Vacation Is Over.

Yes, it's about time that my title had something other than a date and time in it.  In case you were wondering, I did not fall into a crack in the earth and am still alive and well.  My parents dropped my off at a hilton hotel in cleveland last sunday for my summer camp.  This camp was pretty unusual, so I really liked it.  Most of my week was spent working on our project, which was to perform a failure analysis of a pair of scissors with the rest of my team of six.  Our mentor, Dr. Daniel Dennies, was a lot of help, and has actually written a book on how to run a failure investigation.  One of the students, named Simon, was from france and was accompanied by another mentor from france named Philippe.  During the course of the weak, we were privileged to use a Scanning Electron Microscope, perform a hardness test on the metal in our scissors, perform a microscopy on our failed scissors and examples scissors.  In addition to tests for our projects, we were privileged perform a pewter casting of a Knight and a tin casting of a lizard as well as make a hook out of wrought Iron.  We found that while our subject scissors and a similar pair of scissors that we liberated from the ASM library were made of cast Iron, our other, more recently made, example scissors were made of stainless steel, which caused the subject scissors to be much softer than the examples.  We also found that it took less force to brake the two cast Iron scissors than the stainless steel scissors.  However, we did also learn that the scissors broke while being used to cut sheet metal.  We concluded that although the cast Iron scissors were sufficient for cutting paper, they were inferior to the stainless steel scissors.  Bottom line, I really, REALLY enjoyed camp and met lots of fellow nerds.  It seems I now must add materials science to my list of possible majors.