Class Update

I wrote about the current state of Design Nature (though since then, I found out that I'm on team Gibbon for the next project!), but I haven't mentioned recently how things are going in my other classes. Summaries of recent events in each class are below the fold!


ModCon
So, here's my circuit board from lab 7:

This is a hot wire anemometer. The lightbulb was broken open to expose the filament, which meant that I could blow on the filament to simulate wind. We actually built two different circuits, one of which is functional in the picture, that react in different ways in the presence of wind. The one that reacts faster is the one in which the op amp (the black chips are op amps) controls the resistance of the filament. I really like thermal systems, so connecting the electrical world to the thermal world was lots of fun.

Now, we've moved on to motors. Our lab last week and this week is about characterizing motors -- from electrical experiments we can find values for equivalent resistances, the motor's moment of inertia, it's approximate time constant, and all kinds of other characteristics. From there, we'll move on to actually using the motor.


ModSim
Here's a picture of the poster from the first project!

In the past week, we got back comments on this poster. One of the studio instructors from a different studio -- so someone judging solely from what is on the poster -- wrote the comments. The major points:
-- very well organized and well written
-- Not enough information about the model
-- Figure in section II isn't self-explanatory and doesn't explain the model well

The poster for the second project is due next Tuesday. This project had to model either a thermal system or a pharmacokinetic system, and my partner and I chose to go with something thermal. We're modeling a passive freezer. Basically, fill some bottles with water, and line a building with the bottles. In the winter, have some kind of hatch open so that the inside of the building cools. During the rest of the year, close the hatch, and the very-well-insulated building should stay relatively cool even when it's warm outside. My partner and I are modeling what insulation thickness is necessary for a passive freezer to be feasible at Olin.

Our code isn't behaving at the moment (implementing a phase change is hard), so we're trying to fix that and get results while simultaneously doing the non-results portions of our poster.


Anthro
We just finished our unit on religion, though we still have our final paper to write, and it's about religion. During the religion unit, we visited a Jain center, a Jewish temple during the Sukkot holiday, a Catholic church that has been resisting closure for the past eight years, and then we each had to go on one other field trip. Mine was to a mosque during its open house. We read the book An Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose, which is by/about a Brown student who spends a semester at Liberty University. I definitely preferred this unit to our health care unit, and it's probably going to end up as my favorite unit, just because I'm especially interested in religion.

Our next unit is on aging. We were supposed to start this unit with a trip to the Needham Senior Center on Monday, but there was a hurricane, so that didn't happen. We're reading Number Our Days by Barbara Myerhoff, which is about a Jewish senior center in California in the 1970s.