Week Eleven - Environment Diversity

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about diversity and my little plot of land I call home, I think of the variety of fruit trees we have! Two kinds of apple trees in one (called a combo, or hybrid? - with the tree trunks kind of wrapped around each other to look like one tree), plum tree (they are little mini plums!), grape vines, cherry tree, a newly planted pear tree, almond tree (I've yet to taste ONE almond because of the cursed squirrels!), and my FAVORITE, huge, beautiful apricot tree. I didn't like apricots until I tasted our apricots. They explode with sweetness, and are unbelievably juicy.

We have jasmine growing on our back deck, and on our front walkway. When it blooms, it is the most wonderful "welcome home" you can have after a long day of work and school. And a huge elephant ear plant in front.

One or two other trees/hedges that I don't know the name of, but I love the big oak tree that we almost cut down when we moved in. I'm so glad we didn't, it's beautiful, and the tree cutter guy told us Oaks are one of the best trees for the environment in terms of global warming. 

Other species - our little doggies! A random hummingbird, but not many of those, nor bees - I guess we don't have enough colorful plantlife. Raccoons that are eerily huge.  Squirrels that taunt our dogs for hours on end, a blue bird, and other birds that are our wake-up alarm, ANTS ANTS ANTS ANTS ANTS that invade our house every summer. Severe infestations!! Bats at dusk. Falcons (or hawks?) that hover in the afternoon. A random mosquito in the summer that gets through our screen.

Week Nine - Animations

So I love the idea of these animations - I'm always a sucker for pictures and colors. I wish it was a little more sophisticated because it could be a really great site. Some improvements:

-have a voice over or written blurb describe what's going on in the animation, and/or including more details as part of a bigger picture

- integrate some of the  animations together - like all the DNA, RNA animations, and how they play off of each other and are related! 

It just kind of left me wanting more.

Side note, the bucky ball reminds me of one of my dogs' toys. :)

Week Nine - Biochemistry Definition

"Biochemistry is the study of molecules in the absence of the rest of the organism."

This caught my eye because it's quite the opposite of TCM! We would never dream to study one component of a whole in isolation.  

I can't seem to really grasp this site. It's one of those where you re-read the same sentences over and over again but have no idea what you read. Doesn't have a great flow, seems kinda jumpy. Or maybe it's just my brain shutting down....

Week Nine - Gene Therapy Ethics

I am torn on the ethics of gene therapy. 

On one hand, especially since diving into the world of TCM and focusing on people and the elements in their most natural state, I can lean to one side and say that we have no business monkeying around  with gene alterations. It seems wrong to mess with the most fundamental and basic component of our being. It seems to be asking for trouble, and thoughts of a blasted open pandora's box enter my imagination. Where do you draw the line? I see lines and lines of perfect little cloned humans marching along. Where do we learn our "hard" life lessons from? Would the world have the same level of inspiration if we didn't see people overcoming health-related obstacles that might be preventable with gene therapy? How do we decide which genes get altered? Only very severe diseases? What qualifies as "very" severe? It seems a slippery slope of the list of diseases lining up to be eliminated with these therapies.......boom! Off comes pandora's lid....

Now on the other hand, I think, yes living in a manner that is as close to natural is the way to go. But we humans are a smart lot, yes we are. Can it be argued that as we encounter more and more disease and problems in this world, perhaps it IS natural evolution, and acceptable and appropriate even, to use our intelligent minds and problem-solve our way out of some of these messes. Why should someone have to live with Hepatitis B if we can figure out a way to eliminate it? 

Much to think about...

Week Eight - Chembalancer Review: Balancing Equations

I could not get the wfu.edu website to work, so I took a look at the richardbowles site instead. I already got the gist of how to balance equations, so I kind of breezed over some of the explanations, but I did learn two new little tidbits: 

1. to balance the larger molecules first, and the simpler elements last, and 

2. that it should be designated whether it is a solid, liquid, gaseous or aqueous, which is helpful to make these random configurations of letters jump off the page a and be a little more tangible and easier to grasp. It makes it less of a straight algebra problem, and more of a an actual chemistry experiment. Very good for beginners to stay engaged!

Week Eight - Chembalancer Review

I always had fun with algebra (nerd!), which is essentially what balancing equations is. This was a nice analytical gift for my heavily overworked theoretical brain. Metal insulting huh? Nourish Yin, Astringe what?? Give me numbers! There were a couple of equations it took me a few tries to hammer out, I guess I'm rusty. But it was a perfect amount of questions to get a sense for how to balance equations, and I made it through the whole set. Yippee!

Week Eight - Semiconductor of the Week: Germanium

Discovered at the end of the 19th century, the semiconductor named after Germany was not very economically useful until the 1940s when it was used for transistors and diodes in electronics. However, it soon was replaced by by its more high quality semiconductor cousin, silicon. Although silicon is a higher quality choice for these uses, it is only so in a much purer state than germanium needs to be. To offset this trade-off in purity, though, it is worth noting that silicon's availability is only limited by its production, while germanium has limited availability in nature. So it seems to make sense to use silicon for these applications since it has better quality, even though you need more of it. 

Dollar for dollar comparison ten years ago: 

Silicon, 1 kg, $10.

Germanium, 1 kg, $1800

The question would be then, economically speaking, how MUCH more silicon do you need to equal germanium's efficacy? 

Germanium is still very valuable today for multiple infrared and optical uses such as thermal imaging for the military, night vision and fire fighting applications as well as fiber optics uses in cameras and microscopes.