Nice Time! Florida Teen Who Constructed Hydrogen Bomb In School Sentenced To Space Camp

Okay kids, put on your thinking chaps, it’s time for a science quiz! Q: What happens when you combine aluminum foil and hydrochloride-based toilet bowl cleaner in a sealed container? A: You don’t have to go to school anymore, AND YOU GET TO GO TO SPACE CAMP ! (Also a small amount of hydrogen gas is released. Oh, the humanity!) This is known as Wilmot’s Law, so named because it’s what happened to that girl in Florida, Kiera Wilmot, who got Zero Toleranced and led away from Bartow High School in frickin handcuffs fer chrissakes because she showed initiative and has functioning brain tissue, which is Not Okay In Schools Anymore, because… terrorism? We guess terrorism.

But this outrageous tale of Kafkaesque bureaucratic overreaction has a post-massage handjob, because Homer Hickam, a former NASA engineer, author, and haver of quite a silly name, saw a bit of his younger self in Kiera: he, too, had been arrested at his school when the cops thought one of his home-made rockets had started a forest fire. He was innocent, while Kiera actually did the thing that got her in trouble, but who cares? Homer is sending Kiera and her sister to Space Camp anyway!

It’s almost all Nice Time for Kiera Wilmot, but not quite, because while she won’t face criminal charges for liberating a few milligrams of a naturally occurring element from a common organic compound, she’s still expelled from school. We wouldn’t want to make things TOO easy for intelligent young black girls, right? Bootstraps, and all that.

Here’s a semi-fun video of the thing Kiera did, only worse/better, because this one has fire:

[ ABC News ]