As a child I once ordered, built, and launched an Estes model rocket, and learned the important adult lesson that spectacular personal failure can briefly masquerade as roaring success and soar above the trees, long enough to draw the attention of strangers, before spiraling queasily perpendicular to the ground and terminating in a sad crumple on a stranger's driveway. This was not the first time a crowd of children and adults turned away from me in embarrassment and disappointment, but it was novel in that in this instance I didn't have to open my mouth to make it happen. From the Edmund Scientific Company I learned that you can't actually do all that many fun things with optics for less than five dollars unless your definition of fun is dramatically reconfigured, and that sometimes your hand is stained a stubborn dark blue even by liquids that are not blue.