Nick Winterowd

It surprised me that half of my last year in high school was already ending. As I look back on what I've done in this class I want to deeply appreciate Dr. Bill for supporting me do what I'm interested in and giving me ideas for very cool projects. Starting from seismograph sensors and calculating hypocenters and epicenters of waves on Hawaii island, this class has inspired me to many things that not only were my projects. If I could do something different or better for the earthquake wave research, I would find seismographs with more accurate GPS and also do my calculations more accurately by using digital maps instead of handwritten maps. I will continue working on placing sound tiles in the hallway and experimenting with them because my capstone is related to noise levels in the dorm. 

It was a lot of fun to have 3rd-grade kids with us too.

If I were taking ISR another semester, I want to do things about aerodynamics(which I was going to do initially this semester). 

Outside of class, I started watching videos about space physics and astronomy, which I would've not ever been interested in watching just for myself. Science has become very fun by taking this class and inquiring what I was interested in. Thank you so much, Dr. Bill.

Now that I am working on my project from my room, I keep losing track of time and forget to do weblogs at the end of class. However I have been taking footage of my project throughout the day, so I will post them while explaining each day. I first started to think of what I needed to reduce the noise in the hallway. My idea was to place sound sponge tiles cut the edges of floor pads and put them between where the door and the threshold hits. Kelan helped me get the sound tiles because I needed to get them from the attic of the Elab, but I was scared of heights.

Unfortunately, although I cut the floor pads thin enough that the doors would close when slammed, they still make a massive noise. So, I decided to do the sound tiles around doors and in the hallway. After I put them around my noisy neighbor's door and to my door, the tape I used was already gone, so I brought more spare tape. 

In one of the weeks, we had 3rd graders come to the Elab once again. I worked for the VR headset station, and the kids loved them. I felt bad for the few who couldn't experience it due to the sake of time. It was hard to keep the kids away from the kids with VR on them, and one kid accidentally was punched in the face by going too close. Levi and Koi helped me take control of the kids and keep them away from the VR kids. 

Now that I finished putting sound tiles around my side of the hallway, I'm putting some on the other side, and then I will experiment with the noise difference between the hallway without the tiles and with them to see if the tiles actually work. If they don't, I will take them off and put them back into the Elab, where they were.

After a bit more than a week after I placed the floor tiles, I noticed that they kept moving around, and the tiles kept disconnecting. And making a disaster in our hallway. This also made it difficult for the housekeepers to clean the floor because of the gaps between the floor and the tiles. I asked the housekeepers if it would be fine if I placed the tiles on the floor without a gap, and they said it was fine. So, I decided to cut the tiles so that they fit perfectly on the floor. I would see if this could prevent the tiles from moving around everywhere and detaching by putting tiles down just for the entrance. I will check every day if this functions, and if not my next plan is to put sponges on the wall to reduce the noise. 

I learned how to fly in the fight simulator. I flew an F15 and tried low-altitude flying, landing, and departing. I crashed every time I tried to land because controlling the aircraft parallel to the surface was so hard. I found a problem with the simulator set: the chair keeps moving during the flight because it's not locked on the ground. So, I might see if it's possible to put lockable wheels onto the chair.

Levi and I went down to the softball field and boat house and measured watts of solar panels. Some of them had above 150, but some had under 40. They mostly should be around 200 was what Dr. Bill said, so we found that some of the pannels were becoming junk.

The wind wasn't strong, so I was able to try and fly a drone. I flew the DJI mini 2. I couldn't fly it so far because it would lose connection pretty fast. I expected that I could at least fly it to the solar pannels. I will check if there is something I can do to fly it further. The camera on it was pretty good.

I made two big maps of Hawaii Island to make it easier to triangulate and see the completed map. I used a projector to trace the map onto the paper. I put small triangles where the peak of mountains on Hawaii Island exists. Next, I will label and write down the stations I choose to use, and triangulate from them. 

Since the waves I used last time to experiment weren't big enough and weren't accurate, I decided to use a newer and larger wave. The new wave I choose to use is from an earthquake on 9/22/2024 at 6:21 am. This one was large enough that some people were able to feel it, so it was easy to see the P and S waves of it in all three different shakes. The WiFi connection wasn't so strong, and it took too much time to get to rhaspberryshake.org, so I couldn't get to the process of calculating/triangulating the epicenter and hypocenter of the wave. Since Dr. Bill was nice and made me a big map of Hawaii island with the island science class crew, I will mark my triangulations down on the map from now on.

I somehow couldn’t submit this although I pressed save & view and publish. This day I started to find relative waves in different seismograph stations. It took time to find ones that had a visual P and S wave that was close to 10 seconds apart. I found stable stations and found a wave that could be relevant for other stations too. Next class I will start mapping and may be calculate. 

This is for my Aug 30th class.

Dr. Bill introduced me to a student’s weblog from 10 years ago that did a project familiar to mine. There, he was researching distance and time of P and S waves from an earthquake in Japan. I tried to calculate the same earthquake, but got a different answer from his. It seems that this was because he was calculating the distance above surface and I was calculating the direct distance; or it just could be my calculation mistake.