u1d6 Review Day Notes

These are the notes for September 8-9.   I pretty much just reviewed what we have covered already this unit.  Click here to access the notes: u1d6 Review Notes

Index Page for your Notes

For the test next week (sept 17-18) you MUST have an index page to your perfectly organized notes.  Here is the up to date index list.  If you are missing note days, I will be slowly getting the notes up on this blog, but you may also come after school and I will help you with them individually.  

u1d1   Class Rules, What are Numbers     

u1d2   Properties of Real Numbers and Number Types    

u1d3   Quiz and Baseline Test   

u1d4   PEMDAS and Algebraic Expressions  

u1d5   Like Terms, Distribution  

u1d6   Review and Exponents

u1d7   Exponents

u1d8 .…………… 

u1d9  TEST  

u1d7 PDF Notes

Today's lesson is about exponents.   You can get the pdf right here: u1d7 Notes PDF

If you cannot open the file send me an email! Or text me!

We have a test in ONE week!!!!!

Friendly and Social numbers

SEM imaging practice and fun!

I found a lot of cool samples in the SEM lab room.  This is a wasp abdomen and the widest angle possible.  

The abdomen was coated in gold to improve the imaging.  Certain material absorbs or radiates the electrons poorly, so they are coated with a gold mist.  I really don't understand how you can coat something so delicately!

I was using these cool specimens to practice the different imaging algorithms and methods.  For example to get this picture I adjusted the power of the electrons being projected and rotated and tilted the sample to get this interesting angle.

In the background of this picture you can see a bug leg.  Again this is as wide as the SEM can go.

The leg had so much detail it was awesome!

Even the hairs on the leg have ridges in them.  There is so much detail in nature.  Even though this picture looks very clear, it should be clearer and I should be able to zoom in much farther.  I talked with Dr. Smith and she says that their is an astigmatism with the focus of the electrons.  I hope I can work with her to fix the focus so we can zoom in even farther.  

Looking at the tips on the leg hairs I'm curious if we could find something naturally occurring in nature and simply coat it to use for our AFM.  That would be an incredibly cool different way to make tips.  

Etching Tungsten Tips for our AFM

This is a picture inside the SEM.  You can see the electron gun, the two detectors, and the samples at the bottom.  

I'm doing research for Dr. Cross.  I'm attempting to create cheep and effective tungsten tips for our Atomic Force Microscope (AFM)

The tips are etched using electrolysis.  I dip a thin tungsten wire into 7.5 molar KOH solution.  The wire is hooked up to direct current at about 3 volts and the KOH solution is hooked to the other end of the circuit.

These pictures were taken with he biology department's SEM.  I am checking the tips for blemishes and to see if they are sharp enough to use in the AFM.

You can see some defects in the surface and shape of this tip.  I think they may have formed because the etching was too violent and the wire entered the KOH solution at an angle.  

Again you can see odd shape this tip takes.  

Overall I'm really happy with my research.  The tips are forming at about a 50% success rate, with 2/3 of the tips looking fairly usable.  I'll be working with Dr. Cross to test them sometime next week.  

Linear Algebra

My linear mid-term is in 8 hrs.  This looks fine to me...  This test may be a little rough.  0_o

Comic credit: xkcd.com

Edit:   Well, It went okay.  What a relief!  I think I actually did fairly well.  :)

Miami!!

I just got an email from Lauren Post that I may be placed with City Year Miami!  I'm pretty excited about living some place warm!!!  It's month three of our snow apocalypse and I would LOVE being in Miami next time this year. 

Beyond geography and weather, City Year Miami looks like a very strong and active chapter.  They have an informative and active online presence.  You can find some really cool projects for Miami on their blog  They also have a flickr and twitter. 

I'm really excited, and a bit nervous about my up coming interview!  Wish me luck! 

Applications in!!!

 

Applications are all turned in!  I even had a phone interview with City Year on Friday.  I really like there program, and am excited to see were they may want to place me.  

Only one more deadline for Teach For America!  A "research survey" on
Thursday.  Late Thursday they should post if they want to place me in a school.

I finished and submitted my application to the Peace Corps today.  I have to submit a health form soon, and then wait for their evaluation.  Going overseas would be a really fun and ever educational adventure. 

Summer Tour to Italy!

 My final class to finish my undergraduate degree will be a tour in northern Italy!  We will be exploring the area the Waldensians hid from persecution.  The class was designed for architecture students to pick up religion credits.  I'll be taking it for an art credit and spend my days drawing and photographing the countryside.  I probably should start practising!  I need to figure out if I want / can financially tour / backpack around Europe after the class.  It would be amazing to see the degenhardts again.  

We leave on June 4th, flying from O' Hare to Milan.  The tour ends on the 12 but hopefully I'll be able to stay overseas for a bit longer.

Meta-Narrative Vs. Daily-living.

When I examine the areas of my life that need significant improvement, I doubt philosophy will help improve these rough patches. 

I have exerted a fair amount of energy and time attempting to create or find a functioning worldview.  Perhaps I should simply stop and "view the world." 

React with simple action.  A friend recently told me that, "fear is the enemy."  Fear has caused so much inaction and second guessing in my life.

I need to interact more with life.  This doesn't have to be painful, like water you can simply flow along, reacting to your surroundings.  However, if you flow for long enough you will leave a significant mark. 

Question and answer from reddit's ask science.  

"If you cut a magnet in half many many times, will you eventually have an atom that has a north and south pole?

In my physics textbook it says if you cut a magnet, it has two poles. And if you cut it again, it still has two poles, etc. I already knew that part. At what point are you left with just atoms?" - djwm12

"NO, to strictly answer your title, "will you eventually have an atom that has a north and a south pole?" However, your textbook was right to say that breaking a magnet in half into large pieces still gives you two magnets. But you can't take that concept too far, down to a single atom, while still being correct. You can't extrapolate your physics textbook to say that you can keep cutting up a magnet down to a single atom and still maintain polarity. A simple answer is this: you can cut up your magnet down to a few thousand atoms or so and have it still be a magnet, but beyond that and it will just be a chunk of metal. Only read further if you're prepared for a little more advanced answer. I'm giving this answer because there likely many people that will see your post that have the necessary background to understand it.

Before I go further: trying to explain this in one shot, to a level that you can understand without any hiccups, is impossible for me. But I tried. Now you just read and tell me where you get confused. Maybe I can reword this and make it more clear, but believe me when I say this: the idea of cutting up a magnet down to a single atom has hundreds of top magnetic researchers around the world scratching their heads. You have no idea how incredibly complex the answer is to your question! If I were able to do this, I'd be a millionaire. My research group studies this to some extent.

If you take a bar magnet that is 10cm long and cut it in half to 5cm, it will still be a permanent magnet (well, okay, you'll have two permanent magnets). Cut one of those 5cm magnets into 2.5cm and you'll still have a magnet. Continue this a few more times down to a few hundred micrometers, and you still have a magnet. So far, your textbook is correct.

But you can't go much further than that point, and how much further you're able to chop up your magnet depends on special material properties. Unfortunately for you, you don't have a solid background in magnetic materials (yet), and to understand why all the sudden your magnet stops behaving as if it has north and south 'poles' requires quite a bit of background.

First you'd need to understand that magnets contain atoms that each have their own little magnetic moment, or their north and south poles. Sounds like you already understand that. Next, you'd need to understand that in a typical magnet, these atoms align their poles so they point in the same direction. This adds up all of the magnetic energy inside the magnet. Sounds like you already understand that as well.

The next step is to understand that this alignment of magnetic poles only travels so far throughout the magnet. Let's say you have a chunk of magnet that is 1,000,000,000 (billion) atoms across. Well, it turns out that there might only be a block of atoms that are 10,000 across that are actually aligned almost perfectly. We call that volume of atoms a magnetic domain . In the left picture, you can see 9 different domains that each have a group of atoms that are perfectly aligned. But these domains are all pointed in different directions. This is what a chunk of iron would look like if you zoomed in far enough. If you apply an outside magnetic field (H) you'll align allof the domains in your specimen, and then BAM, you now have a strong magnet. Here is a picture . Now if this were pure iron, and you took away the magnetic field, it would go back to that initial state where the domains were random. But let's instead pretend we have a special alloy, Nd2Fe14B for one random example. Now with this special alloy, all of the domains will stay aligned quite well, and we'll have a bar magnet.

What happens when we cut up this bar magnet into smaller and smaller pieces? Well, above I said you can easily cut this up into pieces that are a few hundred micrometers long and still have a tiny magnet. That's true. But eventually we cut up our magnet so small, that we're now about the size of a single domain (a few thousand atoms across). Do we still have a magnet? Yep, that single domain particle of magnetic material is still a magnet. But then what happens when we try to chop that up even further? That's where odd stuff starts to happen.

You see, the atoms can align their magnetic moments due to a very special interaction that takes place on the quantum level. Imagine a force that is holding neighboring atoms to keep their alignment parallel. This force needs to be pretty large, actually, for reasons you probably already understand. If you take two bar magnets and place them parallel to each other so their North poles are next to each other and their South poles are next to each other, you'd find that they'll repel each other. So why in the heck would neighboring atoms do the same thing? That's where this force comes from. It has a fancy name: exchange interaction. It has a very confusing Wikipedia article, so I'm not even going to link it. But let's just say that it's this exchange interaction that binds your neighboring atoms' poles to align in the same direction.

But there is another energy that is in competition- thermal energy, or heat. If you add enough heat to your magnet, it completely stops working. It's called the Curie temperature. Heat basically knocks around your atoms so violently that they can no longer stay parallel to each other. As long as your thermal energy is less than the energy that comes from your exchange interaction, you'll have a magnet. But if the thermal energy becomes greater than the exchange interaction, you'll lose your magnet. The energy from heat is always at work, but the exchange energy doesn't work like that. The smaller you cut up your magnet, the less effective the exchange energy becomes.

Eventually you'll chop up your magnet into such a small volume of atoms, that the exchange energy diminishes to the point where the atom's won't align. It's at this point, the "superparamagnetic limit", where your magnetic moment is dimished for all practical purposes. And that's the answer- no, you can't cut up a magnet down to a single atom. It stops being a permanent magnet a few hundred atoms before it reaches that point, depending on the specific alloy your material is made of." - nd2fe14b

What is Energy?

This was a question posed on reddit by nexuapex.  The resulting answer by BoxAMu is very enlightening, so I have posted it here in its entirety.  

"To answer your question, first an interesting bit of history- In the 19th century, energy, or at least heat, was thought to be a physical substance. One of the great paradigm shifts in physics was the discovery that heat is just a form of motion. The misunderstanding with energy exists today because many textbooks and physicists still like to talk about energy as if it were a substance. Energy, from classical through quantum mechanics (I exclude general relativity since there it gets tricky and I am not an expert), is nothing more than a number. The only significance of it is that this number doesn't change. It's analogous to money in this way. We can't compare (for example) the value of an apple and an orange directly, but we do by assigning a dollar value to each. In the same way we use energy to compare different physical processes. An object in a gravitational field being set in to motion, for example. We use energy to define how much action of gravity this motion is 'worth'. It's said that potential energy is 'stored' energy, but that's completely misleading- in fact potential energy has no physical meaning at all. It's just a method of book keeping. The fact of gravity being conservative just means the book keeping is easy. If we know the displacement of an object in a gravitational field, we know how it's velocity will change. Compare to a non-conservative force, such as air resistance. In this case, the force is non-conservative because the energy of motion of the object being resisted is transferred to many air molecules. If we actually knew the velocities (and masses) of those air molecules, then in such a case air resistance would be conservative: we'd know the change in velocity of the object from the change in velocity of the molecules. So again the difference is only one of book keeping." -BoxAMu

"What are the conditions under which the actual "energy" number doesn't change? I know, for instance, that if you change reference frames, then your calculated energy changes. Are there more conditions?

Why is this "book-keeping" necessary? What math wouldn't work out if we didn't have potential energy around? Is a boulder rolling down a hill explainable without gravitational potential?" -nexuapex

"As other have pointed out, only changes in energy matter, not the absolute number. It's true that on top of this, even the changes of energy change in a different reference frame, but think about how this applies to doing an experiment. Take the classic example of throwing a ball back and forth on a train. One could calculate the motion of the ball and it's energy in the train frame or the ground frame. The actual numbers would be different in each case, but this does not prevent either observer from applying the laws of physics in their respective frame and making correct predictions. I believe the only condition is the usual one of physics- that the experiment or calculations are carried out in an inertial reference frame.

It's not that the book-keeping is necessary, it's just that it's really useful that we can even do it. The math of course does work out without potential energy- you can calculate the whole trajectory of a particle in the gravity example using the gravitational force, which is considered the more fundamental idea in classical mechanics. However, this type of reasoning gets more complicated beyond these basic classical mechanics calculations. Due to relativity (among other things), energy has been promoted to the more fundamental idea than force. Many modern theories are based on the Lagrangian formalism, which originally required the ideas of kinetic and potential energy. Now it's totally different, there's no basic force to derive a potential from- people just try come up with a Lagrangian that gives equations which make correct predictions (sorry field theory people if I'm oversimplifying). But energy again pops up as a conserved quantity, and is useful since it may simplify calculations." -BoxAMu

I recently did a presentation on some of the reading I have been doing on web 5.0 the personalization of the internet. The whole filter video above is a wonderful introduction to the topic. If you enjoy the video and enjoy learning about new technology and the world we live in ted is an amazing organization which provides hundreds of educational videos to the curious and intellectual mind.

Apart from the video there are some good places to find concrete information on the topic. The first place I think you should all go is Eli Pariser's official website the filter bubble. If you are really interested and have a spare $12 dollars Pariser's book can be purchased at Amazon. I have a collection of three good articles: Mashable (a premier tech orientated news affiliate) TIME, and Slate

After you have done a bit of research on the topic you may want to know what can be done to eliminate the negative effects of the filter bubble. 10 things you can do is a practical guide to popping your bubble.

I hope this helps you! Thank you once again for your interest in this topic. And to show my gratitude here is a nice picture of Cats. (lets face it - this is what the internet does best)

COM 450

I'm taking a COM class this year and was surprised how much I learned. The whole subject is very interesting. I made a few models which for teacher learning system:

Updating the Live text

Some of the title pages:

Off to visit SERERERERERES!!!

Just got my ticket to Massachusetts, watch out... here i come! I'm leaving on july 8th and will be with Sereres till the 13th. Then I travel to Washington DC to see some relatives and Kyly. I'll be home on the 18th... and then off to Hawaii in 13 days!!!!

New Site

Well I have finally gotten the new website up! Its about time. I will be posting something here at least once a week concerning my time in Ebeye. Hope you all enjoy reading and following along with my adventures.

Welcome

Welcome, Weclome, Welcome :)   well... i finally got this published, hope you guys enjoy it, be sure to join the forum and let me know what you think,

sinclair

Publishing

So not to long and my site will be published.... my dad is coming home from chicago and then we can put it on his host site. 

I've also been working on my projects page, which I have deleted because its not done.  I want to put some of my other websites there after I convert them to frames... instead of tables.