10/26/2015 0 Comments about meI am a student in geography and I am trying to find a way to incorporate geography into the other aspects of my life i am passionate about.10/26/2015 0 Comments Last assignment
The last artifact for this class I will use will have to be my midterm and my final. I received an average of about 80% on the two assignments which is nothing to be too proud of, but I will try not to lose sight of the forest through the trees. This first point will be both embarrassing and impressive for me. I only took both tests once. Both times I didn’t plan accordingly and lost track of time, which is terrible, but I also am proud of it. I took those two tests all on my own, and the part I felt most comfortable with was the short answer portions. I was asked how burning fossil fuel added to global warming and I was able to link man made particulates caused by exhaust to the larger amount of green house gasses which in turn allowed less heat to escape. When I first began this class I was asked to create a plan to better take advantage of this class. I was worried because I had never taken an online class before and I was worried about my ability to stay on track. One of the ways I hoped to make this class important, and how I planned to get a take away from this was to incorporate it into the parts of my life I am passionate about. Before this semester of school I was deployed to the Philippines as a signals intelligence operator. Basically I worked with antennas and radio waves. There are multiple ways to send a signal to another location. One way, is line of site. This is when you could theoretically hang a string from one antenna and pull it in a straight line all the way to another antenna. That is the type that will not matter in this correlation. The other two are where my explanation of green house gasses comes into the picture. One is called reflection; you use the ionosphere to bounce the radio waves off the atmosphere back down to earth. Imagine a force field around earth, and a really bouncy super ball jumping back and forth between the earth’s surface and the force field. The third way, would be satellite communication. One antenna shoots its radio waves up at a satellite circling the earth, either a mechanical satellite or something like the moon, and it bounces off that satellite and heads back to earth. The problem comes in when you realize both of those shots of radio wave do the same thing, they shoot up towards those green house gasses, one gets through, the other bounces back. The reason one bounces through and one bounces back is the “angle of incidence.” This is the angle at which your radio waves make contact with the atmosphere. If it is a steep angle, like a rocket ship, it will burst through. If it is a shallow angle, like a plane landing, it will bounce. You don’t assume radio waves to act the same way a baseball does but, low and behold, it does. This has a lot to do with those green house gasses that we talked about heating the earth! I love that I was able to make that correlation and learn from two different avenues in my life to get to the same answer. This says a lot about me. I’m bad at time management, but I was able to find a way to learn. I am lazy and should have found a way to take my test twice, but I also did well even though I didn’t take advantage of all the resources available to me. This assignment reminded me that knowledge is connected; there is never a good reason not to learn something new because it will help you in all aspects of life. 10/4/2015 0 Comments First assignmentFor our first group project we put together a map set of the seismic activity in Pasadena, The United States of America, and North America. Much of it was very easy to identify and could be described as intuitive. We have learned about tectonic shift through elementary school and highschool, and we also have the benefit of living in southern California, not to mention that horrible San Andreas movie. Earthquakes are a part of our society but our understanding often stops outside when our house shakes it it is probably just an earthquake, aftershocks are hopefully coming, and the San Andreas Fault that runs pretty much along the west coast. During the creations of our map set however, there seemed to be a line of earthquakes that began somewhere around San Francisco and lead out towards Utah. I had no idea why, so I turned to Google. The San Andreas fault is much more volatile and it is the one closest to us so we know it well. But there are many smaller, less active faults running all throughout the country. I also found it interesting that there were earthquakes in locations miles from a fault. The resulting earthquake, many of these are on the east coast, have much gentler earthquakes but they can be felt for much larger distances. Lastly, different locations are affected by earthquakes to differing degrees, and therefore, have different building requirements. This has lead to a small scare because we are due for a large east coast earthquake where our building requirements are very loose. Ironically enough, the east coast may be more vulnerable to earthquake damage.
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