Month: May 2017

So if you remember a while ago, we did this weird and wonderful thing called a math monster (dun dun duuuun). Well, we continued on that project. And it was a lot.

We had to write a story, make a video, and create this thing called a frankenstuffy. A frankenstuffy is a mess of a bunch of different stuffed animals combined into one hell demon… I mean adorable stuffed animal.

For this to actually make sense instead of me word vomiting all over this post, I’m going to break this down into categories. There was the science, the book reading, the story, the geography, creation, and the video. In short, or not so much, it was a big project.

THE SCIENCE

We studied ecology. That meant everything from learning where each animal lived to fancy words like biotic and abiotic. I honestly don’t want to go into all of this, so if you want to actually learn something, then click this fabulous link.

THE GEOGRAPHY

We studied geography as well. Part of this project was researching different parts of Canada, to see where our frankenstuffy would go. I chose North East of the Interior Plains. For reference:

The Book Reading

Another part of this unit was making an epistolary story [pronounced eh-pist-oh-lair-ee]. Pretty much, it’s a style of writing done in either diary entries or letters or logs. So we got the read a story in this style. And what better story than the Martian?

This of course inspired me to make an edit with Martin Freeman

Anyways, we read the book. Which is actually quite good, it’s science-y and funny at the same time. We read it, and did a bit of research. And I did a lot of research either debunking or proving the science. If you want to get into that, I’ve left the paragraphs I wrote below

On the poop science:

Growing potatoes on mars is possible. It all boils down to three key factors, which would be surviving on just potatoes, growing them, and the soil. Surfing on them is easy. Potatoes have everything a human needs to survive, besides a few vitamins and calcium. But with the rations and the vitamin supplements, Mark should be fine. The gravity is 1/3 of what it is on earth, so he isn’t using as much energy and burning as many calories as he would be normally. For growing them, the potatoes would grow slower, as mars is 1.5 times further away from the sun than earth, and gets 60% of the light. There are nutritional deficiencies in mars soil, though the poop makes up for it. Raw poop can’t be used as fertilizer, but the poop in the Martian has been freeze vacuumed and exposed to the mars atmosphere. That kills the pathogens in the poop, making it available for fertilizer. The soil is the last thing. 0.6% of Martian soil is made up of perchlorates, which are salts capable of disrupting the body’s metabolic system. They interfere with abilities to absorb iodine, messes with production of thyroid hormones, which throws mood, temperature, appetite, sleep, and more. Long term exposure to perchlorates result in a higher risk of thyroid cancer. The typical human consumes 100mg of dirt a day. Mark would be consuming 1mg, from the perchlorates in the dirt as well as what he’s getting from the potatoes. If he’s there for 500 days, he’s eating 500mg of perchlorates. But he’d still be fine, according to research. It would take much more and much longer to start to affect him. That’s why poop science in Martian isn’t crap.

On the logic of the storm that gets him stranded on mars:

So it turns out Martian wind storms can, at top speed, reach 60 miles per hour. In the book, they’re hit with 175 km/h storm, which translates to 108.74 miles per hour. This doesn’t make any sense in the book. So technically the entire book is wrong and shouldn’t have happened. Seriously, the poop science makes sense and this doesn’t.

On being able to survive 17 months on only human bodies:

So Johanssen implies that if they don’t get the probe, she was the chosen survivor, and could survive off of rations and her dead crew mates. There are a few flaws to this. Such as scurvy. The human body can survive 90 days without vitamin C before you catch scurvy. Flesh would have vitamin C, but maybe not enough. She could catch scurvy, which takes 6 weeks to die from. If she doesn’t die from the other diseases the raw bodies could give her. Cooking them wouldn’t be wise, as that takes out vitamins and nutrients. But she can’t cook them anyways. But if she miraculously survived the diseases, would five bodies be enough, plus nine months of rations? Well, if the average human weighs 50 kilograms and eats roughly a couple thousand calories per day, one human body can sustain another human for one month. Seeing that Johanssen mentions she is smaller, and if she rations it, we can stretch that to a month and a half. So that’s one body per every one and a half months. That gives her 7.5 months worth of food. Plus the nine months of rations, that gives her sixteen and a half months. But she needs 17 months. She’ll be fine for water, as the bodies will supply that along with the water tank. It takes maybe 20-40 days to die from starvation. She would start to starve before she made it back to earth, but she could maybe survive, if she doesn’t die of disease or start to starve

Yeah, it gets deep. But we got to learn how to write an epistolary story is the point, I just got off track.

The Story:

We also had to write stories on our frankenstuffies. Eight chapters, and it had to include a beginning, a shift in the environment, our frankenstuffy evolving, and either the frankenstuffy stopping the change or running away. The main question was ‘Who’s in control, people or the environment?’. We also made a math monster earlier in the year, and we had to include that. If you’d like to read it, I’m going to link to a separate blog post with all of those chapters here.

The Creation:

Aside from everything else, we had to actually make our frankenstuffy. Mine was supposed to be a lynx with wings. But there was one issue

Finding a lynx stuffed animal is actually impossible. Seriously, they don’t sell them. So I went for the next best thing. A cat. Okay, in my defence, it’s the closest thing I had

Thats pictures of the creation of my stuffy (feat Claire).

The Movie:

Finally, we had to make a movie. After all of that, I was like “sure, it’ll be easy” So what did genius me decide to do?

I of course made a stop motion. Not that I regret it, but

Okay I regret it. It looks really great and I’m proud of it, but it took SO LONG. Seriously, three scenes took the whole day. Every single photo. Frame. By. Frame. But it turned out well! Here it is:

And that’s all for this blog post!

Read ya later

Ruby

It is I, back for another wonderful post.

If you remember this post from a while ago, I mentioned a project that was to be announced. Well…. here it is.

We got to study fantasy, and hands down it’s one of the best projects I’ve done. We got to study the art of making people believe that fantasy is real, and making people have an immersive experience while bejng in these fantasy worlds. We at first studied Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was awesome. And then we went to Florida, and went to Disney World to study the rides.

The actual project: studying one of the rides at Disney world and doing research on what draws people to that ride and why it’s such an immersive experience. And then we had to make a small video on it.

This was really enjoyable, as I love studying these kinds of things. It’s about visual arts and psychology and I’m a giant nerd so of course I’m excited.

I got to study the Jungle Cruise ride, which is a ride that takes you through the experience of being on a jungle cruise with a bunch of bad jokes and animals. Right up my alley.

We got back from Florida, and so the editing of the videos began. The draft of my video can been seen right here. So watch that.

I got some critique, and eventually came up with the final draft. *cue the music to the Final Countdown with terrible kazoo*

Im really proud of this video, and it shows how far I’ve come from the beginning of the year. I hope to do more work of this quality, and I really strive to do that next year.

So, that’s all for-

“Hold on, Ruby” you may be thinking. “Why is this post titled The One With Bohemian Rhapsody”. Well, let me explain.

This who project is about making fantasy real. And what’s the first line of Bohemian Rhapsody?

Right. There you have it.

Well, that’s all for this blog post

Read ya later

Ruby

So I’m back for another post. This one is probably about my favourite thing in the world, besides Musicals and Cinema.

Food!

Yeah, I’m very excited. Lettuce Celebrate! (I’m so sorry). This is part of our Health and Career Unit, and we’ve done a quick section on Healthy Eating. To start, we watched four videos, which I will link to in a second. They were all really interesting, though I had to say the first one was my favourite.

This one I found interesting because it wasn’t only about food. He changed pretty much his whole lifestyle, and I found that interesting. It’s also cool to see him talk about the perfect healthy life, with earbuds and helmet on constantly. I can’t imagine living like that, but apparentally it’s healthy. For reference, no. I won’t be sporting a helmet to school, I’ll stick to my beanies thanks

This one is about eating bugs. And before I get started, I just want to say that the grainy video quality really BUGGED me. Haha, I make bad jokes. Anyways, it was talking about eating bugs. And how we already eat up to 500mg of bugs per year. That’s two cups of bugs down the hatch. It’s just such a crazy idea. But the fact that they’re so high in protein and calories is also interesting. I also will not be having chocolate covered crickets for lunch, don’t worry mom.

This one is about food and climate change. This just amazes me at a) this guy’s hatred for cows. Come on, cows are great, despite what he’s says in the video. And also how much farmland affects things.

Last one is about obesity and hunger. It’s really interesting to see the facts, about one billion people being obese and one billion being hungry. It’s just so shocking to hear see facts that we’re usually so sheltered from, because ‘it’s not our problem’.

Then came the second part. We had to make ourselves a portrait. Easy, right?

We had to make ourselves a portrait out of food. That’s right, we’re going full Guiseppe Arcimbolo up in here. We had to take what we eat most and put it onto a photo of ourselves. Warning: disturbing content ahead.

Let’s list off the things on my face here (never a sentence I thought I’d say):

– Banana

– Chips

– Pancakes

– Popcorn

– Cereal

– Grapes

– Corn

– Pop

– Pasta

– French fries

– Raspberries

– Tim Horton’s Creamy Chocolate Chill

– Lettuce

This took so long, as each article of food was individually placed. This means every single pop corn kernel there. It took a while.

But not all of these options are healthy, very few are. I have a goal to start eating healthier, even if that’s adding more lettuce into that salad I’m making, or eating the vegetables in the pasta bake mom made last week.

So that’s all for my healthy living post. I hope you all are healthy, and if not, don’t stress out too much trying to be the best you can be. Set small goals.

Well, I’m gonna beet it. (Oh god these are getting worse)

Read ya later

Ruby

It is I, only the best of blog post writers. Side note: I’m writing this on May 4th. So may the fourth be with you!

Anyways, this is another science post! We did a lab about….. strawberries. Yeah, but it was really cool! We wound up extracting DNA from them.

Little refresher, DNA is the stuff that’s stored inside the nucleus of a cell. It makes you who you are, or in this case, the strawberry who it is.

We started off with 5ml of soap, 30ml of water, 2.5ml of salt, and half a strawberry. We crushed that all up in a bag, then put it in a beaker:

It looks kinda weird, but it’s pretty. Then we added in some alcohol (not to drink) and let it sit for five minutes. It wound up separating the DNA, as when we crushed up the strawberry, it destroyed the cell wall, making the DNA easier to pick out of. It rose to the top, and looked like this:

Side note: sorry these are sideways. I don’t know why, I’ll try to fix it.

We then put it underneath a microscope and looked at it. It looked weird and bubbly.

Well that’s all for this blog post, hope you enjoyed!

Read ya later

Ruby