Sunday, November 15, 2009

35 Amazing Science Fair Projects!

Today, a lesson in contextualizing: 35 Amazing Science Fair Projects!

Now, I'm not going to pass judgement on any specific one of these fine science fair presentations. But I'm going to say that I strongly, strongly suspect that this set of thirty-five contains a mixture of sincere projects and deliberate jokes. (My fiancee says there's unmistakable signs of Photoshopping in at least one of the photos.) What's more, I suspect the deliberate attempts to be funny tend to be arranged near the top of the page, and the sincere attempts at a science fair project are clustered near the bottom.

This means that if you look at these sequentially, by the time you reach the kid concerned about the horniness of his/her mom's feet, you're already looking for signs of Photoshopping in case it's been manipulated, and you're trying to figure out the original context in case it hasn't been changed but was meant as a joke all along.

These kids - the ones who meant it sincerely - are going to have their hard work scrutinized by legions of Internet wankers who would have simply giggled and moved on if they'd come across their project in the context of, say, FailBlog. Poor kids.

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