Spare Change

Gravity: It's the Law

Posted by Bryan

Dumb kids are always good for a laugh, but don't blame them, for they are merely a product of the same system that tells them their uncles were monkeys, that the earth is 70 bazillion years old (give or take a few jillion), and that we all grew up to be big strong humans, coincidentally out of primordeal pea soup.

From the inbox:

TRUE QUOTES ABOUT SCIENCE FROM KIDS

~ One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second.

~ You can listen to thunder after lightening and tell how close you came to getting hit. If you don't hear it, you got hit, so never mind.

~ When they broke open molecules, they found they were only stuffed with atoms. But when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed with explosions.

~ When people run around and around in circles, we say they are crazy. When planets do it, we say they are orbiting.

~ While the earth seems to be knowingly keeping its distance from the sun, it is really only centrificating.

~ Most books now say our sun is a star. But it still knows how to change into a sun in the daytime.

~ A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it wants to go.

~ Many dead animals of the past changed to fossils, others preferred to become oil.

~ Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they are there.

~ Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I have never been able to make out the numbers.

~ We say the cause of perfume disappearing is evaporation. Evaporation gets blamed for a lot of things people forget to put the top on.

~ I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing.

~ In making rain water, it takes everything from H to O.

~ Rain is saved up in cloud banks.

~ Cyanide is so poisonous that one drop of it on a dog's tongue will kill the strongest man.

~ Thunder is a rich source of loudness.

~ Isotherms and isobars are even more important than their names sound.

~ It is so hot in some parts of the world that the people there have to live in other places.

~ H2O is hot water, and CO2 is cold water.

~ To collect fumes of sulfur, hold a deacon over a flame in a test tube. When you smell an odorless gas, it is probably carbon monoxide.

~ Water is composed of two gins, Oxygin and Hydrogin. Oxygin is pure gin.
Hydrogin is gin and water.

~ Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries, vanes and caterpillars.

~ Blood flows down one leg and up the other.

~ Respiration is composed of two acts, first inspiration, and then expectoration.

~ The moon is a planet, just like the earth, only it is even deader.

~ Dew is formed on leaves when the sun shines down on them and makes them perspire.

~ Mushrooms always grow in damp places so they look like umbrellas.

~ The pistol of a flower is its only protections against insects.

~ The skeleton is what is left after the insides have been taken out and the outsides have been taken off. The purpose of the skeleton is something to hitch meat to.

~ A permanent set of teeth consist of eight canines, eight cuspids, two molars, and eight cuspidors.

~ The tides are a fight between the earth and moon. All water tends towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon and nature abhors a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this fight.

~ A fossil is an extinct animal. The older it is, the more extinct it is.

~ Germinate: To become a naturalized German.

~ Liter: A nest of young puppies.

~ Magnet: Something you find crawling all over a dead cat.

~ Momentum: What you give a person when they are going away.

~ Planet: A body of Earth surrounded by sky.

~ Rhubarb: A kind of celery gone bloodshot.

~ Vacuum: A large, empty space where the Pope lives.

~ Before giving a blood transfusion, find out if the blood is affirmative or negative.

~ To remove dust from the eye, pull the eye down over the nose.

~ For a nosebleed, put the nose much lower than the body until the heart stops.

~ For dog bite put the dog away for several days. If he has not recovered, then kill it.

~ For head cold use an agonizer to spray the nose until it drops in your throat.

~ To keep milk from turning sour, keep it in the cow.

And thats....one to grow on.

This reminds me of a substitute earth science teacher I had my freshman year. He came in for a week because of some extended reason why our existing teacher had to be away (who was awesome, I might add. Because of him, I can identify clouds, understand tectonic plates, know the difference between assorted types of lava, tell why rivers have oxbows, and explain the water cycle). This sub teacher administered a test to us and didn't really know what he was teaching. He was more of a phys. ed. kind of teacher, if you get my drift. Well, because this test was just a bit out of his league, he decided to award points to the students for creative answers, regardless of how inaccurate they were. This created for some of the most fun I ever had in my formal matriculation. I don't remember many of my answers, but I do remember that I was putting down fake answers, even for the ones I knew, because it was so much more fun.

A couple of the answers went a little sumpin sumpin like this:

deciduous -- the season where word endings leave/ fall off the redneck speech. Example, "Did you deciduous goin' to da' 'partment store for a new possum trap?"

coniferous -- the quality of being single horned, as in a unicorn. "The coniferous horse was very popular at horse shoe pitching conventions, for obvious reasons."

foilage -- The act of stopping an evil plan, either on accident or purpose. "The foilage of the plot to rob the bank occured when the criminal used his own deposit slip as a note demanding money."

deforestation -- The process of transforming oneself into Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, for an impending Star Trek Convention. "My deforestation took several hours, mostly because my mom washed my blue shirt in with my Dr. Who pajamas, and it took forever for me to find it."

Surely you can come up with some gems of your own... here's some words to get you thinking, thanks to Mr. Pete Bergmann, and the nuggets of earth science knowledge still clinging to my cranial neurons:
fossilization
subduction
cumulo-nimbo
pahoehoe
aa
mesozoic
chlorophyll
mantle
genus
phyla

Share your brilliant definitions of these words or others, for the betterment of the group.

May 10, 2004 3:15 PM