Spring Break

During spring break I stayed in Michigan. For two days i actually worked all day. I actually really enjoy my job I do, it is pretty interesting to get to work the panels that go into plants. I impressed the guy who I was working for enough that he said that he could me as many hours as i want during the summer. One day though we went up to Manistee and went for a bike ride which was interesting since it got really windy half way through so I had to ride back and grab the truck to pickup my sister and my mom. Mostly this spring break though was spent catching up on sleep which i really needed.

Well it is a free post, so why don't I talk about something I find interesting. So I am going to go over my personal thoughts on windows 8.  So off to the right there is a picture of the new "desktop" or metro it is called. Pretty nice new start up screen, it gives you live weather news  and email and such right there. So first impressions pretty good. Now to the different things, because you might think the desktop is gone, but you would be wrong it is simply an program to run now. So now you run the desktop but there is a one big difference. There is no longer a start button, which is personally just strange. To access settings and such you have to put your mouse into the top right corner, which personally is not very intuitive. Also to get back to the start screen you basically have to do the same thing unless you know keyboard shortcuts. So thoughts on the whole desktop as an application, it just feels weird. If you just browse the web you will hardly use the desktop but if you are running other programs then you will use it much more and I feel that it is going to take some getting used to. Now onto to my favorites, aka the copy dialog box. It may sound like something trivial but it will be nice to finally be able to see how long it will be until something is done coping.  Overall, I enjoy windows 8. Is there somethings that could be made better yes but when it comes out on tablets and computers it will allow a more unified experience over both platforms.

If you are having a hard time remembering diffusion and osmosis I would recommend writing it down. Now if your issue is not remembering it but learning it, things are a bit different. So lets start with osmosis, H20 is the elemental name for water it has an O so H2O and osmosis go together. So in osmosis water flows from a high concentration to low. What that means is that if there is more water in one solution than the other on each side of the membrane water will flow towards the side with less water. So lets describe this more and less water I mean it is water it is all the same, right? Wrong, for example salt water has a lower concentration of water than distilled water. Well why is this you say, well that is because water is only the H2O, there are lots of other things in water such as salt and iron. If there is more of those other thing then there is less water. Now diffusion is different than osmosis because it deals with things that are not water. The concept though is the same, things will flow from high concentration to low. There are three types of diffusion: simple, facilitated, and active transport. Simple diffusion is when things simply pass in between the molecules in the cell membrane. It is simple so it requires nothing else for it to happen. Facilitated diffusion requires a protein to help thing pass through the membrane.  Facilitated starts with an f and fork starts with an f. You need a fork to eat food just as you need a protein for facilitated diffusion. Now active transport is a bit different. It moves things from a low concentration to a high. To do this it requires energy, which comes in the form of atp. Active transport basically shoves things into a cell. So when you are active you play soccer and in soccer you try and push the ball into the goal against what the defense wants.

Check out those examples:

Some active transport:

Yo, nucleus, I'm really happy for you. Imma let you finish. But the ribosome is one of the best parts of the cell ever. My reason why you make ask?  The nucleus is really full of itself. I mean really all the nucleus does is remember stuff and tell others what to do. I personally would rather work and make something of substance, something that is be used by others aka what the ribosome does. That is why I would want to be a ribosome if I had to be a part of a cell. The ribosome makes all the necessary proteins  for the cell, so basically it's a pretty big deal.  Well you might say who cares about proteins, and that is where I am going to stop you and remind you that proteins do almost everything in a cell other than store genetic information (and frankly who cares about that). Would there be any reason to store genetic information if the cell would die anyways, of course not, so without the ribosome the nucleus is useless (take that nucleus). Now I have to say the nucleus is not all that bad, it does help the ribosome out by telling it what proteins to make and how to make them which is pretty handy. The issue that I too many people see the nucleus as the most important part of the cell (which it clearly isn't). All the other parts of the cell deserve some credit. Without the rest of the parts the nucleus is absolutely useless, so the nucleus needs to be a little less self centered.

Just a brief  story about a ribosome being awesome.

 

Link for school: Click this thing.

Titrations....

I found the enzyme lab to be kinda interesting with our final result. It was a moment that you had to think of why you are getting the result that you are getting. Other than that though it reminded me why I hate titrations so much. I thought that when we would do titrations in biology that we would not have the issues that we had in chemisty, it turns out we had almost the opposite issues. In chemistry the titrant was too weak, so the it took way to much titrant to get a color change. In our experiment we got a color change almost instantly which although it is still an issue, I find it to be a less boring issue. So even though I didn't find anything really new in this experiment it was still very interesting, and made my hatred of titrations a tiny bit smaller.

Introduction

Hello, my name is Steven Bradford pretty obvious because it is at the top of the page. I am a senior at Sparta High School. I enjoy mountain biking, tennis, and camping. After high school I plan on going to either Ohio Northern University or Trine. I plan on pursuing a degree in computer engineering. The reasoning for me taking AP Biology is so I can try to get some more college credit.  What I really hope to come away from this class with is a college credit for biology.