Poiu spent all morning in observation of a snail glide across the backyard, grass blade to grass blade, minidirtclod to minidirtclod,  and onto the sidewalk where, in the heat of the sun, it retracted into its shell and waited for the cool of evening to return.

The armadillo passed by both of them without noticing their odd relationship.

The scientist and the experiment.

Question: does an observed snail change its behaviour?

Experiment: Pick up snail from sidewalk, move it to starting position.  Observe and record its behaviour as it heads toward sidewalk.  Return snail to starting position.  Does snail’s path deviate when unobserved the next day?  Return at end of next day and see where it ended up, check its movements.

Poiu shook his head.  Why did his parents decide to name him after a row of English letters on a QWERTY keyboard?  What were they thinking?

Poiu looked at the list of assumptions in his experiment.

At age two, his thought-t0-text rate was slower than his older sister’s but his reasoning powers were more advanced despite his mother’s measured intelligence and intellectual output greater than his father’s.

From those thoughts alone, he deduced that gender was not directly related to intelligence, given the same number of inputs and genetic propensity for logical rather than emotional thought development.

Poiu looked at the embedded display screen woven into his optic nerve and glanced at the report detailing the results of the experiment being edited by his onboard computer assistant.

The assumptions were wide-ranging, from the lack of predators to the slight change in the snail’s body weight because of growth and/or water loss to the availability of nutrition between starting point and sidewalk to the number of unseen parasites and snail pests.

What about prevailing winds or UV radiation spikes?

A snail’s central nervous system can’t be too complicated but an outdoor environment can.

Poiu proceeded with publishing the preliminary experiment results.

Within microseconds, Poiu’s playmates provided valuable criticism of the report, some he had thought of and some he would never have guessed.

Back to the drawing board, as they said in the 21st century!