Thursday, July 9, 2009

Just a Regular Day

Today I woke up at the same time to go to eat at John Jay Hall with the rest of the group. As soon as we were finished eating our breakfast we headed towards Havemeyer for another day of chemistry class.

As you might already know, our mornings start with a lab followed with a Seminar right after lunch. Anyways as I was saying, the purpose of today's lab was to analyze the purity of the aspirin we have synthesized in the previous labs. The way we found out the purity of the aspirin using Thin Layer Chromatography and Column Chromatography. My group was fairly successful in today's lab and I have to say that I personally enjoyed this lab because it was something I could understand. In my AP Biology class we did a lab on Chromatography with Spinach and what the purpose of this experiment was to determine the different pigments within a spinach leaf. What the Chromatography paper allows you to do is to be able to see the the different pigment within the spinach leaf.

In addition to the the lab I also enjoyed today's seminar as we. Today's lesson focused on the nature of glass. What seemed to capture my interest was the idea that glass has the mechanical structure of a liquid but looks and feels like a solid. It is interesting how the arrangements of the the molecules in glass can't be distinguishing from that of a liquid. So is Glass a liquid, a solid, or both? ( Now there is something to think about.)

1 comment:

Don Gosney said...

Sofia,

Just as with Mr. Ramsey and Ms. Kronenberg, we read all of the blogs. Most we comment on but at least we read them (all 415 so far).

As I was reading yours today, I cam across where you had studied “chromatography with Spanish” in AP Biology back at Richmond High. I kept reading this and re-reading this trying to figure out what you were doing. I know there are a lot of Hispanics at Richmond High and at first I thought that maybe the class was conducted in Spanish that day or maybe there was a special technique that the Spanish had perfected.

It was only after getting by my frustration and reading your next sentences that I saw that you were referring to working with ‘spinach’.

Perhaps now you can appreciate what we’ve been writing about the need to proof what you write before posting it.

In retrospect it’s funny, Sofia. You had me going for a while.

About glass: you were probably told that glass remains a liquid forever. If you get a chance, take a look at a REALLY old window and you’ll notice that things look distorted out of the bottom part of the glass. What’s happened is that gravity has allowed the liquid glass to flow downwards over the years so it’s much thicker at the bottom of the pane than at the top.

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