April Fools Day!

Happy day of foolery!

Today I went to the Technorama (sciency hands-on center place idk) after school with some other people from different math classes... I thought it was pretty boring. Which is really sad because I was really really looking forward to going! 

The part that was kind of interesting was the workshop that we did as a class, where we worked with liquid nitrogen and frozen CO2 (dry ice!) and fire and lots of snazzy stuff. But I picked a bad partner who had no sense of wonder apparently. She would perform the experiment, go "neat." And move on. Hello? You just did this sequence of events that led to this thing suddenly erupting into flames??? Does that not make you want to stop and think for two seconds why? It's not like they were tricky experiments. Whoah, look, a glowing piece of steel wool burns like crazy when you put it into a flask with a bunch of oxygen. I wonder why. Duh. So that was a mistake. Oh well. Lab coats and goggles are always fun, I guess.

And I feel like the actual permanent displays were not that interesting. I was impressed at how much stuff there was to look at and fiddle with, but it was also still quite simple. It would definitely help someone trying to learn or understand basic math or science. Multiple visual representations of Pythagoras's Theorem that you can twist and take apart etc etc are definitely useful. Oh well! I went and spent an afternoon somewhat stimulating my brain. Example: what kind of mathematical formulas do they program this magnet-controlled ball with so that it creates beautiful, perfect patterns in the sand and how does that translate to the machine actually moving the magnet around? Sadly this was not explained on the plaque. 

That turned into a rant pretty quickly. Oops. I guess I'm just sick of stupid people.

Tomorrow I'm going to a friend's house for a sleepover because we don't have school Friday or Monday because of Easter! Yippee! :)

Brains

Today was fun because this semester we have these half classes, where half of the class goes to one class and the other half to another. It's supposed to allow the teacher to interact with us more and such. But only for three periods on Tueaday... Idk why either. 

Today we also got a little lecture from our "Klassenlehrer" (class teacher-meaning we are class 3D with him as our main organizer of activities and trips and such) about motivation and why we are in the Gymi (higher level school) instead of the Sek (lower level school). He talked about training your brain and stuff like that, which I found really neat. Did you know your brain perceives over 10,000,000 stimuli/bits of information per second? And we only physically notice 16. And after an hour we only remember 1-2. And after a few days we only remember 0.5. And years later, if we experience something that somehow is similar to that 0.5 bit of information, we might make a connection to it and our brains will have a little imaginary string connecting those bits of info. But if you never received or studied that information, your brain never has the chance to make that connection. So even if you don't remember much of what you studied in 10 years, if you somehow make a connection, your brain has the opportunity to grow and make new imaginary strings connecting stuff. If you never trained your brain by trying to remember stuff, you won't ever make that connection and you will be scientifically not as smart. Weird stuff. Brains. But fascinating. 

Tomorrow after school I'm doing a mini Photoshoot with one of my friends:) I'm excited to see if we get any good pictures!

What Time Is It?

Summertime! Yay! Our last day of school was yesterday, I'm so happy! Woohoo summer!

And just now, I looked out the window and there was this absolutely gorgeous double rainbow, half in the sun, half not, right as the sun was going down. So pretty! And what's funny is one rainbow goes left to right, purple to red, and the other one goes red to purple. Apparently this happens because the light coming from the sun is reflected twice inside the raindrops. The light emerges from the raindrop at a different angle than it does the first time. In the first rainbow the blue light emerges from the drops at a smaller angle than the red light, but in the second, the blue light emerges at a larger angle than the red light. Therefore it seems "flipped" to us. Whoa. Science. Cool stuff.

Congratulations. You learned something today:)