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No School; It's Cold!

2/3/2019

Not a whole lot happened this week, so I'll be doing one long post this week rather than my normal two. This week started off pretty well: my friend and I were starting to understand Signals class when North Dakota entered a deep, deep freeze. Temperatures on Tuesday and Wednesday plunged to -30F (-34C), and so school was cancelled for both Tuesday and Wednesday. This meant some much-desired relaxing time. More importantly, it gave us time to work on our signals homework.

We are currently learning about convolution in Signals class, which involves taking integrals while also varying a time constant *t*. From what I understand, convolution is the mathematical technique by which a person takes an understanting of how a system works and uses that understanding to interpret an input signal. We were almost able to understand it Thursday night, and Friday's lecture finally pieced together the last couple of gaps in the proceedure.

We didn't have much time to work on the aquaponics, aside from a quick run to Menards (a home-improvment store popular in the upper Midwest) for some Perlite growing medium. As I mentioned earlier, we previously used only river rock as our growing medium. These were very heavy and didn't provide very much support for the root system. Perlite, however, is much lighter and finer. It will provide proper support for an extensive root system without making the bin too heavy. A good root system is especially important in our aquaponics system, since all of the nutrients will be supplied only through the fishwater. Here's a picture of our Perlite:

Perlite in Bags [IMG]

My friend Jake has been growing a tray of microgreens (radishes, specifically), which he was able to harvest this week. The 10" by 20" trays produced enogh microgreens to fill several small tupperwares - we were very pleased. They taste just like radishes, but are little sprouts instead.

In hall gov, we've been preparing for our Superbowl party. Besides ordering obscene amounts of food, we also decided to chill the drinks using snow from outside. The party will be later tonight, and we anticipate good attendence.

For my website, I'll be spending some time refactoring and redesigning so that it meets some requirements and reccomendations for my English class. The class was instructed to use Wix, but my teacher gave me permission to instead iterate upon my hand-coded website - I greatly appreciate this since I wasn't too keen on giving up my hard work thus far.

Happy Sunday!