1st March 2006 - Day 135

I woke up slightly earlier today as lab work starts today.

On my way to the bus stop, I saw the Hausmeister in his office and decided to ask him when I can make an appointment with him. He told me to find him again about 2 weeks later.

There are 4 people in every lab group. In my group, there was an Indonesian, a Slovakian and a German. Generally got along well with them. They are all full time students here.

I looked through the lab manual and decided that most of the experiments are not easy. They are supplemented with a lot of extra readings for background information. The difficulty level is no doubt raised by the different langauge used.

Here's how the lab went on today. First, the Betreuer asked us some questions about today's experiment and what we were supposed to do. Her instructions were not very clear though. We ended up taking wrong sets of values.

After we went through the experiment, she took a look at our results and gave some comments. Next, she introduced a new instrument to us. I find this instrument really amazing. It's called a Planimeter.

Question of the day. How do you calculate the area under a curve in a graph paper?

Count the number of squares lah!

- Secondary one student from a neighbourhood school

If an equation for the curve is given, integrate it within the given limits lor.

- Secondary four student from the same school

If accuracy is not a problem, use the Trapezium Rule with more trapeziums. A bit tedious, but can skip the integration part if it's super difficult!

- Junior College student

Use my favourite calculator model, Casio fx-991MS. Very good model. Solar powered one somemore. Got the Trapezium Rule function to help solve this kind of questions. Area under curve with known equation? I no scared!

- Engineering student from a certain university

Eh, use a computer. The points of the curve can be plotted using Excel then you can get an equation of the curve. Then use MATLAB to help you do an intergration within the limits. Very accurate too. The only problem is you cannot bring a laptop to exams.

- Computer dependent Engineering student

Use a Planimeter.

- Betreuer from Universität Karlsruhe

A Planimeter was what people used when calculators and computers were not widely available yet. It can be used to measure any closed plane areas given that it is correctly scaled. It's super cool!

The exposure to this instrument seems to close the gap between all the methods I know. I had been wondering for some time how people in the past did it. It can't be that they were counting squares all day long!

Anyway, I think she taught us how to read the scales wrongly. I had my doubts when I saw the scale and heard her explain how to read it. The principle is somewhat similar to that of reading off a pair of vernier calipers. Unless all the websites I visited provided the wrong reading method.

But it could just be me understanding what she said wrongly.

So, I have to do some reading up for the lab tomorrow.