Killing Cockroaches and other Insects

As you might know, I add random people all the time. Sometimes, it's for the games. Mostly, it's just because I like to use FB to interact with people. Much less trouble with all the social aspects, and whatnot. If we mess up anywhere, just a quick click or two, and all evidence is gone. :D

Fantastic.

Most of my friends, aside from the NYGH and primary school friends are surprisingly enough, ACS and RGS. Now, I surf around and look for blogs.

Here's something I found.

I'm short for my age

I look at the photos. Damn, he ain't short. That'll be an understatement.

But anyway, what was I gonna say?

Ah. Tuition. Nothing much for Maths. We were joking that our teacher had one more strike. The first one was one week before I joined. They broke the air-con's cover. How they did that, I dunno. I suspect it had something to do with some weel aimed throws. A few weeks back, they brought in Coke. And a packet of salt. If you watched Mythbusters, salt works better than Mentos.

And this week, they tried to bust up his record. They brought in a bag of Mentos and gave it out. And they noticed that the aircon cover was held on by a few pieces of duct tape. They spent the lesson throwing Mentos at it, trying to knock it off.

They failed. But it was amusing.

As for Science, we were doing Microscopes. Something like SPA. Did cheek cell (good luck getting it), onion epidermal cell (AKA a layer of onion cells) and hair follicle. The OUCH.

Kelly, being Kelly tried pulling her hair, and did it first so that she could skip the painful part ASAP. I did the onion first, because I got to play with a scalpel. I drew it. Kelly forgot about it, and threw away the hair, moving on to the cheek, then onion. When she was done with the hair, I reminded her that we needed to draw the cell.

She wasn't happy at having to pull out her hair again.

So, we managed to complete it after an hour, with no deaths nor injuries.

Our teacher went over to get some prepared slides, while I sat there, playing with the onion and scalpel.

He returned with a box of slides. I chose to look at the Mouse fur. Too tough to draw, so I moved to the Angora wool.

I saw an ant.

I pulled out the slide and noted that the ant and the wool were right next to each other.

RETARDS.

Never mind, we drew the ant, because it looked nice, and the teacher focused it till we could see the hairs. He's awesome.

So, with 30 minutes left, Kelly mentioned that she could make a different slide. A blood sample. So what she did was, she picked at a scab on her calf until it bled, and she squeezed out a drop of blood while the teacher and I chatted. His main job was a researcher. Entomologist. One of the things he did with his colleagues at the end of the day was an experiment they conducted over the last year. They all worked as a team, on different insects each day. One of the things they had to do at the end of the day was to kill off whatever insects they used.

The bosses said, "Kill 'em. I don't care how. Just kill 'em, and don't destroy the lab."

What they'd do is apply alcohol fumes to the insects to make them drowsy. Can't kill them yet.

Then they'd use their own slides (they were cheap anyway) and drop a single drop of ethanol on the insect's head and time to see how long before they'd drown. Times were taken, averaged, then inputted into a spreadsheet to see who had the best times.

Currently, cockroaches are leading by 1.3 seconds, according to him.

At the bottom of the league are houseflies and ants, with half the time of the cockroaches.

So yeah. Kelly was done. I don't really want to know how she did it, without getting blood all over. Whatever. The point is, she did it. That's all that matters.

As for movies, I'm stopping it. I need the sleep, and I so need to clear up my sleep. I'm pretty sure I can't bring a thermos of coffee to school because coffee is best iced or hot, never lukewarm. And coffee can only do that much.

Mabel, the Rambling

Update:Just a few more to go, before I can stop this...

Hell yeah:)