rope.  After quickly exhausting a number of black tweener stereotypes we got more competative.  Someone challenged the three staff members and I went second after Andy who got 11 jumps.  Someone started singing “Miss Mary Mack” and was out after getting hit in the face while doubled over laughing.

Kevin Ott got up next and to secure my record of not being last I yelled “FAIL!” every time the rope came around.  My record of 9 was three times the three he got in before he also failed to jump while doubled over.

Victory through adversity.

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Last night, I had to deal with a number of kids with homesickness, or what we call domestic nostalgia.  Here’s what they said:

Kid: What music do you listen to?
Me: Mostly stuff from people who’ve been dead for 150 years.
Kid: Oh, like Van Halen.

Me: So what do you do for fun?
Kid: Collect souls, I bought Michael Jackson’s for $1.00.

Kid: You’re awesome at the guitar, you’re like that black guy.