I was wrong on clearing it with the teacher. She should have done that.
But, she gets points for "small amount" (less than 8 oz) and "open area".
And how is a reaction that pops the top off a plastic bottle in any way a "bomb" or "destructive device"? (which was how she was charged)
Bad choice of location and didn't cover her ass with the teacher, but that's all I see wrong here. We had a kid in my class at school who used to mix up far worse in the chem lab, and as far as I know, he never suffered for it.

" If she had thought it through a little bit more, this "experiment" wouldn't have landed her in hot water."

IIRC, she cleared it with her teacher? Used a small amount of chemicals in an open area. That sounds pretty safe, cautious and intelligent to me. Nobody got hurt, but because the reaction was exothermic and dramatic, one observer felt someone *could* have gotten hurt. So, instead of reacting sensibly, they went off the deep end and called the police. The person lacking judgement and intelligence wa the school administrator, not the young lady.

NASA is "looking into this": don't misinterpret investigation as validation. If it's not reproducible, more work needs to be done. If the process appears to violate the laws of thermodynamics, your first reaction should be "scam", not "how do I get in on this?". Your second reaction should be "how do they do it"? It's been many years since cold fusion and while there have been tantalizing hints that there may be something to it, nobody has been able to reliably reproduce the phenomenon for objective observers.

To date myself, I took a "unit record" business course in High School, because I wanted to program an IBM 402 accounting machine before they disappeared from the planet.
I keep current by reading, talking with younger colleagues and investigating interesting things (like Arduino) on my own time. Sometimes, my ancient knowledge comes in handy (neither my boss nor my lead software co-worker had read Brooks' Mythical Man-Month). I offer soldering lessons and have been asked to repair older gear here at work.
My independent investigations of new tech have made me the go-to guy (well, I am the only hardware guy here, now) for quick mockups, because I can hack together stuff for demos. Years of valuable experience in making mistakes help me know what not to do, which I try to pass on to the younger people who work here. Linux is new to many, and the command line is scary, but a former employer dropped Sun workstations on our desks and told us to set them up, so I learned "survival UNIX" the hard way. It still pays off today, the Linux system on my desk lets me do things that aren't as easy to do on a Win7 system.
If you stay curious, you won't be outdated. And some of that ancient knowledge can come in handy -- it's called "experience" and passing it on, in a low-key way, is a good thing to do.

Ugh...the only two C's in my undergraduate career were in Engineering Math I & II. It was the damn proofs.

//Paradoxically, I did well in Discrete Math and Coding Theory...

You forgot Kin 1 and Kin 2 :-)
// it's understandable, they were only on the market for a month or so...

Well, you could recycle the machines and get some kind of payment if they're subsequently sold. This is what the IT guys at my company do with old machines. The disks are wiped, reformatted and reloaded with a fresh copy of Windows (by the recycler), then the machines are cleaned up and resold in a storefront. We get a portion of the selling price (wither to keep or to donate) and the folks in the community get low cost machines.

Sort routines, my ass. 083 sorter ftw!

Easy to debug when all you can do is add, subtract, count and print! Much more challenging if you have a reproducing punch hooked up to generate the YTD summary cards... Been there, done that and glad to have C.

Drawing a diagonal line across the top of the deck is faster and lets you insert cards without having to resequence.,..

That's an 026 keypunch he's leaning on, not a 129.

Hey, from my observation, the middle east is quite capable of sh!tting all over itself without our assistance.

And thanks for explaining why my state and local governments can't even come up with the money to fix potholes -- they're spending it all shredding the Constitution and sending the rest to Israel!

--
Good people go to bed earlier.
(really good people take their meds *every* night!)

Maybe a little old for middle school, but an interesting read for the brighter kids interested in math, art and music.

Ooh! Ooh! Free high speed internet? Naah...it would never catch on...

I wonder how many would be willing to pay extra for Fox?