Risking Ones Life in the Pursuit of Education

Interesting thing happened today. My EECS 401 class was canceled because of a gas leak in the EECS building. Scary stuff. I could even smell it from the entrance of the building. I don’t know if it’s a gas leak from one of the labs or if it’s from the gas that provides heating.

Either way, I strongly believe that all laboratories should be located somewhere away from the lecture halls and classrooms. It’s just a scary thought of having a bunch of experimenters dealing with volatile material upstairs while you’re scribbling down lecture notes below. Oh well, it’s the way it’s been for the past 100 or so years of the engineering department’s existence so I’m sure that they know what they’re doing. It’s not the first time that an engineering building has been evacuated because of leaks.

Further Thought to Previous Consideration:
I gave my little whack experiment of exhaling while chewing off some food (previous post) some more thought and came up with some explanations.

We inhale while taking in food because:
1)It is only natural that while food goes in, air goes in too. We can’t have wind resistance when putting stuff in our mouths. The whole process is just a lot easier if everything flowed in one direction, which is of course towards the mouth.

2)When inhaling, we smell at the same time. Therefore, we get to smell our food before, while and after we’ve eaten it. Smell enhances the process of eating, making our food taste better or on the flipside, warns us against eating something bad.

3)Exhaling while eating will cause the smelly air from our lungs/throat to be dispelled onto our food. We wouldn’t want to be surrounded by bad breath while eating now would we?

4)It’s just plain difficult to do otherwise.

So what’s the moral or conclusion of this finding of mine? Just off the back of my head, I’ve found another trait that unites all human beings. I guess it’s another silver bullet to fight differences such as gender issues and racism. We all inhale when taking a bite of our food!