Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

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

I will just be making one more comment about a topic I discussed in the student-friendly version that I couldn't put there.

One of the real reasons why the practicum students are being moved to some place nearer the beaten paths of the school building from their corner is that there is a (well-justified) suspicion that a lot of the time they are just playing network games there, and that when this is the case, they can just post someone outside the door to look out for persons of authority walking down the corridor towards them and they would be warned, and switch their multi-tasking operating environments to a work-related window or application.

As to the first meeting of my Engineering Materials Science class for the sixth week of the first term, I discussed the answers to their most recent exercise with them, since a lot of them got it wrong.

That, I told them, was the reason for the exercises, which they have been complaining about before as being somewhat tedious.

Would they rather that the teacher is blind to the concepts they are having a difficulty understanding, and thus bring up more of those in their exams? This is especially since these upperclassmen have been crying wolf about all the topics being tough and confusing since their earlier years in the college.

We continued talking about the principle of equivalence between crystallographic directions as being based not just on parallelism, but also on how many atoms are pierced along the "stick" like barbeque.

When we got one example of a "family" of coordinates that are qeuivalent, I showed them that they all have the same indices regardless of sign or order - an easier way of finding families.

Except that it only applies to cubic lattices. To prove this to them, I gave some directions using a hexagonal structure.

I'll continue this tomorrow. Session 1185 slacks when alone. Class dismissed.