I thought that I found the perfect glycerin-water solution on Tuesday. The mixture wasn’t close to what I calculated, but- it worked. It held up beautifully, despite less than ideal conditions. We thought we were ready to let the diffusion experiment start, but today, the tracer fluid sunk to the bottom. It’s starting to look [...]

Behind that tarp is my experiment. See? It literally is table top. Physics doesn’t always have to take place in huge labs like CERN or Argonne. The reason I keep a lot of details under wraps is because I don’t want someone beating me to completion. I didn’t have much to do (really, any) with [...]

I keep hearing about local Middle Eastern dance communities hurting because of the economy. If you can swing it, try to support them somehow. Go to their shows, take the classes or workshops, buy costuming stuff… If you want to support the Chicago-area community, the following big events are happening: Deb Rubin formerly of Ultra [...]

I enjoyed my lesson with Aradia so much that I decided to check out Aradia’s DVD, Oriental Dance By Aradia. Besides being a fan of Aradia now, I was interested in the content, since the DVD covers Egyptian, Turkish, and Lebanese dance. The beginning introduction gave a general overview of Middle Eastern dance and the [...]

I don’t enjoy grading on a whole. Despite some of the students’ beliefs, I don’t enjoy docking them for mistakes. It takes far more time to grade a bad report then to grade something perfect. I also feel a little bad. One of the reasons why I prefer to not teach intro labs, besides having [...]

We concluded today that the tracers did what they were supposed to do: sit there. We were ready to go, but we discovered something terrible: the density of the tracers is a bit higher than water. As a mixture, it was fine, but for what we wanted to do (inject a lot of tracer as [...]

My diffusion experiment is slowly underway. By slowly, I mean it was set up on Monday and we wait until Friday. The first test is basically to see that nothing weird happens with just a constant temperature and the tracers in the water. The tracers are these little things that are basically 2D. They’re that [...]

I finished my first grading for the quarter, which was a bit daunting at 90 lab reports. While the quality varied (some excellent, others not), one thing that stuck out to me was most people wrote “human error” as the reason why their data wasn’t 100% spot-on. Anyone who has had me as a TA [...]

I thought I’d continue the reviews of DVDs with Ansuya’s Lavish Layers. Ansuya begins the DVD by doing the moves as strict isolations. For someone who is familiar with the dance moves, this is review more than anything. I liked that Ansuya slowly moves so that you get a front, side, and back view of [...]

Yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time in the lab with my advisor, setting up equipment for the diffusion experiment. The way we set up an experiment was more about doing it right than making it look good. For instance, we needed to raise something a bit, so we used a folded paper towel. [...]