Day 15

I was quite reluctant to get up this morning. During the morning meeting, Bob kindly brought us donuts, you know, these toroidal objects (speaking of torus, there is actually a system called the toroidal coordinates; it's very interesting that the conversion between it and the Cartesian coordinates involves both hyperbolic functions and trigonometric functions, but I digress too much). We talked briefly about our projects during the morning meeting.

After the meeting, I went downstairs to take spectra of coal and charcoal. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn the spectrometer to the Run position, so the first few sets of data was useless. I almost had lunch at 11:30, but Emily told me we would play Trivial Pursuit again during lunch, so I went back downstairs and came back at 12:00. Since none of us knew much of the 90's, we eventually didn't play (at least from a non-MultiWorld-Interpretation perspective).

In the afternoon, I collected the correct (hopefully) spectra (eventually) for coal and charcoal. They did seem better than before. I also received three articles via the Inter-library loan, all of which I printed out. Cici and I agreed that I would make the rough draft for the outline, she would edit it, and then Joe could edit it by Friday.

P.S. when learning Feynman Lectures Vol. II Chpt. 17, I came up with a way to slow my wattmeter down a tiny bit (which amounted to, as I estimated, 0.001 cents. Huge amount; enough for a can of Coke). Today, however, I actually tried my method (yep, for the second time in my life I'm conducting an interesting experiment) with my magnet. I put the magnet on the wrong side, so the disk rotated faster (by about 0.63 degree/second, if I counted right) as opposed to slower. I decided it was too delicate a difference to observe, even if I put the magnet on the right side, so being lazy as always, I quitted. That's why I like theoretical physics better, I said to myself, making a mental note to get a stronger magnet.