Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Yesterday I saw the sample documents of one of the people in charge of the housing coordination. This is something that started with a survey a few weeks ago on all the people (faculty, staff and students) boarding near the school.

I thought they were just going to place everything on a bulletin board, but I guess there’s no decided central location for that yet. What I saw instead was a small classified ads type booklet, perfect for giving to the prospective freshmen and their parents on Open Campus Day and/or the Freshmen Orientation before the new school year starts.

On Wednesday we had the experiment of Coefficient of Friction in the lab. We used the same plank that was from the uniform acceleration experiment, but this time we put up the side that had sandpaper attached.

Again we had to change the directions of the experiment to compare the coefficient of static or starting friction for the two different surfaces, and no more verification for kinetic friction. We could have used the inclined plane with indicator that was in the lab, but this only went to 45 degrees, and the angle of where the block starts to slide down the ramp might be more than that.

Some of the groups again went beyond the allotted time with the experiment, and we had to hustle them to the robotics lab to finish with their paperwork while the 2pm class started with the new experiment.

Yesterday one of my students, Shiena, helped me finish the graph of how the moon looks like every hour and every night for the entire month of March, recording the coordinates from the astronomy software we have then plotting them in spreadsheet software with graphing capabilities. Of course, the comparatively polar coordinates of the altitude and the azimuth had to be converted to Cartesian coordinates before being used in the XY chart of the software. This is because there is no polar chart, and the radar chart is a poor substitute.

As expected, the moon started out in the northeast going to the northwest in a curve, but towards the middle of the month now moved more directly east to west and in a straight line, before going back to the northeast to northwest curve by the end of the month.

Since this is during the month of the vernal equinox, I told Shiena that the path of the moon during the month of the other equinox and the two solstices (September, June and December) have to be plotted first before any valid conclusion can be reached.

She agreed to teach two other students to help with the work. She, in fact, went to my room during my mechanics lecture (the afternoon one) asking for the disk of the astronomy software and the spreadsheet file so they could work on them, but I did not want to have to interrupt my class just to give them the disk from the faculty room, so I told them to work on more preparations for the Open Campus day instead, such as the streamers, some of which have already been started in the faculty room.

Yesterday before I left though she insisted on borrowing the disk from me so that she could finish the other months in her free time at home. Well, I can’t deny giving in to that scientific curiosity.