Saturday, July 10, 2004

Good days for bored students everywhere

I ran across a couple of cool sites on Slashdot today. Basically Carnegie Mellon and MIT are putting a bunch of courses and whatnot on the web! It looks like the MIT people have more in the way of coursework and lecture notes with no real opportunity to earn credits (but some interesting looking stuff to say the least), while the Carnegie people are actually going to offer classes for credit, except that you get the credit through whatever school you might be attending. The coolest thing about the whole deal is that Carnegie Mellon has a chemistry course with a VIRTUAL LAB! Being a good student and all, I first did their dilute 1M Glucose solution to .025M problem. I then decided to *test the system* by making something blow up (as far as I can tell, probability of explosion is the litmus test for all chem classes). Unfortunately, it seems that they only allow things to get to 99.85*C and don't account for evaporation (believe me, I TRIED!). This, the lack of highly reactive chemicals, and no tight-fitting rubber stoppers combined forces to thwart my plans. Perhaps if I were a better chemist....
Meanwhile, my laptop is now running Mandrake 10, and after only a very little wizardry, Autodock and Autodock tools. I think Bobscript and Raster3d are also working, but need to figure out how to test them. I am told that these programs represent some of the finest in bio-chem research.

1 comment:

Sam said...

Down the sink of course... como siempre... ;)