Japantown Field Trip

whee.

today we went to Japantown (or 日本町）. we did this scavenger hunt with lots of first year Japanese students. We walked around all day today and looked at lots of different cultural items in Japan. We had lunch at some place called Sapporo-ya and they had some really yummy ramen. Then we went and got lots of crepes for dessert. I got a chocolate gelato crepe. :3 Theresa had some really expensive ice cream もち.

I wanted to go to the Pikapika photo booth stalls but we didn't have enough time to go, and we had to go back at like 1:30 (which is super early!) and now because of that I'm sitting here typing up this blog about Nihon Machi. :o

David Webb, The Vacuum Master

There was this guest presenter named David Webb who came on Tuesday to show us some really cool demos using air pressure. He had this vacuum chamber which used a pump to pump out air using air pressure (not sucking!) and really funny things would happen to things inside the airless chamber (vacuum)!

He did lots of fun stuff like putting a feather and a metal washer into the vacuum and showing us how they fell at the same time in it (because the feather doesn't encounter wind resistance). Then he magically made marshmallows bigger, like this!

It was pretty fun that day. Although I have to wonder what the American Vacuum Society is o_o.

Gay-Lussac's Law

This guy discovered the law that air pressure increases when temperature increases. We did this lab on Thursday when we dumped a test tube full of air and a black pressure gauge into increasingly hotter liquid water, and then hot oil @_@

Then we made this graph and we found out the absolute zero temperature is around -300 degrees celsius! that's super cooooooooold.

MC Delta T

And it's M, C, Delta T!

That's calorimetry dawg.

MC Delta T is a formula that calculates the specific heat of a substance. It's used in calorimetry.

Q = MCDeltaT, where Q is the heat energy in joules/calories, M is the mass in grams, C is the specific heat in calories or joules per Celsius gram, and Delta T is the change in temperature of the substance.

Here's a calorimetry sample problem.

Elephant toothpaste, desu

Today Mr. Olson did the elephant toothpaste experiment. :3

He put some hydrogen peroxide and dishwashing soap together, and he said it was supposed to react really slowly and finish reacting after a couple days. But when he put a catalyst in, potassium iodide, the solution suddenly turned yellow, and bubbled right over the cylinder :o

It was really hot and steamy yellow puffy stuff!

Like this!