Unit 6 Reflection

This unit was focused around basically the anatomy and physiological aspects of bones. We talked about how our bones are almost constantly being slowly destroyed by osteoclasts and being rebuilt (slower or faster depending on your age) by osteoblasts. We also talked about the types of bones, from their classification (long, short, flat, irregular) to the types of bone that are found in bones (spongy and compact). Another thing about bones we talked about were some of the disorders that happen within the skeletal system (arthritis, osteoporosis, scoliosis, lordosis, kyphosis, and rickets). Arthritis is the inflammation of your joints, osteoporosis is when your bones become porous and overall weaker, scoliosis is when there is a sideways curvature of the spine, lordosis is when there is over extension of the lumbar spine, and kyphosis is also known as having a hunched back. The lab that we did this unit was the owl pellet lab, where we took an owl pellet and separated the bones and cleaned (to a certain extent) from the pellet from the fur and/or feathers. Next we measured the skull and the mandible (if the pellet had them) and then we tried to identify the animal the skull and bones belonged to before trying our best to reconstruct the skeleton with what bones we had. I felt really good about this unit, since I've always loved the topic of bones and have always been interested in them. Checking back in on my New Years Goals, I'd say that I've been holding up to them so far and haven't strayed far from them.

20 time and animation

20 time is when you take a certain amount of your time (about 20%) to work on a project that you want to do, whether it's to help improve something that already exists or for your own benefit to learn how to do something new. I really did not ask an essential question, instead I'm just planning to learn how to do something that I've been very interested in learning for quite awhile now. I have chosen to teach myself how to animate for my 20 project, the reason why I chose this was because of the fact that I've been wanting to learn how to animate for a few years now. My goal at the end of all of this is to be able to animate pretty well, with still room for improvement.  To see how I progress with this, I'll be posting what I manage to animate, and I'll be I guess evaluating how my animations are.

Owl Pellet Lab

In this lab, we took an owl pellet and took it apart, so that the bones and fur of what that owl had eaten were in separate piles. We then took the bones and tried our best to identify what it was and tried our best to reconstruct the skeleton of the animal with what bones we had. What we think our animal was, is that it's a rat. We decided on this because the average skull of a rat is 30 mm in length and about 25 mm in width, and the skull we had was 30 mm in length and 21 mm in width. Another feature of the skull that made us think it's a rat would be the way the teeth in it's skull were. The differences the skeleton of a rat to a human are the shape of the pelvis is long in a rat unlike that of a human, the rat's skull is elongated and has a different set up in teeth, and the rat's tibia and fibula are fused together at some parts unlike that of a human's. The similarities between rat and human skeletons are that their ribs are roughly the same shape, the scapula are also roughly the shame shape, and that the overall skeleton is roughly the same, just with slight differences in length and built.