sn't that what Ham and pete believe they are doing?

That's a perfectly fair question, so it deserves a straight answer. In my view, that may be what they believe they are doing, but if so, their belief is based on a misunderstanding since they are not carrying out experiments aimed at disproving evolution or anything else connected with young earth ideas (such as the stick-in-a-bucket experiment proposed above). What they do instead is search the literature for things scientists declare they can't currently explain and leap up and down shouting "Look, look, science can't explain this". But they ignore *why* it can't be explained: maybe the project was exploring something like an igneous outcrop and an observation about a nearby sedimentary bed was observed but there was no funding or time to investigate (I'm not a geologist so apologies if my example is nonsense, but you get the idea I hope.). Or maybe it was a measurememeasurement of something but there's not enough measurements for statistically significant results. Or maybe the PhD student just ran out of time to investigate.