thanks a lot, anita;) i am having lots of fun learning about laws of planetary motion and calculating the velocity of planets in orbit, it’s a lot of “crunching” in scientific notation numbers into a calculator and solving. the mass of the earth is 5.98X10^24, so cool;) if you drop a clock into a black hole, it will orbit the black hole and as the gravity of the black hole pulls it closer to the event horizon (point of no return), the time slows down b/c the clock is losing energy. i stayed after for physics honors today to go over centripetal force on a rollercoaster and i understand it better now. we are learning about how to graph sine and cosine functions in pre-calc (ch. 7) and it is quite a lot of steps and annoying because if you mess up on the calculations of the asymptotes, you have to redo it. i think i still need a little more practice with it, but i understand most of it, the annoying thing is when you have to reflect, vertical shift and horizontal shift the sine functions because it takes a lot of focus to plot the points so you don’t mess up. i have found it becoming easier for me to calculate formulas and derive them. however when graphing points without a coordinate grid, i find it hard to visualize where the points fall especially for cosine functions, so i get graph paper and do it, then plot it on my hw. dave was teaching andrew about black holes and andrew really enjoys learning about them, so he researched more about them and we were having fun discussing them after ap english. your body elongates as it goes toward the black hole and then it condenses into itself when you reach the black hole (i did a black hole experiment online), making the mass of your body still the same (law of conservation of mass), but the density increases since your body is compacted within the black hole. andrew and i were both laughing while we were discussing black holes, they are so cool. the mass of a star has to be greater than 10x that of the sun to become a black hole. after the physics lesson dave stayed behind to see if i was okay, he helped me with pre-calc and physics honors. when i told him i was staying after, he stayed for ten minutes to see if i was understanding what my teacher was explaining and then he left wishing me good luck. also today during lunch, my lunch buddy steve said that the pre-calc class tended to skip chapters and it was less thorough and that we were ahead by one chapter (on 7.3) b/c in pre-calc honors you learn it in chapter 8) and steve says honors class is easier b/c the teacher doesn’t skip chapters or combine them, but i like my pre-calc teacher. i like how she skips and condenses chapters and she makes learning fun. my friend francine and i were talking about school and how andrew, dave and i were having fun in school. my special friend seems a lot happier b/c he accepts the fact that andrew and dave are just academic friends b/c he heard me and francine talking and he’s happy that i’m doing well in school. he even helped me with pre-calc at lunch.