Today is my lucky day.

    Its Friday, I feel good, I'm having a good easy day. Things are going my way. My daughter asked me weeks ago to help her make a science project. When our lawnmower crapped out we thought about using it for the science project. I thought I would take the motor apart, clean it at the car wash, cut a slice off the side to show the inside moving parts and bolt it to a board. I put it on my list but my list is long and the priorities change daily.
    If you happen to have something you need me to do you might want to remind me frequently to keep it high on the list. She reminded me yesterday evening around seven o'clock that her project was due today. We had a backup plan. We had also been talking about demonstrating the conductivity of water. We happened to have everything we needed for the backup project so we proceeded. We took two half liter water bottles and poked two holes in the top of both. Then I ran two wires through the holes at different lengths and stripped the ends. My daughter filled the bottles with tap water and put salt in one of them. I attached alligator clips to the ends of the wire that were coming out of the tops of the caps. We were able to prove that electricity will travel through water but we didn’t get the results we expected.
    We both were sure that salt, a molecule made of sodium and chlorine atoms, would conduct electricity better than the plain tap water. Sodium is a metal. We put an ohmmeter on the wire going into the plain tap water and then into the tap water with salt. The salted water had a higher resistance than the plain. We went to the net and found similar experiments where the salt water was a better conductor. Also when we shook the bottle with the salted water the resistance increased. We decided that it was too late to do anymore and she would ask her science teacher in the morning. I got the following feedback this morning on the phone from my wife. "He is the coolest dad in the world. Not many dads would let his daughter bring an expensive multi meter to school." Maybe today will be her lucky and the presentation went well and she found out why her experiment behaved the way it did.

Monday, May 16, 2005
10:45 AM
This is a follow up. Her teacher told her it was because we used iodized salt.