danaleeling

Fall term recommended moving the solstice presentation to Friday of week seven, but the vernal equinox is not until Saturday 21 March 2026, at 1:46 AM local time. The solstice presentation will only make sense on Friday 20 March at the end of week ten, not the end of week seven. There is always this asymmetry in the term, first experienced when the ethnobotany class used the equinoxes to clean the Haruki cemetery .  That date moved between different weeks of the term, causing the ethnobotany schedule to have to be revised every term. Monday focused on latitude and longitude only, followed by a slide deck on the use of GPSTest , and open source Android app which is ad-free. The app has none of the downsides of GPS Essentials. GPS Essentials attempts to be the default app for PDFs and other formats. GPSTest is GPS and only GPS, but in doing only one thing, the app does that one thing extremely well.  The only quibble is that the Longitude wraps but the labels ...

Materials required are marbles and a 200 gram scale. This term a mix of marbles was used.  Students were told to pick five marbles. This avoided an issue that had been created by giving students five of the same marbles. When different sets of five were in use, some were the smaller, lighter blue marbles and these would generally not capture the population mean. A spreadsheet , single tab for the Smartboard memory limitations, is used to generate data. Tallying a dozen students took until around 9:25, this photo was taken at 9:32.  After the first five marbles were massed the point estimate of the population mean was 5.06. The massing was paused to explain that this was the best estimate of the population mean for that student. The point estimate for the population mean.  Masses are done marble by marble. After the second student the split in the point estimate was pointed out. And that both were now "wrong" - the population...

Botany laboratory six carbon sequestration was pushed back to laboratory seven when the hydroponics field trip moved from week nine to week six. The class went straight into the field with no preparatory notes given in order to take advantage of the break in the weather present on campus at 11:00. By afternoon a flooding rain was falling. The circumference is measured in inches, the height in feet for the algorithm in this laboratory. The field measurements were recorded in iNaturalist as notes. iNaturalist provides a place to record circumference and height data while automatically picking up the location and date. Identification of the species is also facilitated by iNaturalist.  iNaturalist The tallest tree in the area is this Acacia. The Acacia is visibly taller than the other trees in that area.  The Acacia had a diameter of 26.8 inches in spring 2025, spring 2026 the diameter was 28.6 inches. Santriko holds the end of the tape ...

The starting concept was to roll one, two, and then three dice mapping the results onto the white board to show the distributions. This morphed minutes before class into passing out a single die to 12 student pairs and having the students tally data into a shared spreadsheet.  The concept worked, with the complication that different individuals, and pairs, moved at vastly different paces through the data. With some working as pairs and others as individuals, there were only nine dice being rolled. Because the spreadsheet included the distribution for 12 dice, the data was padded using three columns containing the function =int(rand()*6+1). In retrospect this felt like a kludge.  Karen and Kimilane started as a pair, and then were each given their own column to add another student generated data column. The Smartboard proved problematic with high latency - adding a column was difficult. Perhaps this was in part that nine groups were entering data to...

Monday featured the Eureka video playlist. Although an absolutely ancient set of videos, I come back to the dance of the molecules over and over again during the following week.  Wednesday saw a compression of the temperature material to fit in the return of the modes of movement of heat energy to the curriculum. This term the three laws of thermodynamics were also gratuitously tossed into the tail end of the lecture. Students shouldn't leave a physics courses with meeting chaos and disorder. The board was worked in a random order. Temperatures led on the right side, then moving heat on the left board, finally the three laws of thermodynamics on the left side of the right board. Poor blackboard technique. I was thinking that the boards might remain unerased, hence I put the temperatures far right expecting to use the left board for lab on Thursday. The 150 ml beakers were used for the laboratory. The 100 ml beakers were deemed too small.  ...