wordsworth

I watched a video on cancer again today. It was very interesting. The first section of the video talks about how smoking can cause cancer, and I found it rather interesting. The video says that lung cancer has surpassed breast cancer as the leading cancer for women. The smoke acts as an environmental carcinogen. The smoke acts as a mutagen that causes cancer and it also causes tissue damage. It does the same thing that alcohol or asbestos can do to the system. It causes increased proliferation, meaning that more cells are created, and an increase in mutations, which means that there are more cells with a replication error or damage. There are about six different cancer-associated mutations that affect the cells: an increase in proliferation, a decrease in cell death, angiogenesis – blood cells within the tumor, an increase in cell motility, an increase in invasion, and some other issues. There are people that have developed treatments that can target precise mutations. Apparently some doctors have developed molecularly targeted therapies, also called personalized medicine, which could make chemotherapy obsolete. I also learned about oncogenes which are mutation altered genes that can cause cancer.

I also worked on some more of the math problem sets. I worked on the graph one again. Finally got five in the row on the really hard problems. I also watched some videos and worked on a new problem set about graphs of functions and their derivatives. It is about as fun as the last one. It tends to be frustrating when I can’t get five in a row correct. Especially when I am really sure that I got it right.

So Yesterday I did some more math. It was cool because I watched a couple videos about practice problem simulators. They were all very interesting. They took me a long time to actually understand. The first involved moving orange dots that control the derive lines on a graph. It basically provides a visual representation of the derivative on a graph. The orange dots align to form the derivative of the original graph. If an orange line does not connect through the orange dots then I did not make the derivative right. That is how I knew if I got it right. The first few I did not do so well on. Sometimes my directions would be off. But once I got it right it seemed pretty simple, so that was nice. The next practice session was really cool too. It also involved graphs and the goal was to highlight a region of the graph. For example the question would be something like “A function f(x) is plotted below. Highlight an interval where f(x)<0 and f′(x)<0.” After reading the question I would try to pick a section of the graph that fit the description. This practice was really hard for me to get through. I got it ok at first, got a couple correct in a row. Then I was starting to get worse. I guess I just got lucky the first few times. Anyway I did kind of give up on that one. But I will go back to it eventually.

So tonight I worked on it again for an hour. Only got a little better but still could not get it to be five in a row. So the increase in my sufficiency was not that significant. Guess this is something I am going to have to work on a lot more.

Today I did a lot of work. It felt like most of it was not watching class videos when in reality the time was split pretty evenly. The first thing I worked on was ebay stuff. I looked at the pictures that exist on the big computer and priced what I could using ebay. I still have to work on the shipping prices but once I look at that and weight the items I can put the items on ebay. Then I put the pictures into individual folders and then those folders into another folder.  I really like folders. They make everything neat and tidy. Then after that it started raining but I wanted to work on the tile. So I brought it inside. It also gets kind of icky with bugs outside, lots of spiders in the tile. But I shock them all off. Also I found out that the red ground leaves red on my legs when they get sweaty from sitting there.  Either way I did about 5 tiles in an hour. Got them pretty clean too.

After that I did more calculus. Watched a lot of videos. At the end of this session of videos there were practice questions. You have to get five in a row before the program moves on. I did not do that well. I kept not getting five in a row so much that I eventually got five in a row just because the questions recycle. Some of them were really hard. I will either go back and try them again or wait awhile until I do.

Either way that way my day today.

On Monday I just spent some time exploring Khan Academy. They have a lot of interesting videos and classes on that site and they are all well organized. There are some computer programing videos that seem interesting.  The programming seems to use a programming system called JS. The intro videos are about drawings and animations which seem pretty interesting. I did not watch a whole video but the part I did watch seemed easy to follow and well put together. I watched some of the math videos to have deemed them to be much more helpful then the MIT videos. The person who narrates the videos likes to start at the very beginning. For example, I watch two different videos involving slope and in each video the commentator went over the basics of finding the slope of a line before going into detail about the slope of a curve.  It was a refreshing change since all the videos at MIT just jump right in. It is kind of like the “previously on…” whatever tv episode you are watching. Either way it helps me understand what is going on step by step. I learned how to understand simple derivatives, those involved in finding the secant lines within a curve. I cannot explain it all that well. All I know is that it involves the slope, which I already know about, and after you find the slope it involves setting the change in x equal to zero and figuring out the equation from there. Pretty easy and straight forward. I have not gotten to the harder derivatives yet but I am sure they will be explained in a manner that can be easily understood. I really like Khan Academy. It might be a bit redundant at times but that might be just what I need in order to understand what the heck is going on with this crazy math.

This was supposed to be posted last night but I fell asleep.

So I started watching some videos about caner. The class I thought I would take about cancer did not actually work out. Turns out that I had to buy that book, the links did not go to anything I could read. Anyway that is not really a problem because the biology class I was going to take has videos about cancer! So I still get to learn about it! I think it is also better this way because reading textbooks can get kind of boring and I tend to get tired. Which is a thing that I hate happens but it does. Anyway, the videos are pretty great actually. From the first video I have learned a lot about cancer. Apparently there are at least 250 different types. They connect epithelial tissue, connected tissue, and blood cells. Cancer is considered a “genetic disease” but not because it is inherited. Granted, there are cancers that are inherited, but apparently most are due to genetic alteration that happen within a cell. There are also chromosome alterations that cause cancer. Sometimes there are too many chromosome pairs, called aneuploidy, and sometime there is a chromosome abnormality that causes multiple pieces to combine into one chromosome. I do not know why I find it fascinating but I do. Not as much as psychology but I still like it.

Alright so the last couple videos I watched dealt with proteins. I did not realize until now how much proteins really do for the body. Apparently they do everything; they make up the structures of the cell, the enzymes. They also function in defense and the movement of the cells along with other things. Thought the one thing they are not involved in is hereditary information. They are very complex though, made of groups of amino acids usually called peptides. The chemical structure involves an alpha Carbon surrounded by four different functional groups. Three of these groups stay the same for each amino acid.  The fourth group is usually labeled R, called the side chain, and can be polar, non-polar, or charged. I think it is all pretty interesting. Gives a person a bit of perspective on the human body. I mean there is so much complexity.  I mean the second video I watched was thirty minutes long talking about the different forms of the amino acids, specifically the R chain. There are so many different varieties. I have a handout that only talks about twenty of them. Each variety have a different function. Each peptide has at least three amino acids, meaning 20^3 combinations.

Either way this is so fascinating. I mean I enjoy learning about it a lot. I just do not think it all sinks in. There is so much vocabulary. Anyway, I am glad that it fascinates me. That means that I am willing to watch all the videos through and through.

So I realized why biology was so hard before. Endless vocabulary, literally so much. I mean lipids alone are so complex. There are multiple varieties and those varieties have varieties. The most interesting to me where the triglycerides. Triglycerides are made up of glycerol and fatty acids. They tend to spontaneously make up the membranes of cells. There are two types of fats that I learned about, Saturated fats and Unsaturated fats. The saturated fats have no double bonds and can pack together tightly, leading to a high melting point. These fats are pretty bad for you and it’s a good idea to stay away from them. The unsaturated fats are divided into two separate types, the CIS and the Trans fats. The CIS contain double bonds, allowing them to pack together poorly and have a low melting point. These fats are better for your body and can even be good. The trans fats seem to be the worse and behave just like the saturated fats. During the class the teacher showed a picture of where to find the fats on the back of the container. So today when I was eating cream cheese I looked on the back to see what fats are in it. There are apparently zero trans fats in cream cheese, which is good since that is the worse kind. I did not pay attention to the other types. Also the drink that mom likes has zero total fats. So that is nice. Anyway, I think I might start paying attention to that more. Should be interesting to see what I can find out. I wonder how much fat is in butter. I bet there is a lot. But I like butter way to much to give that up. If I gave up butter that would mean vegan baking…. Nope I am definitely not going there. Moral of the story: Biology has made me love baking all the more.