Thursday, April 14, 2016

Clay Brain Diagram






















We took some different colored playdough and put it on a computer screen sized cardboard box after we sketched out the brain and did some rough labeling. After we had color coded, to a extent, the brain, we wrote up some labels, slipped them into the ends of the pins, and pinned them to either the corresponding playdough or (for some of them) the general area in which they are.

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Living Without Part of Your Brain

I didn't expect at all for someone to be able to survive without a pretty major part of their brain. Since if you're missing your cerebellum, that's a pretty large part of your brain missing, taking in the fact that it contains 50% of all of your brain's neurons. I also found it very surprising that 9 people have managed to survive past a young age while missing that part of their brain, since the likely hood of them living past a young age is really rare. Also the fact that no one knew that she was missing her cerebellum until she was 24 years old is very surprising to me, then again, they didn't know that those young kids had their's missing until they got the autopsy done.

I looked up if it was possible for you to survive without your thalamus, and I was able to come up with an answer. No, you cannot live without your thalamus, let alone get it damaged. If your thalamus gets damaged, you can be stuck in a permanent coma. Since the thalamus is what controls your state of sleep and wakefulness, it also regulates your level of awareness and activity, and motor controls. So, it's really part of your brain that you cannot live without, that is, unless you don't want to be able to function.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Animation is Loading...Please Stand By

Here's another progress report on my 20 time project. Well, I've run into a set back, which hopefully I'll be able to resolve tonight. In the meanwhile, I did find the desired program after looking for some time, but I might have to then find another program to use with said program to be able to create an animation. So that makes up to having two set backs at the moment, but I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to overcome them quite quickly after I figure out what  I need and what I need to do for this all to work smoothly. My next steps are making sure that the download is successful and then figuring out how to use the program and how to animate with it. Which shouldn't be that difficult, I hope.

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Unit 7 Reflection

This unit was about the different joints in your body, movements your joints can make, how stretching affects muscles, different types of muscles, the functions and features (find the actual word for this ya fuck) of muscles, how muscles work/what causes muscle contractions (we created videos illustrating it, the video will be below), major muscles of the body and what they do, a chicken dissection, how muscle fibers respond to different types of exercise, and what are the causes and effects of using performance enhancement substances (we created a advertisement for one). When you think of joints, you usually would think of your elbow, knee, shoulder, and hip as being examples of joints. But there are other joints that people wouldn't normally consider to be classified as a joint, like the small cube like bones that are in your hands and feet, between those are one of the lesser known type of joint. Something that I would have liked to know about is about the micro tears that happen in your muscles when you exercise and how it can either lead to injury or lead to strengthening of that muscle. But that seems to be my only unanswered question for this unit, that is unless it is covered in the next unit? Guess I'll find that out. As a student, I've learned to keep everything in kind of a schedule so I can get everything done in time while doing it well and with my best effort. I've been working on my new years goals and for the most part it has been going as planned and working.



Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Performance Enhancement Advertisement

The causes and effects of using performance enchanting substances varies from each different substance, but they do all tend to have similar effects on the body. Some of the causes of using those substances are peer pressure, body image, media influences, and role models. Some of the common effects on the body when using the substances are really bad acne, stunted growth in teens, high blood pressure, unhealthy cholesterol changes, heart disease, blood clots and stroke, liver damage, jaundice, or liver cancer, headaches, aching joints, and muscle cramps, increased risk of ligament and tendon injuries, hepatitis B and C or HIV which causes AIDS, and baldness.

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Chicken Dissection

In this lab we took a frozen Safeway chicken and we went ahead and cut it in a way so we could see and find the different muscles, the tendons, and sometimes the bones in the chicken. But of course, before we could do any of that we first had to remove the skin off of the parts of the chicken that we wanted to see the muscles, which in some areas was way easier than others (removing the skin off the torso vs removing the skin off the arms or legs). While we were doing the dissection we labeled some of the muscles that will be shown below. When seeing how it all works, the bones, muscles, and tendons; you can see how the bone is the base structure, but it's also used for movement, the muscle is for helping support the weight that the bones bare and also help the bones move, and the tendons are what keep the muscles and bones connected and provides movement when the muscle pulls on the tendon which moves the bone. In the chickens we were dissecting, there were main differences in how their muscle are compared to ours, for example the two most major differences between us and the chickens are in our pectoralis major and pectoralis minor. Their pectoralis major and minor are huge compared to their relative body size, unlike ours which are rather small compared to the rest of our bodies. This is because of two reasons, first being that chickens need those muscles for flight, and second being we raised those chicken for their white meat, so that's why their pectoralis major and minor are actually bigger than they are supposed to be.


Thursday, March 17, 2016

20 Time Update

I've learned that I am fully capable of doing this project, but it's just gonna take quite a bit of work on my part, and patience. What I've learned so far about myself, one thing isn't much of a surprise, but I'm really stubborn sometimes about trying different programs to animate, I keep making things way more complicated than they actually should be, and I'm not always the most patient one out there. I've already hit one set back, which was using a program and not being able to figure out how to correctly use it, but I switched to a different program and am already planning to try using another program to see if it works better than the one I am currently using. I'll leave this off with what I have figured out what to do so far, don't worry about that meme, it's nothing and can be ignored.