Author Archives: jas920
Backlightness
I began with the question of whether you could create ads for intermediary steps in the supply chains for the many products and devices that use rare earth elements. Supply chains are incredible opaque, and the need for them is driven by demand in the final products. My experience with efforts to clarify them in a way […]
Growing algae in diluted urine & Final project
Our Spirulina has really proliferated which presents a new problem: how to harvest it? So I’ve been figuring out how much and how best to extract the biomass. Chlorella seems much more difficult to harvest. I continued to research microalgae growth with urine (citations updated) and fertilized a batch of algae with urine. Spirulina grows in […]
Microvideo & project progress
Microcinema I’ve been experimenting with creating a microscope that allows me to easily take video. The nice thing about using a piCam is I know it’s easily programmable. Although for my purposes the same functionality might be available for a cheap usb webcam. I’ve been researching tools others have used to do similar things, and found […]
Two proposals
I’m hoping to get some direction in class on two ideas, since I have unwisely spent time becoming invested in both. Idea #1 What if we tried selling all points of a supply chain as much as the end product? Uncover as much specific information for the supply chains of as many rare earths, or heavy […]
markov budget
My poems for this week juxtapose the language of Trump’s 2018 Federal Budget with the Sequoia National Park text I’ve been using. Because the federal budget is not a text I enjoy engaging with and we learned natural language processing tools, I thought it might be interesting to use these new tools to decipher it. I found […]
Final project progress update
Revisiting micro green composites Something unexpected this week was realizing my micro greens are dying. I was thinking a lot about apoptosis, and how death is necessary for a healthy ecosystem, to allow other living things to thrive. I recreated some of the composites I made when my micro greens were growing now that they are […]
AIM Park updates
This week we refactored our code–I updated my Sequoia Park AIM poems from last week. I didn’t get to correct a number of things I intended to–modularizing took longer than expected. There’s something weird going on where I’m getting a lot of the same rhymes line after line. After some trials I thought I had successfully […]
Algae growth progress: bioreactor plans
Maintaining a culture This week we learned a lot about maintaining algae cultures in their appropriate medium (we are maintaining a google doc to collaborate and maintain these and other resources). We had a number of practical questions about building a bioreactor to grow our algae, and about whether there were real or just semantic differences […]
AIM-inspired Sequoia poems
This week we were tasked with creating our own poetic form. I went to Yosemite over Spring Break so I was thinking about Sequoias–I was kind of amazed when I found this Sequoia National Park guide from 1937 on Project Gutenberg. I was stuck on how to create a poetic form from this when separately, I […]
Project proposal progress & 360 images
Our algae cultures arrived! The instructions indicated that the tubes should be slightly unscrewed to allow gas exchange, that they should be kept in light but not direct sunlight, and at room temperature. I sort of panicked but from what I’ve read, it seems like cultures like this are somewhat resilient. The detailed advice online […]