At the meeting of the Advisors for Student Organizations, my colleagues were discussing how weird this new generation is.
“They live online!” my colleagues kept exclaiming. “They post everything that happens to them on those blogs, Twitters, etc. Kids today are weird!”
I felt like one of these weird kids for obvious reasons, so I decided to live up to my generation’s reputation and post this story I heard at that meeting.
The Chemistry Club requested permission to conduct a certain chemical experiment for educational purposes. Their request was denied.
Who can guess what the experiment in question was?
Clarissa's Blog 
Put a 1/2 inch ball of metallic sodium in a bucket otherwise full of water with a tin can over it and see what happens? Of course, after the first time I knew but it was still fun. This was back in the mid – late 1950, and the nanny society was not as pervasive.
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What happens? Is it meth?
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No, my friends.
The students simply wanted to brew beer.
Another shocking news is that student organizations are not allowed to use any beverages that are not made by Pepsi. They can’t even distribute bottled water for free if it isn’t from Pepsi.
I was kind of floored by this news.
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*The students simply wanted to brew beer. *
OMG. And I started already to think of poisons and terrorism.
Even if modern beer is different from the ones in the Middle Ages, still then everybody, including children, drank it regularly because of bad access to clean water. Now uni students can’t brew it.
But, after thinking, I am not surprised at all. In US a young person can go die in a war, see unspeakable horrors, but can’t buy alcohol till 21. In this world forbidding the experiment to unable to legally drink students makes sense.
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“But, after thinking, I am not surprised at all. In US a young person can go die in a war, see unspeakable horrors, but can’t buy alcohol till 21. ”
-Weird, huh?
Today, at 9 am, I saw a person at the convenience store buying beer and vodka. She must have had a fun night. 🙂
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At my school only Coke products are sold.
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Oh, so my school and your school are in direct competition here. Soft drink wars! 🙂
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Do you have to declare soft drink alliance when submitting papers for publication?
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Not yet. But who knows. . . 😦
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Aw, me can’t no good attention pay.
Here is a story about Pepsi I once heard: a family friend’s dad or uncle, I forget which, served in Desert Storm or Afghanistan, I forget which. There was a real problem, as you might guess, at getting potable water out to the desert so that our troops could bathe and not die of dehydration. Not a problem for our good friends at Pepsico! The army had some kind of deal with Pepsi, and the company sent gobs of soda to the friend’s dad’s (or uncle’s) unit every week. Huge crates of it stamped with the company logo, with notes that said something encouraging, something about Pepsi’s commitment to America’s troops etc. etc. That high-fructose corn syrup caffienated hair tonic was the only non-toxic liquid of any substantial volume available for weeks. The unit drank it, bathed in it, washed clothes with it, brushed their teeth with it. Hooray for Pepsi! Hooray for America!
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*The unit drank it, bathed in it, washed clothes with it, brushed their teeth with it. *
Don’t know about Pepsi, but one person talked of Coca Cola as great for washing cars.
If Coca Cola ruins teeth, may be Pepsi does it too, and thus can eat at the dirt, if used for teeth brushing?
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And Sprite is perfect for washing toilets. You just pour it in and eat eats all the dirt away in seconds.
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My dad once used Coke to wash away that blue corrosion stuff on a car battery.
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They wanted to cook meth, didn’t they?
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It wasn’t that bad. 🙂
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Then they probably wanted to:
(a) smoke a whole bunch of pot,
(b) have a whole bunch of sex, or
(c) destroy something in a cool way
FOR SCIENCE.
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Science begins to sound really cool. 🙂
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This science is totally cool:
http://www.studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/6850.html
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It’s beautiful.
But am I the only person who finds this a little disturbing? I’m now kind of scared of my body.
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Your body is always doing all this teeny tiny stuff! You have whole worlds of things happening inside you all the time! You think you’re sitting still but mitochondria is happening! You can’t fight it! You can’t stop it! You’ll die if it ends and it ends when you die! IT IS WHO YOU ARE.
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stufftofreakyououtwhenyouarehigh.txt
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Now you are just trying to freak me out on purpose! 🙂 🙂
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Of course it’s cool. How could you not know that?!
I’m currently trying to make intestinal bacteria glow in the dark.
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Dare I enquire how you do that? 🙂
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“Dare I enquire how you do that?”
Eat some luminol.
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You could insert the gene for this protein (or this one) into the bacterial chromosome … you couldn’t really use this method to make them glow while they were inside you, though, since you’d have to take them out (or just order some; E. coli is a very common intestinal bacterium for genetic experimentation, since it was one of the first organisms to have its entire genome mapped!).
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synthesizing meth? And yes even after TTLAC brought in an outside speaker to “explain” the online lives of our students, I’m still started at for using a laptop at meetings and my professorial FB account is frowned upon. SIGH
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I can imagine so many things that I cannot really decide :).
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Something to do with drugs or alcohol? Poisons or an explosion with danger of being applied for terrorist purposes?
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My biology class brewed a tiny amount of beer in test tubes, but it wasn’t enough to drink. I can see how hey might be reluctant to give permission if your is a “dry” campus. Students could start seeing home brewing “for science” as a loophole in the policy. Still, I think they should have gotten permission.
The part about “nothing but Pepsi products” disgusts me. The students and faculty at Humboldt State would never stand for that!
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The university gets a lot of money from Pepsi for it, I hear.
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We have a “Coke products only” policy here at my university, also. I think that Pepsi and Coca-Cola pay a lot for these contracts. As a person who does not drink sodas, this limits my choices, although Coke owns Minute-Maid orange juice and Dasani water. Coffee can still be brewed locally.
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I have heard that those contracts exist for regular schools too… is that true ?
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Yes, I think it is. These people are everywhere. 😦
Of course, if the government gave back what it owed to us, a state university, we would probably not have to sell our souls to Pepsi.
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This is a true story: Some friends of mine were making a cartoon for MTV, about some “bad boy” adolescents. In one scene the boys are bored at a very prim and proper girl’s birthday party so they decide to spike the drinks with alcohol. The censors made them change it to poison.
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How could you do this to me?? I was drinking tea and just spit it all over myself with laughter. This is the best story ever!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you!!
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Haha you’re welcome. Incredible isn’t it? 🙂
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I don’t have words for it.
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Lol 🙂 My university has whole courses on brewing beer! Including tasting it! For science!
No seriously, you can take a specialisation in beverage technology and you get to use several labs to brew everything from juice over beer to spirituous beverages.
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There is the whole department of beer brewing at Munich Technical University 🙂
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There is a whole department of beer drinking at Munich Technical University.
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More than one department 🙂 🙂
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OK, why are we all not going to that great university right now?
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Did it have anything to do with sexuality?
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I’d like to imagine that chemical experiment. 🙂 No, it was just about brewing beer.
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Paul, are you envisioning the synthesis of a perfect aphrodisiac?
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I count myself lucky to be at a university with a department of viticulture. There are also plenty of classes on beer brewing.
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I remember all the great science experiments we did as part of “science club”. We made fireworks that singed the roof of the lab and put together “lip gloss” from glycerine and colouring. I’m sure we would have been allowed to brew beer had we requested to.
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