Prezzies!

Another thing that's been consuming our time over Xmas has been this prezzy that I bought Jules. It's called Khet (formerly known as Deflexion).

It's a board game played by 2 people. Each player has a laser on their end of the board and most of the pieces have mirrors on them. You move or rotate your pieces to manipulate how the laser beams bounce around the playing field. When a piece is struck by a laser and it doesn't have a mirror or it's mirror is facing away from the laser then that piece is removed from the board. The end-goal of the game is to blast a hole through your opponents pharaoh (the symbolic equivalent of a king in chess).

Sadly the lasers in the game are a little weak - it only slightly tingles when you put your tongue on them! So I raided all the remote controls around the house and wired the lasers directly into a huge 128 array of AA batteries!

It says on the box not to stare directly into the lasers so I made sure to only stare at the reflection of them, you know, to see if there would be any new side effects yet. In short, the good news is we were able to sell our toaster this week, lol. ;-)

 

Xmas Experimentation - Part 2

Experiment 2: Creating Quicksand

After the giant worm moved into a neighbours garden we began our next project - creating quicksand.

We were surprised to learn that quicksand is a mixture of various molecules (none of which is sand) consisting mainly of H²O and Cf⁵ (A.K.A. cornflour).

Unfortunately my poor skills in the kitchen translated to an inability to mix the cornflour and water which resulted in a consistency of, well, water. :(

So after completely exhausting the cornflour supplied with the kit we raided the kitchen cupboard for more raw materials.

After adding several spoons of cornflour and finally achieving the ideal consistency we were ready to test our creation. Fortunately the science kit comes with a willing test subject: an innocent and naive miniature giraffe.

 

Much to our disappointment the giraffe survived the quicksand...so we intervened and decided to study the effects of a giant wooden spoon beating down on his vulnerable giraffe body...in the name of science of-course...mwwoohaahaaahaahaaaaa!

 

Unfortunately, due to a miscalculation in quicksand & spoon dynamics, the giraffe DNA combined with the corn flour molecules to create a fire-breathing super giraffe!

Xmas Experimentation - Part 1

Man what a week it's been...for science! I've been home with the kids and to pass the time we've been working through a science kit that Alex got for Christmas. It contains a bunch of different experiments ranging from making your own worms to building The Hadron Collider. Of-course, in true scientificness we documented our findings.

Experiment 1: Creating our own worms (aka, Playing God)

Like all good scientists we approached this experiment with extreme caution, trying not to expose ourselves to the highly toxic worm goo (Wg²).

 

In fact it only took us a few minutes while exposed to the radioactive chemicals before we discovered the safety equipment we were meant to be wearing.

Sadly, after successfully creating a couple small worms, Alex's God-like command over the creation of worms went to his head and he became mad with power!...

 

...and in hind-sight his tripling the dosage of radioactive worm goo was a mistake.