Since it’s summer, we don’t have to do any homework sets or work on the weekends, so we have a lot more free time to do things like cook, work on projects, go off campus, relax, etc. Because I didn’t have to do anything else last Saturday, I walked over to Lake Avenue to eat dinner and go grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s, and then decided to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Fortunately there’s really easy recipes online (I’m still trying to learn how to cook/bake). They turned out to be more chocolate chip cookies than oatmeal chocolate chip cookies since I didn’t have enough oatmeal though.
Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (one is missing...)
We didn't exactly follow all the instructions, but they turned out pretty tasty! After making (and eating) cookies, I started to work on cutting the plywood for DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) pads (see my previous blog post). One of the dorms has a table saw, so I went over there and got help from an upperclassman to cut the plywood.
Table saw
Plywood laid out in the shape of a DDR mat (still some cutting to do)
I ended up with lots of wood chips and sawdust all over my shirt, but I shouldn't need to cut much more wood for the DDR mats. The arrow panels will be made out of acrylic (lucite) plastic, while the rest of the DDR mat pieces will be plywood. Unfortunately, I'm really bad at measuring wood on a table saw, so some of the square pieces aren't exactly square. It should still be fine though, and we can make some adjustments later. Each "square" wood panel is supposed to be 11"x11", and will be covered with sheet metal before being attached to the plywood base. The acrylic arrows will sit on top of high density weatherstripping foam, which will compress slightly when someone steps on the arrow. Now we just have to wait for the rest of the parts to arrive in the mail! (The local Home Depot, according to the inventory online, actually does not have enough of the corner brackets that we need in stock, so we have to order those online anyway.) For people interested in building DDR mats, this thread has been very useful for design ideas.
Just last week, on an unassuming Thursday, the astro(physics) community got served two humongous cakes at once. Both the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) and the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (IceCube) have ground-breaking scientific findings to share with the class!
A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the mountains are beautiful, and mysterious sounds echo between our walls while we don’t even pretend to sleep.
This summer I had the incredible opportunity to do a 10-week internship at Gilead Sciences in Foster City, CA. For those unfamiliar, Gilead Sciences, Inc. is a research-based biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development, and commercialization of innovative medicines.
