A Stone Age Artist

Stone Age Art!

So in the stone age, people didn't exactly have paintbrushes. Or paint. Instead, they would use their hands or sticks to work with dyes from berries or flowers, sometimes even crushed up rocks. They used techniques like this to tell stories, whether through hidden meanings or literal pictures. 
You could find these pictures--paintings, rather--on the rocky walls of caves. 

In our last two lessons of social studies, we were tasked to plan and create our own stone age art on the walls of the older buildings. These buildings will probably be knocked down soon, so it's fine!






To your right here is my plan. Ignore the fact it looks like it was inked on by an angry squid. Are they the ones with ink?

This is proof that I actually painted and put effort into my painting.

Yes, I am using a paintbrush. Don't judge me, I don't like getting paint on my hands, okay?! 

The whole process was very fun but kind of irritating when I picked up sand rather than putting down paint.

This is my final product. I cut out one of my animal creatures because of spacing issues.

What exactly is going on here? Well, it looks like these people are hunting the early ancestors of the alpaca. I don't know man, these were meant to be giraffes but they look more like llamas and alpacas.

And for sh*ts and giggles, here's a video of us 10Hh idiots

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Cellphones. The Boomer's Devil

In social studies, we've been doing a small study on device use in our year and the history of cellphones.

First, we had to record how much we use our devices, this is shown in these charts.
Over 77 hours (From Friday at 3pm to Monday at 8:30), we recorded how many hours we spent using anything from our phones to our laptops. I used "Instant" an app on the Play Store. We shoved all this information onto a doc to throw into these charts. We can see that Phones are the most used and people are using their devices for around 11 to 15 hours of a weekend.

Over these 77 hours, we had to create a timeline showing information on the history of cellphones and how they have evolved.
<- This
is it :)

But First... Let Me Take A Cell-fie

Aim: 

Generate energy using an electrochemical cell.

Equipment:
Zinc metal
Zinc Nitrate solution
Copper metal
Copper nitrate solution
Potassium nitrate solution
Paper towel + Tape
3 beakers (We used two 250ml and one 150ml)
Voltmeter
Iron wool




Method:

1. Gather the equipment. You have no experiment without equipment!
2. Roll up the paper towel and tape it in place. This acts as our salt bridge
3. Taking your smaller beaker, place your salt bridge inside. Place some potassium nitrate in the same beaker and wait for it to soak.
4. While it's soaking, clean off the top few layers of the metals and place one of them into each of the larger beakers. 
5. Connect the voltmeter to the two pieces of metal.
6. With the zinc metal, put in a bunch of zinc nitrate (I'm not exactly sure how much.) Do the same with the copper.
7. Finally, place in your soaked salt bridge, making sure it does not accidentally touch the metals.
8. Record the results.

Results:

We managed to generate about 0.8 volts of energy, our highest being around 0.902 volts. In theory, it should've been 1.101 volts, but we'll go over that later.

Discussion:

Right. Now to the juicy stuff. What the heck is happening? Well, in short, electrons. In this cell, there are two things that can happen in each beaker. The zinc metal, the Zn, has 2 electrons in its outer shell. It doesn't want that. So, it can give away its two electrons and become Zn²⁺ or the zinc solution, the Zn²⁺ we have in the beaker, can gain 2 electrons and become zinc metal. The same can happen in the copper beaker too. Now, because both movements can't happen at the same time and zinc is more reactive than copper, so the metal is going to lose electrons rather than the zinc ions gaining any. The voltmeter is tracking this movement. This means our copper ions are going to be gaining electrons and becoming copper. If we had left the cell for a g e s we would've seen more copper metal in the beaker than what we began with. 
But... we had a potassium-nitrate-soaked-paper towel connecting the beakers? What? As we know, the paper was soaked in K⁺NO₃⁻ and that there's a bunch of electrons leaving the Zn moving into the Cu. The movement of electrons is going to cause an imbalance. There's going to be a bunch of negative charges with the copper and a bunch of positive charges with the zinc. Nature likes to be balanced. So nature would implode if this was imbalanced (I'm kidding. I think.). So it's the salt bridge's job to balance this, make it all even and stuff.
While all of this is happening, we generated around 0.882 volts. It tended to fluctuate a lot but my clearest image is 0.882 so we're going to go with that.

Evaluation:
Nothing really... went wrong during this experiment. Obviously, we didn't do it to the exact year 13 standard but that's difficult to do for year 10 students. Next time, I'd want to learn more about why the voltage was lower than it's potential. As previously stated, in theory, it should have been about 1.101 volts. This is because the cell potential of zinc is 0.762 V and the cell potential of copper is 0.339 V. When added together you get 1.101 V. But we got less than that. And I think that it has something to do with the concentration of our chemicals, the resistance given by the salt bridge, and how much we cleaned the metal. 

AND PEGGY! - Group Performance Task

Who is in your group? And what is each person doing?

We have Nadia, Chyna, Josh, Logan, and me! Nadia will be Angelica, Chyna will be Peggy, I am Eliza, Logan is Burr, and Josh is a supporting character.

What song have you chosen and why?

We are doing the Schuyler Sisters because it's a song that we agreed we could all work on together and have our own roles.

Add a link to the song you have chosen.

What is the song about?

The song is an introduction to the Schuyler Sisters and the setting, as well as the whole idea of the revolution.

Which part of the song will you start rehearsing first and why?

I think we will just work on vocals and getting the song down.

R a i n b o w s

Imagine your government having control on who you’re allowed to love and create a family with. No, seriously, what if a man and a woman weren’t allowed to get married because they weren’t attracted to the same sex. Stupid, right? So why should it be the same for two people of the same sex? It’s a right, it’s not harming anyone, and it’s wrong to make laws based on religious beliefs. I’ve never got the whole debate, really. I mean, taking away that option to get married is a straight breach of human rights. Human rights were created so that each and every human is equal. Regardless of sex, race, nationality, religion, or another status, as stated by the United Nations. Article 16 of the United Nations human rights states that ‘Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.’ and that ‘The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.’ Nowhere in that statement, nor in the whole document, does it say that people attracted to the same gender or sex is exempt from the right? Did you really want to take away someones human rights because they might be gay? Another human right is the right to religion, as stated in Article 18 (“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”). This includes the absence of religion. When you think about it, a lot of homophobia can usually boil down to religion-based reasons. My God said this. The bible said that. I get it. Yet, that’s not really fair, is it? Outlawing the union of a whole community just because of the beliefs you more than likely do not share. Not everyone is a Christian. Forcing religious beliefs onto others and even onto laws is downright messed up. If I had a dollar for every time someone said that exposing children to gay relationships will make them gay, I’d have enough money to fund an entire same-sex marriage of my own. I grew up exposed to straight couples. Everywhere. What happened to me? When you think about it, gay marriage, or same-sex marriage, doesn’t affect anyone but… people who are attracted to the same sex. People joke about when a man is gay he takes another man with them, leaving the rest for everyone else. Same would go for lesbians too. Seriously though, it’s not harming anyone else. Nobody is being forced into same-sex marriages, as some people seem to think. While it’s true that seeing a gay married couple will force people to understand and raise questions about sexuality and identity, there’s no guarantee that your kid will be anything other than straight because of it. In fact, there’s no proof in favour of that idea in the first place. It, in itself, is crazy. All in all, it doesn’t matter what your religion is or what effect it has on you and your children. Marriage is a human right. So, why isn’t same-sex marriage accepted everywhere? Did you know that only 30 countries allow same-sex marriage? Out of 193 countries recognised as state members of the UN. Do you know how crazy that is?! We can’t just let that slide. We must do something about this horrible oppression.