Last Wednesday was our first meeting for SPICE this semester. This was our kickoff meeting, which we had to postpone from last week due to our lovely Wisconsin weather. We had a pretty small turnout for a recruitment meeting, but we still had enough people to make it worth all the trouble.
I had gotten to the chem building a little late, and for that reason I spent the next half-hour or so running around trying to get everything together for our mini demo show. After explaining a little bit about what our group does, we wanted to show any new people some of the fun things we get to do, so we put together a short show with some of our favorite demos (most of which involved explosions). Some of my favorites were the nitrogen and ethanol cannons, metal salts in a flame, and hydrogen/helium balloons. Everything went quite well, and no one lit their hands on fire, as was the case during our last training session, where we teach our members how to do our demo shows. I did almost hit someone in the head with a cork when I set off one of the liquid nitrogen cannons (we cork a flask with liquid N2 until the pressure builds up and the cork shoots off), but luckily I didn't wound anyone.
This was also the grand debut of our brand new microwave demos, all of which worked on the first try, which is a rather novel experience for us. These especially gave us a really good response from the prospective new members. I think what makes these demos especially interesting is the fact that this is a normal microwave that everyone has at home, and if you put a toothpick inside, you can create a mini plasma storm (by the way, from what I understand, no one actually knows how or why this works).
After the show, we gave everyone a quick tour of our very messy demo lab (a different part of Jim the demo guy's lab, for anyone who's ever taken a chemistry class), and then fed everybody some freshly made liquid nitrogen ice cream, which is just cream, sugar, and vanilla mixed for a few seconds with liquid N2, and then all the toppings you could ever want. Overall, the few people that came seemed really interested in what our organization does, and with how well things are going, I think this is going to be a really good semester for SPICE.
2 comments:
SPICE does sound like it would be a fun organization to participate in. Do you have access to all the chemicals in the chem building? Because that would be pretty cool. Also, while I recognize that your group is exceptionally careful when doing the demos, who would be held liable if someone were to get injured?
For the most part, we have access to whatever we would need for our demos, and whatever we don't have, we borrow from Jim. In terms of any injuries, while nothing serious has ever happened that I am aware of, I think the University would be held liable, since we are a registered student org with a faculty advisor.
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