• Question: What is the funniest practical you have done and why? how much did to revise to get this far ?

    Asked by goodjohn to Zara, Jess, Edd, Christine on 16 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Christine Switzer

      Christine Switzer answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi goodjohn,
      I bet you are going to get some fun answers to this question!
      The funniest practical I did was what my research partner calls a “show”. Our other partner was being a real pain about testing our contaminated land cleanup method other problem wastes and the one he was most keen about was explosives residue. You can see where this is going already… After about six months of constant nagging, I decided we needed to do something to prove to him that it was not a good idea. To simply, there are two basic parts to explosives. Both are dangerous but one much more than the other. The oxidiser is material that gives off oxygen very quickly. The detonator is the more dangerous part. That’s what makes the substance go boom. We took some oxidiser from the lab, mixed it with clean soil and set the whole thing up in a large beaker with our hardware. We ran it in a fully isolated fume hood with the sash down. We could see it but no one could touch it. We stared for 20mins and then the magic happened. It went foof as we expected. Sand *everywhereMATOMO_URL Everything else was fine, we just had some cleanup to do. The nagger stopped nagging. We proved to him that our process would work with explosives but it would be a really bad thing to try for real.

    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi goodjohn… I love this question!! Have already had a chuckle at Christine’s, I can’t wait to hear the other answers 😀

      The funniest things happen during fieldwork! A few of my favourite moments are:

      – In Trinidad, we used to do surveys of frogs in the car… we’d drive slowly along the road at night time (the frogs were breeding in ditches on the side of the road) and listen to the frogs calling. We’d take it in turns to write in a notebook the names of the frogs that we heard. Obviously, because it was at night, whoever was writing would need someone else to shine a torch onto the notebook, in order to see and write. This is kind of mean but… whenever it was my friend Darryl’s turn to write, I would roll down the window of the car (to let insects in, which are attracted to the light) then I would deliberately shine my torch right in Darryl’s face. Every time I did that, lots of insects would fly at Darryl’s face!! I thought it was hilarious!!! But he didn’t. I still find it funny today, I’m actually laughing at my desk right now! 😆

      – Another funny thing… a lot of the field work we do is out in the countryside and near farms, which means climbing over a lot of fences. My friend has a 10-minute video of my supervisor trying to cross a fence. TEN MINUTES! He really struggles and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen! I really want my friend to put it on youtube.

      – Of course, funny things have happened to me too… this one is quite embarrassing. About a month ago, I was out collecting some crayfish from traps. Unfortunately, since I’d last visited the site, it had rained a lot… the water was too deep to reach my traps and I’d forgotten to bring my waders with me, I only had wellies. I had two choices: either go into the water and get totally soaked, then drive home for two hours in wet jeans. OR, take off my jeans and go into the loch in my pants. I couldn’t see anybody around and I really didn’t want to drive home soaking wet, so I went for the second option! It was a little chilly but I got my traps! Then I put my dry jeans back on. I thought I had got away with it… but then two days later, I had an email from a Ranger who worked in the local area. The email said – ‘what were you up to the other day?!! He’d seen me, struggling away, in my pants! I was so embarrassed!!! But I have to laugh now.

      Second question… how much did I revise for my exams? Unfortunately, quite a lot! But it’s worth it, I did well in my degree and if I hadn’t done well, then I probably wouldn’t be doing a PhD now.

    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      The funniest practical I was involved with was our experiments with human crowds. To make sure we got useful results we couldn’t tell the volunteers who were taking part what was happening. We just gave them a few simple instructions (stay close to the person in front of you, follow the person with the hat etc) and then we watched the crowd behaviour that emerged.

      In some similar experiments that my colleague Jens Krause did the crowd spontaneously started walking round in a circle, while in other cases he got a ‘double circle’ with people moving around in opposite directions. It was great to watch, particularly as the people had no idea what they were doing or why!

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