Wednesday 14 August 2013

Day 7: Head over feet

Dear readers,

yesterday the project leaders finally had a chance for some rest however, they decided they will surprise the participants by putting Project X to action. Mateja, Renan, Ruben, Sebastijan and Neva went to the store and bought quite worrying amounts of chocolate and other yummy stuff you need for making two delicious chocolate cakes. Matea really outdone herself and the boys helped while the logistics (Neva) struggled with writing yesterdays daily news. During all that participants were happily working in their new just-for-today workshop labs and you can read their impressions in todays news. Finally, we bring you a few thoughts about the school that our lecturer for the day, Leo Sutic, wrote about the school: "If travel is a good deal of waiting, S3 is anything but. Upon arriving I was quickly rushed to the day's briefing session. The next day was also packed: project work, workshops and lecture followed in quick succession. Anyone making it through this will make it through anything."

Love,
Petra & Neva



Today we had our workshop projects and our group took upon itself the task of measuring the universe. Our project leader, Vanja Šarković, guided us through the history of astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology from the ancient times when the geocentric model was used to the 20th century where modern (difficult) cosmology rules the day (and night).  We took our time debating whether the models used in the past are correct or not and why. Furthermore we used our time to solve some of the problems that have been bugging astronomers for a long time – such as: retrograde motion, understanding of Hertzsprung–Russell diagram and main-sequence fitting, problem with the flatness of a galaxy’s spectra, space expansion and Hubble law. The concepts we mostly worked on (and hopefully understood) are the evolution of ideas, the nature of light, character of space and gravity ect.

 With love,
The Enteršpajz

P.S. We ran into this strange singing man just a light year away from the Gymnasium. Check it out!



Enteršpajz in action


Enteršpajz workshop leader Vanja in action 

Dear readers,

Impossibble... It is truly impossible to wake up this early - 6:45 am. Almost dead, the morning workout killed the last drop of energy in us. The  short project work began. After rapping it up, the true one started. Being like a chemist makes you feel incredible. And yes, we have a cool name - we are The Chameleons. You may ask why - but we won't answer, think about it (it has something to do with changing colour). Anyhow, prepairing the experiment was a completely new experience for some of us. Murphy's law tried to stop our adventure but we stood strong ad won just like we do every time. We synthesized a red powder - Radman's magical formula (€53/mg).

With love,
The Chameleons



The Chameleons in action

Hi guys, we are the Blast : Matea, Reka ,Domagoj with our leader Nikolina. Today we had fun learning about flu viruses and bioinformatics. We learned some theory and we used flu as a model organism in the process of learning . We discovered few pages where we could find lots of useful data about biology (for free!) and we concentrated on genetics. We observed how fast a virus change, and how successful the vaccines are. Our presentation was quite AWESOME ;) we could answer all the questions correctly. 

With love,
The Blast



The Blast in action


Today Stjepan, Michael and I (Tonko) were working on customization of our own OS. We've managed to set up Linux operating system from scratch, from handling with the 'black screen' to GUI. It was really fun to learn something more about operating systems, user interface and lots of other things. Of course, we couldn't do that without our workshop leader Jens Rauch! All in all, we were delighted that we broaden our knowledge outside of our projects.

With love,
The OS Godz


The OS Godz in action


So today was a swapshop day. The three of us, Laviru, Karla and Monika attended a swapshop by Domagoj Fijan titeled Quantum algorithms. Since quantum mechanics is very complex, we'll try to explain in short notes things we learned today:
-        first of all à quantum mechanics is AWESOME!
-        quantum mechanics is strange and abstract (e.g. When you throw a ball, it goes through the wall.)
-        Schrodinger had an imaginary cat and a box with the poison and his cat was in the same time dead and alive à that's how we came up with the name of our group: DEAD OR ALIVE
-        yesterday was Schrodinger's 126th birthday according to Google
-        we used Schrodinger's cat example to exaplain the superposition of states in quantum mechanics which enabeled us to check all the solutions of some problem at once
-        this phenomenom is what makes quantum algorithms very fast
-        and finally, we used Grover's algorithm to solve '' the boxes problem''

The end.
The Dead or Alive
(at least in this parallel universe)


 The Dead or Alive in action

After physics and computer science we discovered magical chemistry. 
There was some rough hairy guy, and we actually did't know what we was talking about.
But, he showed us some really good video about ferrofluids.
Our workshop leader wanted to poison us with some chemicals (NH3, HCl...), but we found masks around and we succesfully
survived. :D
After all, we made our awesome ferrofluids, so here take a look. ;)

With love,
The Crazy

The ferrofluid made by the Crazy



The Crazy crew

Finally we bring you some photos of the organizers struggling with daily news and other organizational bussiness and everyone eating the magnificent cake that Mateja made. 



Petra in action


Neva in action



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