(no subject)

[chess]

MMS prac finished in just over half an hour. Phoenix full; am consigned to a Mac (C4 being the other side of New Museums from where I want to be next).

Should be doing some maths. Am hence spodding.

Comments

[senji.livejournal.com]

Are you supposed to be able to do pracs in half an hour?

Re:

[chess]

Generally we're supposed to be able to do them in two hours and I do them in one; today we were meant to take an hour and half, so I did it in half an hour.

General-purpose MMS pracs are not assessed and are absurdly easy. The assessed ones are annoyingly much harder; I don't understand why they do that (i.e. why they don't make all the other pracs like the assessed ones) but I expect it's because nobody would ever finish them if they did (because nobody else seems to finish as fast, even though I always get it checked and it's all right at the end; however, everyone else seems to do better in the assessed pracs than I do).

Re:

[senji.livejournal.com]

So the non-assessed pracs happen to be better suited to your way of thinking / doing than the assessed ones?

Bah.

Re:

[chess]

Maybe it's because out of the two assessed pracs we've had so far, one of them involved a ton of drawing things, and the other one expected me to have a bunch of notes with me which I didn't have because I took them on a Psion, not on paper, so I couldn't use them in the assessed prac.

I expect the next one will be a pain too, though, because I can't even perform the first task - 'operate a working lighter'. (I failed miserably at it during a prac the other day when we were trying to light bunsens...)

Re:

[senji.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

Is there no possibility of using another method for lighting whatever it is you need to light?

Re:

[chess]

The point of this exercise is to find out how the lighter works, not to light something...

Re:

[edith-the-hutt.livejournal.com]

At a guess I'd say a pizo-electric crystal (probably based on the perovskite structure) with a cunning lever system to maximise the pressure applied. Pressing the lighter button causes pressure on the crystal producing an electric dipole which is used to cause a spark and ignites the gas.

Just a guess though.
They might use a battery.

Re:

[edith-the-hutt.livejournal.com]

The spelling in the above comment is 100% correct. It's the rest of the world that got it wrong.

[tienelle.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much it. I think they use a hammer of some kind, though.