danaleeling

Spring 2015 the physical science class built on the technique I started to develop fall 2014 for measuring the speed of sound. Rather than try to synch with echoes, I used the entrance road to obtain sufficient distance to time the difference between seeing two boards clap and hearing the sound of the clap. As in the past, the 8:00 section had better results than the 11:00 section. And, as in the past, the 11:00 speed was lower than the 8:00 speed. This is not a physical effect due to temperature or humidity, this is some subtle human factor.Speeds are in meters per second. Thurs 8:00 Thurs 11:00 slope 343 274 intercept 8.1 72.6 correlation r 0.92 0.93 While some of the details of the day are covered below, one suggestion for the future would be to spread the students out along the road. I moved the timers with me and recorded all times at a given distance. That leads to the "horizontal bands" seen in the chart above. If pairs were "dropped off" at know...

The students in SC/SS 115 Ethnobotany presented a selection of plant based foods from Micronesia. Petery Peter and Beverly Billy presented the Chuukese food sukusukun uuch, a banana based dish with coconut milk topping. The bananas are cooked and then pounded. Lerina Nena and Darlene Charley presented Pohnpeian mwahng piahia, boiled hard taro coated in coconut milk. Gordon Loyola explains uht idihd, Marvin Batrolome looking on. Below is uht idihd and kehp idihd: ground banana and ground yam, boiled. Miki Fritz of Japanese and Chuukese heritage, presented Japanese mochi. Made from a sticky rice which has been cooked and then pounded in a large wooden pounding bowl. Mochi can be eaten with shoyu or seaweed, or with red bean sauce. Mochi is a traditional delicacy at new year. Mochi in red bean sauce. Good stuff. Alexander Kenrad, John Yilbuw, and Sebastian Yinnifel present boiled ground banana Yapese style, a dish called pusow. A key diffe...

To introduce waves and their morphology, I again turned to the RipStik. I opted to use the uphill between the south faculty building and the A/B buildings. Once track can be faintly seen below, but I forgot to time the run, so I had to make a second run. The second run had to be squeezed over onto the right side of the paper. Out on the sidewalk no one is falling asleep on their desk. I have far more attention that I could get inside a classroom. Two tracks are down, sinusoidal waves are evident. I traced the better looking sine curve and began by asking how many waves were on the paper. The students counted crests and declared there to be four waves, which was correct. This led naturally to the understanding that a crest and a trough constituted a single wave. The wavelength for one wave was measured to be 47 cm. The four waves were laid down in 1.38 seconds with an amplitude of 6 cm. That yielded a period of 0.345 seconds per wave, and a frequency of 2.90 H...