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Today was a Good Day
Dec. 8th, 2008 10:24 pmLet me tell you about it.
The first thing today was a four-hour lab, from 8-12 AM. Normally, especially on a Monday, this would bother me, but. Today we were running our agarose gels to determine which of your common snack foods contain genetically modified corn. Agarose gels contain lots of hurry up and wait, so she said we could show up an hour late. Which we did. Then we poured gels. And waited. Then we loaded the gels and turned on the machines, and left.
For Tim Horton's, where I actually ate breakfast for one. On the teacher's tab. It was a good breakfast, even with the hot hot burny tongue from the hot cocoa. Mmm, hot cocoa.
Then we looked at the gels when we got back. Lo and behold, no one had anything in their not a genetically modified columns, which means that we suck a preparing these. I suggested using a coffee grinder, which are cheap and grind this kind of thing fairly well. Teacher wrote that I get points on the lab report.
The next thing was a meeting so I could get all the Panhel stuff. Apparently my job as VP is to yell at people for not doing their jobs. I feel this is a Thing I can do. Also, I will get to yell at Robert, the Greek Life Coordinator whom I dislike immensely. Which will, actually, be fun.
My first class in the afternoon is PChem. This is normally a class I hate. Sometime either over the weekend or next week I will be writing a formal complaint about the teacher, and everyone in the class is going to sign it, because our teacher is just that bad. However, today was the day when we brought in our demonstrations. And what good demonstrations they were.
They are supposed to be children's museum appropriate demonstrations. The first one involved rock candy and a recrystallization demo with benzoic acid. We got to eat the rock candy. The second one (my group's) involved mutilating and/or freezing plastic bottles to demonstrate the gas laws. The third one, which was about the difference between endo- and exothermic reactions, involved the baking soda/vinegar volcanoes. The vinegar, blieve it or not, cools way down in that reaction. They would have done the thermite reaction* only our school put the pointy-toed boot down hard on that one. Which is odd because I have seen that reaction done as a demonstration at the COSI museum in Indianapolis.
The fourth one involved dry ice and liquid nitrogen. They did the thing with shattering the bouncy balls. They did the thing with shattering the flower. They did the thing with the mad scientist water. And then they made ice cream. By pouring liquid nitrogen into the cream while stirring. It was the best damn ice cream ever, being mostly heavy cream. The purpose of this demo was to show phase changes, which, yeah, yes you need dry ice to show sublimation and liquid nitrogen boils at room temperature and with the water to can show freezing and melting, but. Mostly it was just for the ice cream and playing with dry ice and, y'know, nitrogen.
So then the teacher canceled the rest of class because after that we were hopped up on sugar and had half a pound of dry ice each to play with. And, really, who is going to pay attention then? So yay, no crappy PChem teacher.
Last class of the day was Modern Physics. We had a test. Sometime during PChem I had passed over into a kid of Zen state where I knew I was going to fail and was not so much worried about it. And then I got to the test and I knew how to do every single problem. It was kind of awesome, really. He went over the test afterward, and . . . well, I didn't get everything right, because of a minor and stupid math error. But he does not grade on your final answer as much as how you set up and did the problem, and I nailed that, so I will only lose a few points for having the wrong answer there, I feel. Yay!
Then I came back here and took a nap. Sleep is good.
After I woke up, I called MW because I had dreamed she called only, apparently, it was not a dream. I had said something along the lines of "I'm asleep, don't call me" when I picked up while asleep. We had a nice conversation and I am going home this weekend and there will be meat.
* The thermite reaction occurs when you mix powdered aluminum with powdered rust and light it on fire. Basically, the oxygen hops from the iron to the aluminum, so your end products are elemental iron and aluminum oxide (basically, aluminum rust, which is black). The thing is, this produces heat. Lots of heat. The reaction regularly hits 4000 degrees, and much of the time must be done in ceramic containers because metal ones melt. I kid you not. It is a fun reaction, but for obvious reasons, one better done outside.
The first thing today was a four-hour lab, from 8-12 AM. Normally, especially on a Monday, this would bother me, but. Today we were running our agarose gels to determine which of your common snack foods contain genetically modified corn. Agarose gels contain lots of hurry up and wait, so she said we could show up an hour late. Which we did. Then we poured gels. And waited. Then we loaded the gels and turned on the machines, and left.
For Tim Horton's, where I actually ate breakfast for one. On the teacher's tab. It was a good breakfast, even with the hot hot burny tongue from the hot cocoa. Mmm, hot cocoa.
Then we looked at the gels when we got back. Lo and behold, no one had anything in their not a genetically modified columns, which means that we suck a preparing these. I suggested using a coffee grinder, which are cheap and grind this kind of thing fairly well. Teacher wrote that I get points on the lab report.
The next thing was a meeting so I could get all the Panhel stuff. Apparently my job as VP is to yell at people for not doing their jobs. I feel this is a Thing I can do. Also, I will get to yell at Robert, the Greek Life Coordinator whom I dislike immensely. Which will, actually, be fun.
My first class in the afternoon is PChem. This is normally a class I hate. Sometime either over the weekend or next week I will be writing a formal complaint about the teacher, and everyone in the class is going to sign it, because our teacher is just that bad. However, today was the day when we brought in our demonstrations. And what good demonstrations they were.
They are supposed to be children's museum appropriate demonstrations. The first one involved rock candy and a recrystallization demo with benzoic acid. We got to eat the rock candy. The second one (my group's) involved mutilating and/or freezing plastic bottles to demonstrate the gas laws. The third one, which was about the difference between endo- and exothermic reactions, involved the baking soda/vinegar volcanoes. The vinegar, blieve it or not, cools way down in that reaction. They would have done the thermite reaction* only our school put the pointy-toed boot down hard on that one. Which is odd because I have seen that reaction done as a demonstration at the COSI museum in Indianapolis.
The fourth one involved dry ice and liquid nitrogen. They did the thing with shattering the bouncy balls. They did the thing with shattering the flower. They did the thing with the mad scientist water. And then they made ice cream. By pouring liquid nitrogen into the cream while stirring. It was the best damn ice cream ever, being mostly heavy cream. The purpose of this demo was to show phase changes, which, yeah, yes you need dry ice to show sublimation and liquid nitrogen boils at room temperature and with the water to can show freezing and melting, but. Mostly it was just for the ice cream and playing with dry ice and, y'know, nitrogen.
So then the teacher canceled the rest of class because after that we were hopped up on sugar and had half a pound of dry ice each to play with. And, really, who is going to pay attention then? So yay, no crappy PChem teacher.
Last class of the day was Modern Physics. We had a test. Sometime during PChem I had passed over into a kid of Zen state where I knew I was going to fail and was not so much worried about it. And then I got to the test and I knew how to do every single problem. It was kind of awesome, really. He went over the test afterward, and . . . well, I didn't get everything right, because of a minor and stupid math error. But he does not grade on your final answer as much as how you set up and did the problem, and I nailed that, so I will only lose a few points for having the wrong answer there, I feel. Yay!
Then I came back here and took a nap. Sleep is good.
After I woke up, I called MW because I had dreamed she called only, apparently, it was not a dream. I had said something along the lines of "I'm asleep, don't call me" when I picked up while asleep. We had a nice conversation and I am going home this weekend and there will be meat.
* The thermite reaction occurs when you mix powdered aluminum with powdered rust and light it on fire. Basically, the oxygen hops from the iron to the aluminum, so your end products are elemental iron and aluminum oxide (basically, aluminum rust, which is black). The thing is, this produces heat. Lots of heat. The reaction regularly hits 4000 degrees, and much of the time must be done in ceramic containers because metal ones melt. I kid you not. It is a fun reaction, but for obvious reasons, one better done outside.
