On the walk in from the parking lot to work this morning I went past one of the dorms I used to live in when I was a student. Outside was an interesting collection of debris. It looked like someone had thrown a vacuum cleaner from one of the top floor windows, followed by a small crate of oranges. In the courtyard nearby were the signs of a sort of snowball fight, fought with oranges.
Of course, remembering some of the things that went on when I lived in the dorms, I shouldn’t have been all that surprised. They say that experimentation is an important part of the college experience, right? One dorm in particular was known for experimenting with what we called “Velocity Transfer Toxicity” or “Concrete Poisoning.”
We had a couple of crazy physics students (if there are any other kinds, let me know) who figured out that a two liter bottle filled with water, dropped from a sixth storey window, had the same amount of kinetic energy as a .38 caliber bullet. They even went so far as to calculate the exact brand of bullet, and the gun it would need to be fired from in order to have the correct muzzle velocity. They were scary, scary people…
Fortunately, after figuring out how much damage we could do, we did institute some saftey precautions. A spotter would keep people clear of the sidewalk below the stairwell window when “experiments” were in progress.
Water balloons were another favorite thing to fling from on high. The biggest one that I saw flung was basically a kitchen garbage bag full of as much water as it would hold without splitting… When it hit, it plastered the grass by the sidewalk flat to the ground. It looked like those pictures of the trees near Mt. St. Hellens after it went pop. The plastic from the garbage bag was laminated to the concrete of the sidewalk as if it had been painted on.
Other people from other floors would “experiment” as well. I don’t know what kind of saftey precautions they used, or if they got as techinical as our physics guys. Mostly I just saw the remains of their tests. Possbily the strangest thing that I saw was an entire dorm fridge. It had been one of those cube shaped things, but now it was kind of… rhomboid. It was in some bushes with one corner buried in the dirt from the force of impact. I’m not sure if it was an experiment or simply a surrender to poor housekeeping. It had been full of food when it was thrown out, and the smell kept me well away.