The geeks' guide to pulling.

Experimental science is rather simple, and you learn pretty much all you need to know in school. You put on a white coat, set up your stuff and every 10 minutes change something, whilst looking and recording something else. Hopefully you will then see a pattern emerge between what you change and what you observe.

This is a pretty universal technique, and is fully described in this link for science projects. At any one time thousands of poor scientists are sat around twiddling their knobs (should I rephrase that?) and looking at the colour of their litmus paper, and some of them will be female.

Now here's the trick: If you wander into a laboratory at 5pm on a Friday evening you will find frustrated scientists trying to finish their measurements, one of which you identify as your date for the evening. She'll be twiddling a knob, waiting a while, and then looking at the colour of her litmus paper. This process will have to be repeated for several hours, and she's probably written the evening off.

As a geek, you can walk in and connect a computer via a digital-analogue converter to a motor which automatically rotates the knob, aim a digital camera at the litmus paper, wire the camera up to the same computer and write a program to fourier transform the colour information, plot the results and send them by email to her supervisor at 2am.

You then take your astonished admirer by the arm, whisper into her ear "the only buttons you'll be pushing this evening are mine" and walk off into the bright lights of the city.

I'm sadly not geeky enough to achieve this. I settled for leaving her to finish the experiments alone and picking her up later. Although it lacks the style of the real geek method, it does have the advantage that she'll be so frustrated with the futility of experimenting that she'll be desperate for alcohol.