School has gotten to that annoying point where they expect you to remember and be able to use information you learned in other classes.

My Control group has been working on the lab report that's due Tuesday. There was an aluminum bar with heating tape wrapped around one end, with a fan (a totally ghetto household fan) blowing on the other end. We were supposed to use a digital controller to keep the temperature constant. Now that we're writing up the report we got to the part of "write the heat transfer model for the experiment" which I thought might be the (change in energy)=(energy in from tape)-(energy out by convection) but when I asked the professor yesterday, apparently that's not it. He talked about doing a cylindrical model with heat transfer in the lengthwise direction, and then the boundary conditions depend on whether the cylinder is long/thin or short/fat, and to tell if it is long or short you have to find the Biot number.

Holy cow, the Biot number was like, three semesters ago.

And more annoyingly, the Biot number includes the coefficient of convective transfer and the coefficient of conductive transfer, both of which aren't specified. Well, I bet I could find the conduction one, since we know it's aluminum, but convection? Really! How fast is a ghetto fan on "low" really pumping out the air?

Last week when I got really tired of studying for Separations and decided to just stop worked out quite well. I got a 48/50 on the test, which on a ChemE test is fantastic. So I think that validates me not studying as hard. This must be that "senioritis" thing I've heard of but never got in high school. Or maybe it's supreme over-confidence. But in any case, I like realizing that less effort is needed to maintain the same results.

The other day in BioProcess the teacher was talking about how mammalian cells need to have a surface to grow on--that they are "anchorage" dependent. Right then I understood why that city in Alaska is called Anchorage. Because you can anchor there! It's stuff like that that makes me wonder why people think I'm smart.