Saturday, July 25, 2015

Presentation and Electrical Components

I woke up extremely tired today. It was horrible how tired I was. I went to breakfast and walked to class like a zombie. When we got to class however I felt renewed because today we were doing presentations so I thought it would make for a short day. I came in and I was excited to go up and do our presentation with the boys. We all asked Peter if we could go up first. He agreed to let us go up first. After waiting for a while to start we went up to the front of the lecture. I started our presentation with introducing our ride and the basic movements it had. I then explained how it combined pendulum movement and circular rotation tangent to the pendulum swing. Then I passed it on to my teammates by talking about the data we got and how we got stuck because our point of reference was changing throughout the whole graph.  My teammates got into the details and explained the forces that acted upon us when we were on the ride. They also did a lot of number crunching to get the mass, potential and kinetic energy of our ride. They covered all the stats and the data very well. We ended our presentation and got about three questions from the professor and teachers and wrapped everything up. Bill kept saying “oh these guys are good” and that made us feel proud. We all went to sit down to listen and learn from all the other presentations that took up the whole morning.

We were dismissed on time and I had quite a nice lunch break with my friends. I could not wait to get back to working on our radio telescope with James. It was really fun to work with my peers and Professor James so I was looking forward to it! When we got back I hung out with my Telescope Group. We left to the room at 1:30 PM. When we got there James explained to us that the electronics that we were going to use to collect data with had broken. The Electrical circuit that powered all the components had broken. We went into a very long in-depth explanation on what all the components did and how they needed power to work. It was very interesting and so I would imagine it in my head. The explanations got complex very fast and I would almost daydream trying to visualize the electrons flowing through all the different electronics. Since James has a very soothing voice I ended up getting very sleepy again and so I decided to wake up and not close my eyes again. I had made a poor choice on going to sleep late the night before. We ended our day testing our equipment to make sure everything was ready to go for the next day. We had good readings and we knew the time for fun was upon us!

I came back and had a long afternoon. I wanted to sleep but I could not fall asleep as soon as I got back. The quad was really lonely. The dorms almost seemed abandoned. I went to open microphone night and there was almost no one there. Nonetheless I had a lot of fun listening to poems, songs, and I even went up to read a poem in Spanish. I then helped carry the equipment we used for open microphone upstairs. After that I just hung out with friends for a bit before I went to sleep.

1 comment:

  1. I'm envious of the equipment you all had to work with. Even while at Cal when I was studying physics the technology was ancient compared to what you all have. We didn't have computer chips yet. No computers to speak of (they were the size of rooms). Even calculators didn't come out until the middle of my freshman year and even they only did the basic four functions (add/subtract/multiply/divide--and they cost a fortune).

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