Story of Toaster: Self Experimentation #2

[Neither Toaster nor Hammer endorse trying this at home.]

Looking back at this, I can fully admit how absolutely stupid it was to try. This stupidity was compounded by collaboration with my good friend, whom we shall here refer to as Hammer Fishplate, that endangered both of our lives. In our defense, it should be noted that we were 16-year-old boys with a car, so perhaps stupidity was entirely unavoidable. But at least it was stupidity in the Name of Science!

Our hometown was completely dominated by aviation, and as such we grew up well aware of the principles of Bernoulli and aerodynamics (our middle school even had a wind tunnel). So one night after having lost the competition to see who could push my car the fastest, I proposed that we try steering said car by altering its aerodynamic profile by using the car doors as ailerons*.

So we got some tacos and thought about it.

Since we couldn't come up with any good reasons not to try this, we conducted the experiment. We rolled up all the windows in my car and went to the straightest, widest stretch of local branch of the interstate highway. It was well past midnight so there was absolutely no traffic. Hammer was in the passenger seat while I drove. I floored the car and got it up to 38m/s (since we had reasoned the effects would be negligible at lower velocities). Then Hammer pushed his car door open while I held the steering wheel straight. The car veered gently left! SUCCESS! So then he let his door get slammed shut by the wind and leaned over to grab the wheel while I pushed my own door open (this is difficult to do at 38m/s). Sure enough, the car veered right! DOUBLE SUCCESS!!!

The natural extension of this was to see if we could steer the car productively by this method. There was a large bend coming up in the highway branch, so we gamely took it on and sure enough: it's manageable, if difficult. We wound up drifting across several empty lanes and coming rather close to the concrete median, but we made it nonetheless.

Later on we tried a negative control and repeated the experiment at a much lower velocity (8m/s). It didn't work at all and I'm fairly sure the gas station attendant didn't much appreciate our quest for Science.

Conclusion: yes, car doors may be used as ailerons, but only at sufficiently high velocities.

[Neither Toaster nor Hammer endorse trying this at home.]

Relevant: Story of Toaster: Self Experimentation #1

Story of Toaster: Self Experimentation #1

Looking back, even though I sometimes wanted to be an astronaut or an architect, it becomes apparent that I was fated to become a scientist. And it manifested rather early. For evidence of that, here is the story of Toaster's First Experiment.

Or, well, at least the first experiment that I clearly remember doing. There may have been others before that, but as I was a child prodigy at dropping heavy things onto my own head I don't remember them.

Exposition:
Young Toaster, aged ~5. Hot Southern summer*, I was left to play alone in the backyard. I was very good at this, busily digging holes, hoarding things in the shed, and collecting pillbugs. I had recently tried to dig a tunnel under our neighbors' yards (this failed).

Observation:
So I was casting around for something to do when I noticed that it was difficult to breathe in the very hot humid summer air (typically >40C + 70%+ humidity). I noted that air was coming out of my mouth and my nose, but not the other holes in my head.

Hypothesis:
Because the holes for my eyes are already filled up with my eyes, I logically cannot breathe through them. However, there is nothing filling up my ears, so I should be able to breathe through them.

Test 1:
I held my breath very tightly and even closed my eyes to make sure no air leaked out (just in case). I pinched my nose shut and tried to force air out my ears.

Result 1:
No air went through my ears.

Revision:
OK, it's not easy, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.

Revision Tool:
Piston-style air pump found in shed**!

Test 2:
I held my breath again like before. And I held the air pump to my right ear and tried to pump air in mechanically.

Result 2:
Young Toaster runs into the house trying to scream over the sudden painful ringing in his ears. A visit to the doctor revealed that I had managed to puncture my eardrum membrane when I didn't account for the pointy tip of the air pump moving toward my ear when I pushed down on the plunger. The tinnitus lasted for 2 weeks and thankfully my eardrum healed. Interestingly, my balance was off during the entire acute phase of the tinnitus. Incredibly (because walking was [and is still sometimes at any level of sobriety] a dangerous undertaking for me), I managed to not further injure myself, I think. Sometimes I still get transient tinnitus.

Conclusion:
Once cannot breathe through their ears, either unassisted or with mechanical help, no matter how much they may wish to.

**One of the few days where we weren't inside hiding from these.
*At this point you probably already knew how this was going to end: Badly.

Umbrage

I was speaking today with a "colleague" of mine about self-experimentation, and she at one point in the conversation she remarked that she thought that "Why the hell are we becoming scientists? I mean, you and I, we are the worst people to be scientists!".

I took umbrage. Lots of umbrage. True, that I sometimes wonder what the nutritional value of my reagents are, or what it feels like for a gastrointestinal epithelial cell to be colonized aggressively by an invading and effacing pathogen. And all she did is blather on about vanillin stains smelling good.