Optics

Early arrival at 7:20 to preload water was a fail this term. The power had been off since 5:00 PM the day before.

This is one of the lecture-lab sequences with the most moving parts. Almost overlooked the mirrors.


Water was a $10.50 purchase from A1 across the road. 12000 ml. Jed's has nothing larger than liter bottles and those were in the cold case.

The 2000 ml graduated cylinders consumed a single bottle. 

The cart is necessary to setting up efficiently.

The oil immersion beakers are in the plastic container. They are kept separate as they are never completely degreased between terms. 

This term features more diesel fumes than usual due to the El Niño westerlies.

This will be the first term for the new prisms.

Sometimes I feel so deserted was the setup opener.

New 60° prism

Spectrum. Barely.

New laser set up. Didn't work as well as hoped for. Better to just run this demonstration on the table or to come up with another option.


This worked better than hoped for, provided the sun cooperates.


The empty box was a fortuitous happenstance. The box had held paper towels. 
Fire break: the morning class took a break and started late as toxic smoke reached the classroom at one point. This photo was from before a dump truck knocked the vehicle out of the gas station.

Toxic smoke break. 

Water droplets are round.


Reflection and refraction were anti-climatic after the vehicular fire.


The laboratory set up after break.


Right board. 


Leila'Ona and Maylanica

Ellinae and Seniko makke measurements for the index of reflection for a plane mirror.

Franson makes measurements while Harston records data, Trinidad looking on.

Jenry-Thor holds the mirror steady.

Sapwkini and Elain makes measurements, Elain recording data.

Elain and Ellinae making measurements of apparent depth

Austin estimates the apparent depth of a penny, in the background Camridge makes a measurement

Elain makes a measurement

Leila'Ona making a measurement

Jenry-Thor and Camridge make measurements.

This laboratory continues to function well and leaves no significant room for improvement at this point.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Experimenting with the PlantNet and iNaturalist apps

Image
The application of image recognition technologies as the back end to botany apps is providing increasingly relevant search results. Over the recent winter break I began looking at whether the apps now available might be useful to the ethnobotany class here on Pohnpei. Some apps had a more regional focus in the past and were better at north american or european plants. Pohnpei has a both unique indigenous plants and many introduced plants from around the world -  a challenging environment for any image recognition system. A student working with a plant identification app for the first time My criterion was that the app had to be appropriate for use in my classroom. The app could not contain advertising and the app had to be free, my students typically do not have the ability to pay for an app. The app would also have to be fairly small as my students often use phones with limited memory and processing power. I settled on PlantNet and was impressed with the ability of the a...
Read more

Setting up a boxplot chart in Google Sheets with multiple boxplots on a single chart

Image
The  Google Statistics  add-on for Google Sheets can display multiple boxplots in a single chart. The key is the layout of the data. One column should be the variable by which the data is to be grouped, the other column should be the data to be box plotted. Set up the Statistics add-on with the data to be plotted as the variable, and the grouping column as the "by" variable. In this image I had deselected all but the boxplot option, the result was the appearance of the Moment, Standard errors, and Confidence intervals options. The default is apparently a 95% confidence interval for the mean. The result is multiple boxplots on a single chart with a common scale. The new tab that is created also quotes 95% confidence intervals for the mean. Note that as of 2018 the Google Statistics add-on cannot be found by search in the add-ons. In addition, as of May 2018 the add-on no longer verifies, possibly due to the add-on not having been updated since August 2017. One may ha...
Read more

Traditional food dishes of Micronesia

Image
Clara, Jennette, and Joanie presented ground hard taro cooked in an umw, effectively a hot rock oven. Pohnpeian: rotama. Pingelapese: sero. Mwoakillese: rodma. Mortlockese: Amahd. Kosrae: rodoma. After cooking in an umw the rotama is pounded with the petiole of a palm frond. Rotama is made from hard or swamp taro, known as mwahng on Pohnpei, mweian on Pingalap, pula in Mortlockese, and pahsruhk on Kosrae. In traditional times on the outer islands the women had primary responsibility for tending the taro while the men handled fishing and climbing tasks. Joesen and Noeleen presented fermented breadfruit from the outer islands of Yap such as Woleai and Eauripik. The raw ingredients were actually brought in from Yap, Noeleen prepared the maare.  The leaf wrap is ti leaf - Cordyline fruticosa. Pauleen, Barnson, Trisha, Verginia, Con-ray, and Maylanda from Kitti, Pohnpei brought in mahi umw, koahpnoair koakihr, and uht sukusuk. Above is breadfruit umw, mahi umw, o...
Read more