danaleeling

Not one single student had a plant legend or story to share. Not one knew any. The destruction of languages, cultural knowledge, and cultural practices by social media has happened so quickly that in the future historians will be baffled at the rapidity of the mass extinction. 

 On Monday Power Comes in Many Forms was shown to provide the segue into voltage and current on Wednesday. Fall 2025 the class did not make it to see the solar panel output display, so this term everything was done on the Smartboard using the presentation . This permitted moving through the material more quickly.  The solar panel display, however, is down yet again. This time partially down. I never had the chance to show the students. But the Watts per square meter is still available.  An earlier image provides conversion capabilities. 0.89 kW/m² generates 102.7 kW of DC with 96.5 kW of AC output. So 1.08 kW/m² would generate 124.6 kW. The loss on conversion to AC is 6.04 percent. 124.6 kW of DC input produced 117 kW of AC power on the output side at a loss of 6.04%. Enough to run roughly 15 cup 117 rice cookers Thursday dawned aa a fourth cloudless day with moisture still hanging in the morning air. Alisha enters data, Meraia sets ...

The Chromatography laboratory failed spectacularly.  Every single plate, with three different plate types, looked like this. The solvent above was 70% ethyl alcohol. The pasty white appearance is likely a result of too much calcium carbonate.  Most of the class used 91% isopropyl alcohol with a result seen as above. Ethyl alcohol was used successful last year. 70% isopropyl alcohol was also used successfully last year.  Perhaps the plant leave mix was problematic. Alternanthera sessifolia was the dominant plant in the mix. Some Codiaeum variegatum and Cordyline fruticosa leaves were added in. Last year only Alternanthera sessifolia was used. Was that contributory to the issues?   The calcium carbonate was locally sourced. Was too much added? Not enough? About a half to one teaspoon was used. Perhaps there were impurities in the calcium carbonate. The use of an eye dropper tended to create larger blobs, but n...

I first began using the spreadsheet software Lotus 1-2-3 in 1986 and have memorized and mastered an ever increasing number of spreadsheet functions over the decades since. Google has introduced a new AI function in Google Sheets that acts like the one ring in the Lord of the Rings: one function that rules all other functions.  I spend a couple of weeks in MS 150 Statistics covering the normal distribution, standard error of the mean, t-distribution and t-critical, and 95% confidence intervals. The students learn to calculate the mean, the standard deviation, the standard error of the mean, t-critical, and then the lower and upper bounds of the 95% confidence interval. The Google AI function replaces all spreadsheet functions with a single function () and a prompt inside the function. Tell the function what you want, and the function constructs the functions that give you the answer. I have only entered a prompt inside the new AI function in cell C1 with data in column A of the...

A fruit type presentation developed for botany class was used in ethnobotany fall 2025. The videos that had been used up until spring 2025 tended to be ignored by the students and were not well focused on the fruits encountered in the fruit salad activity. The students are of a generation that can tune out a YouTube video as background noise. And the fruits shown in the videos were of a temperate climate focus. The botany slide deck, however, included material that is relevant to agriculture majors in a botany course, material that is not part of a general education non-major non-lab science course. A slide deck more tightly focused on the activity was prepared for use.  The class was scheduled to end early to accomodate student evaluations of the course. With this in mind a handout of fruit types based on the one in the text and used on botany was prepared. The handout lacked a header label and doesn't line up the fruit types into a common column. This proved confusing. The hand...