THANK YOU. I went to college, got my bachelors in Industrial Technology (shop class), minor in Computer Science. graduated well, realized my degree was mainly designed to go and teach shop class, and promptly spent the next 7 years working construction. I learned more useful skills in the first year after college than I did in the four years I was there. I've framed houses, poured concrete, installed flagstone and tile, hung sheet-rock, built cabinets, installed windows, trimmed doors, painted miles of walls, and installed metal roofing, just to start. Why? hell, when it comes right down to it, It was more interesting. Lots of my friends from college are now working in fields that have nothing to do with their major field of study. I have a english major friend with a masters that worked for Microsoft, I have another that studied biology that ended up doing chemical cleanup. The point is, College was useful, mainly in that it taught us to knuckle down, get work done, and turn it in on time. If you already know how to do that, just go get a job in something that interests you, and work your way up the old fashioned way.

a surprisingly large amount I suppose, what with high rise buildings having floors that are also ceilings, which have plumbing for the floor above in them.

seeing as I risk hilarious levels of accidental death driving down the street, I'm thinking the trade-off between feces and risk of death is a pretty easy one. Also, awful diseases in human waste.

and you very rarely have to deal with human feces.

Look at it this way. If i want to make a business of rebuilding a engines, I could absolutely google it up "how to rebuild an engine", and get the "results" I need. However, Those results showing step by step how to do it, are absolutely no replacement for actually having properly rebuilt an engine, with someone guiding me along, to the final result with all the nuts and bolts and parts in the right places. And to make a business of such a task, I need to do it over and over again, until the proper process is instilled into me. The whole point of "Teaching Science" is not to get students to make brand new discovery, it is to teach them how to work in a proper scientific manner. The new discovery comes later in life, once they have been properly trained in the basics of how to DO science, which is what high school level science is really for.
I'm not saying that

I'm saying that, in an educational setting, the student should be performing an experiment the teacher knows the outcomes of. If done properly, result A is produced. If poor procedure is followed, result B is the expected result. The student would be expected to perform the experiment to the best of their ability, trying to follow proper procedure. Ideally, they perform the test at least three times. Then, they write up their findings. Now, This is the "teachable moment" as we are so fond of calling it, the actual educational part of all this. The teacher reveals the intended results of the experiment. Then the students are tasked with reviewing their work, and discovering where mistakes in their procedure where made that caused result B, instead of result A. Perhaps at this stage, the students are tasked with performing the experiment one more time, this time correcting the error, to see how proper procedure results in result A. In a well designed exercise, Both result A and result B in the experiment produce fascinating results, thus investing students interest in science. (A fair amount of classroom science has results where A is interesting, and B is not, which also can spur a desire to learn how to do the process correctly, allowing for the exciting result.)

The point is, to foster an interest in science, while instilling in the student the knowledge and skills required to perform scientific processes with the appropriate rigor and technique. Once this is very well mastered, students move on to designing and executing their own experiments. As we have seen here, there is a great deal of discussion as to the various places proper scientific process was or was not followed in these students experiment. Couple that with the fact that the phenomena they are attempting to study is still in great debate by professional scientists around the world, and you have students set up in a situation where, despite having performed an experiment, they have not really learned anything about how to do science properly.

I would imagine that it was not "we outlaw experiments" but rather "outlaw experiments that are far above the level that the students can conduct with proper scientific process"
The point being, there are plenty of ways to get kids interested in science, that will allow them to do projects, and get results, that are not nearly as prone to producing aberrant results. MY understanding of how to teach kids science is to have them perform KNOWN experiments that the teacher KNOWS the possible outcomes of, because they have been performed thousands of times by well trained scientists. That way, the teacher can actually teach, because they will be able to tell if proper scientific process has been followed, based on the results, and guide the students into learning the proper scientific process.
Having young kids do actual research on subjects that are not well studied already, or with huge variable pools, does not really teach them anything. its just "I did an experiment and something happened! but because I don't know what was supposed to happen, I cant tell if I followed good scientific procedure." Which is really what they need to be learning.
Let me give a real world example I experienced as a student. In one of my electronics courses in college, we used a workbook designed by students of another school. It included lots of problems such as calculating the final resistance of a circuit. Now, in a professionally designed workbook, generally the problems are arranged so that when you finally produce an answer, the answer is in such a format that you can tell you've proceeded through the math correctly. In OUR workbook, the problems where not designed that way, the result being, you would spend twenty minutes hashing out a bunch of numbers, and the end result looked like it was spit out of a random number generator.
While it is true that real world applications of this sort of math would often produce similar results, In an education environment, producing obfuscated results simply confuses the student, You do the math, look at the answer you got, and think to yourself. "well, I hope that's right." Because the answer your derivations produced is in such a obtuse format.
The point is, in a learning environment, working toward a known answer is key to learning the steps in getting their correctly. Once you know how to take those steps, you can move on to taking those steps blindly towards unknown answers. I will concede that yes, there is eventually a time you may ask students to step out and work towards unknown answers, but I personally feel that such levels of education are better suited to college, possibly even masters degree level, simply because there is such a great quantity of knowledge required to properly proceed through the scientific process.
Think about it, Any high school chemistry teacher worth their pay would never ask a student to mix two chemicals together if the teacher did not know what the reaction would produce. The same standard should be held for biological science at that level.

probably. From what I can tell, the growing medium (of the dead-ish) seeds was paper towel on a plate, and they where given two cups of water a day. If it was blowing warm air out of the router, that two cups would not last long soaked into paper.

finally, someone mod this guy up.

Yes, I have never known a plant growing the the wild to flourish. I also have never known a plant transplanted from the wild to flourish. Oh, wait, thats where all the plants came from in the first place. I must be confused.

So the moral of the story may be "don't put a wifi-router down your pants and leave it there" ?

what celery in food coloring experiment? I never got to do a celery and food coloring experiment. Now I feel left out! I may not be as special and unique and as much of a winner as everyone else!!

everyone seems to forget that there is this fancy thing called the SUN that does in fact emit radio waves across pretty well the entire spectrum. The only thing we ever did with them is modulate the frequency or the amplitude to produce a signal that can be translated back into information. We are not producing anything that does not already wash across the day side of the planet anyways.

Not really. Acidic soil, no water, no light, to hot(sterilizes seed), to cold(various things) all can contribute and prevent a seed from even germinating. This is how we store food seeds (that are not Monsanto products, which won't germinate for their own reasons). keep them in the dark, keep them cool, keep them dry, and they don't germinate in storage. Break those guidelines, and they germinate, produce heat, and either burn down the silo, or rot.

As if the poor are not all ready in crippling economic distress. What you mean is "Cause mild inconvenience to people who have to sell their spare learjet."

Seems like I remember reading about a few cameras out there now that use something like a 15 megapixel sensor and some fancy software to take three 5 megapixel images at the same time, making 1-click HDR possible?