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She Blew Me Up with Science
Mar. 7th, 2008 01:47 amSomeone is making another effort at a self-aware computer. This one looks like it might actually succeed.
*****
Amputation saws!
*****
Did you ever want your own EEG machine?
*****
Now you too can own a brain! Actually, that's quite reasonably priced.
They've also got the preserved Rats injected with red and blue latex. When I was in high school, we actually had a 55-gallon drum of those, which was gruesome but cool. I can't smell formalin without thinking of the Big Drum o' Rats. I kept my Rat's tail for many years.
We christened the gall bladder 'the green light bulb'. It really did look like one.
Once you had your Rat hollowed out, it was possible to stick a rubber tube into the rectum from inside the belly, and make water shoot out his ass. We sprayed one another, of course, since we were guys and in high school.
If I learned anything from dissecting a Rat, it's that dissection is fairly useless as a learning experience to a high school student. What we learned about the anatomy of Rats, we learned from the book, which was profusely illustrated with nice cel overlays. The Rat wasn't so neatly laid out, nor the parts so readily identifiable. Everything was stiff and rubbery from the embalming process, and smelt of formalin - I know far more about the what the insides of animals are actually like from the kitchen than I learned in dissecting.
*****
The same book that had cel overlays of Rats also had cel overlays of Humans, male and female. This somehow cross-fertilized with the Song of Solomon (being taught to us as literature) to produce a fad among my clique of picking out a girl, rolling a d100 to select a body part from the list, then declaiming on the spot an extemporaneous poem about that body part, complete with bizarre and extravagent imagery.
As was so often the case for anything fun in high school, this ended up with us getting in trouble, this time for laughing hysterically in the library. I don't think the Principal was really convinced that it resulted from poetry comparing a cheerleader's gall bladder to "a Rat's green light bulb".
Yes, we were geeks.
*****
Amputation saws!
*****
Did you ever want your own EEG machine?
*****
Now you too can own a brain! Actually, that's quite reasonably priced.
They've also got the preserved Rats injected with red and blue latex. When I was in high school, we actually had a 55-gallon drum of those, which was gruesome but cool. I can't smell formalin without thinking of the Big Drum o' Rats. I kept my Rat's tail for many years.
We christened the gall bladder 'the green light bulb'. It really did look like one.
Once you had your Rat hollowed out, it was possible to stick a rubber tube into the rectum from inside the belly, and make water shoot out his ass. We sprayed one another, of course, since we were guys and in high school.
If I learned anything from dissecting a Rat, it's that dissection is fairly useless as a learning experience to a high school student. What we learned about the anatomy of Rats, we learned from the book, which was profusely illustrated with nice cel overlays. The Rat wasn't so neatly laid out, nor the parts so readily identifiable. Everything was stiff and rubbery from the embalming process, and smelt of formalin - I know far more about the what the insides of animals are actually like from the kitchen than I learned in dissecting.
*****
The same book that had cel overlays of Rats also had cel overlays of Humans, male and female. This somehow cross-fertilized with the Song of Solomon (being taught to us as literature) to produce a fad among my clique of picking out a girl, rolling a d100 to select a body part from the list, then declaiming on the spot an extemporaneous poem about that body part, complete with bizarre and extravagent imagery.
As was so often the case for anything fun in high school, this ended up with us getting in trouble, this time for laughing hysterically in the library. I don't think the Principal was really convinced that it resulted from poetry comparing a cheerleader's gall bladder to "a Rat's green light bulb".
Yes, we were geeks.
