Spaghetti Bridge

Growing up, there have always been several “stereotypical” school projects that I would hear about from others as well as from the T.V. One such project was the classic spaghetti noodle bridge.
About a month ago, I, as well as the rest of my class, was assigned to construct a bridge out of nothing but spaghetti and glue. The bridge had certain height, width, weight and span requirements, and the finished product was expected to hold 1000 kg for ten minutes.
It was one of those projects where the idea behind the assignment seems fun, (who doesn’t want to make a bridge out of noodles?) but once the project is started, it is not fun at all.
My group and I (four people) worked many hours on trying to make a decent noodle bridge that would get us a decent grade, but all we accomplished was meeting all the project requirements except being able to hold the 1000 kg weight for ten minutes. Which surprisingly only docked five points off our overall grade. We ended up with a B for the project, a grade we were all very pleased with!
Our bridge ended up looking very elementary, and overall the experience was very embarrassing (some of my classmates had very, very good bridges!) I am so glad this project is behind me, and I hope I will never have to construct anything like that out of noodles and glue again! (Though if I ever did have to make another noodle bridge, I would have a better idea of how to go about doing so!)

Here’s a picture I found of a really good bridge. Ours turned out looking nothing like this one! The site I found the picture on can be followed through the following URL: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3116/2446453088_339f1637da.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.flickr.com/photos/vio/2446453088/&usg=__kDW6fEA8Xh77W07HQmXDLGDoHwA=&h=455&w=500&sz=201&hl=en&start=7&um=1&tbnid=vV3zKloyKEk9DM:&tbnh=118&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dspaghetti%2Bbridge%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1

UNI

I have never planned on attending one of the local colleges in Cedar Rapids. None of them have ever really appealed to me. The University of Iowa sounds like a pretty good school, and I love the Hawkeyes, but I don’t think I would ever want to go to a university with such a big population! And I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’m not sure I would be able to bring myself to go to Iowa State University partially because I’ve grown up with a disdain for the Cyclones. None of the smaller local colleges have appealed much to me either.
I have never really had anything against the University of Northern Iowa, and have never looked into attending this University. I am going to research more about UNI because it’s close to home, not a huge college, but at the same time is not a ridiculously small college.
I found the UNI’s website to be very unique and helpful. You can view their site by following this link: http://www.uni.edu/advising/
I have friends that are at UNI right now, and I’m sure some of my friends will attend UNI next year after graduation. UNI has a tennis team, but unless I play a ton over the next year and I half, I probably wouldn’t make the team. What I like about UNI is that it is fairly close to where I live now, about an hours drive. I am going to keep UNI in mind when I apply for colleges, and when I go on college visits next summer.

Rabies Survivor

I was looking through an issue of Scientific American magazine when I came across an article about rabies. The article was called “A Cure for Rabies?” and was about a teenager who survived an encounter with the deadly virus. I found this article very interesting, and it has made me think again about becoming a lab technician, or pursuing a similar occupation.
I read this article right out of the magazine, but the beginning of the article can be read at the following web address: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-cure-for-rabies

Jeanna Giese was an un-immunized fifteen-year-old when a bat bit, and infected her with rabies. Now she is the first known person to survive rabies without the immunization. Rabies is a RNA virus, and is usually located in the brain and nerves. The immune system is unable to detect the presence of a rabies microbe when first contracted because it doesn’t enter the blood stream, or the lymph nodes. If caught early enough, death from rabies can be prevented, but since the symptoms don’t start until after the treatment would do no good, lives that could be saved aren’t.
While the results of Jeanna’s tests were being analyzed, Infectious Disease Consultant, Rodney E. Willoughby, Jr., started doing some research in the event that her tests for rabies came back positive. Willoughby Jr. learned that the brains of victims who have died from rabies have virtually no visible problems, and when a victim dies after spending weeks with having intensive care, traces of the virus cannot be found. This means that a human’s immune system is capable of ridding the body of the rabies virus over time, but the body just doesn’t have precisely that; time. Apparently, this virus is able to gain control of the brain and cause it to kill the body without damaging itself. If the brain could be “stopped” for long enough for the immune system to get caught up with the disease, death may not be inevitable. After Jeanna’s tests came back positive, she was induced into a coma for a week, and during the duration of her coma, her blood and spinal fluid was tested to determine whether or not she was creating antibodies. Awaking from her coma, Jeanna was completely paralyzed, but steadily regained control of her body.
The treatment Jeanna underwent came to be known as the Milwaukee Project, and has been unsuccessfully attempted six times, so the question of whether or not there is a cure for rabies still remains.
The results of this experiment have made an impact on the world. The procedure has been tried without success in Germany, Thailand, the United States and India, though not all of the attempts followed the hypothesis used when curing Jeanna. Some experts are opposed to this therapy because it appears as though Jeanna’s survival goes against studies that have shown that brain cells are killed by the rabies virus. But the results of these studies may not be accurate because a different strain of rabies could have been used then the strain that is found in nature.
I found this magazine article to be very fascinating. I just think it’s so interesting that by putting Jeanna into a coma, her body was able to fight of the rabies virus. This is the type of science news that makes me want to major in science in college. I just don’t know if being a doctor or lab technician is something I’d be good at.

The youtube video I wanted to have displayed on my last post wouldn't embed, so here is the link to the webpage to the same video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3ydELQlvT0

Alvin and the Chipmunks

If you came home from school one day to find your twenty-two year old brother watching Barnie, you might think it was a little weird. Well, at my house, that wouldn’t be considered weird at all. My brother, Ben, is twenty-two years old and has Down syndrome. I’m not writing this post to describe what it’s like to live with someone with a mental disability, or to fantasize about what life would be like had my brother been born without this disorder, because I love my brother just the way he is. What I want to write about is the fact that movies I’ve forgotten about, or haven’t even seen, are brought to the surface by my brother and his taste in movies.
When I find my brother watching a cartoon movie that was popular when I was a kid, I can’t help but stop and watch it with him. With all the different movies he picks out to watch, in a sense, I relive part of my childhood. Movies that I haven’t seen in years, or new release movies that I wouldn’t other wise see are brought to my attention by him. It's kind of weird to think about how I'm seventeen years old, but still get a kick out of watching movies that are meant for audiences much younger than I am. One such movie is Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Granted, Alvin and the Chipmunks is one of those movies that can be enjoyed by audiences of all ages, but was just another one of those movies I saw by accident, because of my brother.
I came home one night and caught the end of this movie with my brother, and I liked it so much I watched it again the next night. Alvin and the Chipmunks is perhaps one of the cutest movies I have ever seen! I loved most of the movie and can’t wait to see the sequel—I mean Squekal.

Embedding disabled by request

Class Schedule

This week was the start of the agonizingly stressful process of signing up for classes for another year of school. I hate signing up for classes, and signing up for next year’s classes is proving to be particularly tricky. The past three years, which class to sign up for has been pretty obvious. This year however, I am finding a particularly hard time trying to decide what class to take for each subject area.
Senior year. I can either choose to take regular classes, and take it easy my last year of high school, or I can push myself to take harder classes. This is proving to be a fairly difficult decision to make, because on the one hand, I would like to take things easy next year, and not have to stress out about homework and AP exams, but on the other hand, I think I might feel really lazy taking classes that aren’t very challenging. The only thing I relish about signing up for classes this year is the fact that next year I wont have to sign up for anymore high school courses!
Another problem I am having with choosing which courses I should sign up for is the fact that I have no idea what I want to major in, and what type of career I want to pursue. If I had a better idea of what I want to mo later in life, choosing courses would be a lot easier, because I would simply sign up for courses that correlate with what I want to major in. But because I am very undecided in what I want to do later in my life, I am having a much harder time trying to decide what classes to take next year!
It also doesn’t help my decision making process much that my high school has tons of courses to choose from. I have so many options for classes next year, that choosing each individual course for each individual subject area is a nightmare for indecisive people like me.
Check it out at this web address, this link has a list of all the classes offered at my high school.

http://www.kenn.cr.k12.ia.us/academics/coursedescrip/2009-10CourseListingDepartment.pdf

College of the Ozarks

I have a friend who is currently going through the college application process. Her first choice in college is the College of the Ozarks, and she is currently waiting (anxiously I might add) for an acceptance letter. I don’t want to choose a college to apply for just because I know someone that is already planning on attending, but since I really don’t have many other colleges on my mind at the moment, I have decided to take a more detailed look into the College of the Ozarks.
The information I used in writing this post came from the following web address: http://www.cofo.edu/about.asp

The College of the Ozarks is a Christian college that could be viewed as very different from other colleges and universities. Rather than paying for their tuition, students who attend College of the Ozarks full time work for it. This is probably one of the reasons the College of the Ozarks is also called “Hard Work U.”
The idea behind “Hard Work U” is that students will work about fifteen hours a week at an assigned job to help pay for their education. This job not only helps students in need of financial assistance, but also helps develop working skills that may help prepare students for jobs after graduation.
Another positive aspect of the College of the Ozarks is that it is on many different lists proclaiming some of the nation’s top colleges. The student to faculty ratio is 13:1 which is also something I can appreciate about a college, because I really like being in smaller classes.
Although the College of the Ozarks has many positive aspects about it, it also has a couple characteristics that I don’t really care for.
Like so many of the colleges I have considered attending, the College of the Ozarks does not have a tennis team, and while I am not for sure whether or not I want to play college tennis, I don’t want to commit myself to a college that doesn’t have a tennis team, just in case I decide I want to play in college. Another aspect of the college that I’m not sure if I would like is the fact that if I went to the College of the Ozarks, I would have to get a job. As a freshman in college, it would be nice to have extra cash supplied by a part time job, but I also don’t want to have to worry about being too busy my first year of college, and I’m not sure if having a job would be too much for me to take on.
The College of the Ozarks seems like it is a really good college, and I am disappointed that it doesn’t meet all of my standards, because I think it is a really good college, but just doesn’t quite have everything that I am looking for.