Journal

Today was my first day of instruction at COSMOS. I got to work with the Linux workstations and Unix OS for the first time, and it wasn't that difficult. I was able to do some basic things in the terminal, and then had a lecture about biophysics. Then, I got to know how our robotics course was going to work. The most challenging part about COSMOS was the showers, I still need to figure out how to change the temperature.  

Today, I was able to speak to my roomate about his experience in Cluster 12, Introduction to Machine Learning. He told me that yesterday, he spent 4 straight hours coding in Python, and probably has to do the sam thing today. We had a discussion about the libraries we were using, and our experiences with them. 

In college, we are going to get lots of lectures on various topics throughout the day, so it is important to learn how to understand a lecture. It goes beyond simply being physically present in the classroom or hearing the words spoken by the professor. It involves actively engaging with the content, processing the information, and being to reflect that in your notes. I usually like to explain things to my friends to make sure that I am teaching the concepts to them, so when the test comes around, I can recall things I teach them.

We were able to go to the planetarium show, "Dark Universe," which offered a captivating exploration of a perplexing cosmic phenominon: dark matter/energy. The show was able to immerse me with the universe, and specifically trys to uncover what dark matter is show immerses viewers in a unique 3-D experience, which was essentially a dome with a projector playing the video. The show highlights the role of satellites and telescopes over time that have either ventured into space or contributed to the study of dark matter. These technological devices have enabled scientists to gather data have helped scientists reveal the invisible forces and matter shaping our universe. Satellites are robots, as they are controlled by software and complete tasks that were manufactured to perform the task they were set out to complete. In this case, satellites had to gain intel on the expansion of the universe by detecting the paths of galaxies and the heat they produced while expanding out. Computers have also helped simulate “The Big Bang”, and supercomputers such as the one recently created by Google could have the potential to detect dark matter passing by Earth. What this means is that we can track this matter down and somehow harness it in the future.

I feel relatively comfortable with working with the motor commands that we were taught and have been using during class, since we have been coding for the past week. There are a few methods and functions we have gone over in detail today, which I will need to brush up on and experiment with. As with biophysics, I am confident as I have lots of Python experience with working with strings, and also have a few projects I have done before. 

I previously have worked with dictionaries and tuples. But I relearned what mutable and immutable data types are, and how to manipulate dictionaries and tuples so that they can be modified. In dictionaries, keys cannot be changed,  but instead replaced. And the same thing can be said for items in tuples. I have actually used Dr. Dad-del's advice before, by learning python extensively in my AP Computer Science class, and creating a good create task that displayed my knowledge. It actually helped work with python easily in the biophysics course we have right now.