I finally had to bite the bullet and buy an over priced umbrella from the school store. I had hoped to get a chance to go shopping on a day that wasn’t raining, but my luck with only being caught by smaller showers ran out yesterday and I was forced to make the purchase. I walked out of my last class to clear skies, only to have rain start coming down hard before I had walked more then 20 feet from the building. So I walked a little faster and grabbed the umbrella before heading back home. Since it also rained today that makes something like two weeks straight with at least one shower a day (and usually quite a bit more then that…). Though today had a rare celestial occurrence in that I did in fact see the sun come out from behind the clouds for about 15 minutes.
I had my first physics lab today, which was perhaps the most pointless physics lab I’ve ever done. It was not a physics lab at all, but simply a statistics assignment tweaked to fit a “lab” classification. And what’s the easiest way to do that? Just have the people doing the lab generate their own data set to work on! We flipped tiddly-winks. 200 times. And then performed far more calculations then have ever been done on a data set involving tiddly-wink flips, except for, presumably, the other groups that were unfortunate enough to be assigned this lab.
Of course since this is a stereotypical college physics lab we have the stereotypical good proctor/ bad proctor thing going on with the two guys who were overseeing the lab. One starts off by telling me off for not having a lab notebook of the type I would have to purchase from the bookstore, and comes closer then I would have imagined to making me run out and buy one before starting my tiddly-winking. The next proctor comes by later and tells me not to worry at all and that the notebook really doesn’t matter and I can just get one at my leisure and stick whatever paper I’m using today into that one, and I don’t have to copy it word for word like the first proctor told me I had to do. At another point in the lab I am doing some scratch work on another piece of paper trying to do one of the problems for the lab, and bad proctor looked over my shoulder and grabbed my attention to inform me that I should make sure that was not what I was going to be handing in to him, as it was far too messy and he would just mark it wrong. Nice guy.
The one good thing about this lab was that it really didn’t take that long. I worked with two other guys and we were able to divide the labor of the flipping so it didn’t take more then about 20-30 minutes and then we helped each other through the calculations at the end, so I was able to get out about 45 minutes early from a normally 3 hour lab session.
Oh and for those of you keeping score, it is still raining as I write this.