If you had asked me how my project was going on Tuesday around 8:30 in the morning you would not have received a confident answer. That morning it hit me; I have two weeks in December and two weeks in January to finish up Music in the Stars. Continue reading
Alex
After extensive preparation and reading, I am nearly at the point where experimentation will begin. I, like my classmates, am entirely new to the type of lab work going into this course, so even the most essential procedures are new territory for me. In order to help prepare for extensive work of a scope I’ve never before done, I have made my best efforts to be proficient in the material and methods that will be used for the western blotting. Hopefully, this will lead to experimentation soon after thanksgiving break.
I want to start this off by saying that we’ve made a significant amount progress in the way of fixing the printer. The issues with the print pieces adhering too well are in the process of resolving. After tweaking some settings on the printer related to how close the print bed is to the bottom resin tank and adjusting the thickness of the base, we are hopeful that our next print will be fully successful. This means that we can begin to print and evaluate the current prosthetics along with the one’s we’ll model as soon as we get back from break. The last major part of protocol to develop is how to do the materials analysis for the PLA and ABS from the extrusion based 3D printer and we are currently looking through industry standard protocols to see if there is one that can be adapted for our purposes.
Another aspect of the project we’ve progressed in is the conservation of print resin. When prints fail, it is common for small pieces of partially hardened, flaky resin to be in the tank. Whenever this happens, we now are going to strain the resin using a funnel and four overlapped sheets of wire mesh that has holes of about 1mm length and width. The first time we did this saved about 20 ml of resin, so over time this will begin to add up to a huge amount of prevented waste.
With further teachings about the complex numbers, the lecture keeps elaborating on solving certain differential equations by using complex numbers. After some of my own research, I found the history of complex numbers quite interesting. Continue reading
Seeing that break is quickly approaching, it would not make sense to start lab work that would have to remain unfinished for weeks on end. Not only that, after some of the steps in my protocol, there is no time to take a break and leave solutions unattended for a long period of time. Continue reading
Most of the games I have described so far could be categorized as games that are played simultaneously. Regardless of whether it is rock-paper-scissors game or the prisoner’s dilemma, each player can anticipate his/her opponent’s response to some extent, but does not know his/her strategy for sure. Even though the notion of Nash equilibrium provides a reasonable way for people to surmise each other’s strategy under the assumption that everyone is rational, each player still cannot conclusively determine what strategies his/her opponent will play until his/her opponent has played it. Now, the course shifts its focus into sequential games, where a player can make a decision based on the strategy that his/her opponent has played already.
This week, as my work has been mush the same as the last and I have little to report, I thought I’d share some of the amazing work my peers at Westtown are doing for their independent seminar projects. Continue reading
Last week we began the process of materials analysis, but we’ve come across some difficulties with the Form1 Printer. The prints have been sticking to the print bed too well, a change from our problems with it when it was new of the prints not sticking at all. We’ve contacted customer support and are eagerly awaiting a response so we can return to printing our test parts.
In the following lecture, the professor reintroduced the idea of complex numbers and its application in differential equations, which I found very intriguing.
Complex number, for those who are not familiar to the concept, is a number that does not exist in any visible or “real” world. It is not used in daily life, because it does not really “exists”. Many of the beginner level math students are taught that there can be no square root for any negative numbers, nor can there be any negative squared numbers. When they are asked what is the square root of -1, they would say: “There is none”. Continue reading
Finally our cultures are dense enough to begin to extract final products. After toiling over gallons of green, salty water we are finally collecting and storing quantities of it to concentrate and eventually dry. There are several methods for collecting the dry cells that I have thought about. We could filter Continue reading
Independent Seminar Blog 