mirror blogs

The members of the Megaband have resumed their blog writing this arc. Matylda and Quinn wrote great posts about the first two weeks of the new Mirrors arc. Here are some excerpts and thoughts from the two of them:From Matylda:On Tuesday my band had classes about mirrors. We were experimenting with mirror-writing.First, our teacher showed us interesting article about Leonardo Da Vinci (http://www.inventorpat.com/leonardo.htm). Leonardo didn't write normal. He wrote using mirrors. People couldn't read his notes. We don't know why did he write like this but probably it was kind of secret code. This article shows other explanation of it. Enjoy reading :)We wrote in mirror too. It was really funny and really difficult. I tried mirror drawing - it was more difficult than writing!From Quinn:Throughout the next week, we studied art with Phillip. He taught us about the six elements of art: 1. Lines 2. Shapes 3. Form 4. Color 5. Texture 6. Space. After he taught us about those, he taught us about all the different kinds of symmetry. We picked three different kinds of the symmetry related categories and made collages with paper cut outs of the shapes. We also talked about how you can relate mirrors to art.One day with Christie, Velocity read an article all about mirrors and if they lie or tell the truth. We also wrote our own entries about whether we thought that mirrors lied or not and why.Over the course of a couple days the band managed to listen to a full length radio lab podcast about mirrors. There were three sections and the first section talked about people mirroring other people. The second section was about the difference between what you see yourself like in the mirror and how other people see you from their perspective. The third section was about anti-particles that are basically mirrored normal particles. We all wrote down something that interested us that they mentioned in the podcast. We then all researched that thing and wrote a paragraph about it. I was interested in cloud chambers which they mentioned in the third section. Here's my entry:

I was wondering about cloud chambers and how they worked. I found out that you can use them to figure out if a room consists of filtered, dust free air or if it consists of dust. For cloud chambers to work there needs to be dust in the room. You drop water molecules (they would be so tiny that you wouldn’t be able to see them with a naked eye) and if there isn’t dust, they would just fall to the ground and they wouldn’t make a cloud or interact with other water droplets. But if there is dust, you would get a quite interesting result. The dust would collect the water molecules and create bigger droplets. As the water molecules attach to the dust particles the water droplets would become visible and they would make clouds. Cloud chambers and this method are most commonly used to detect ionizing radiation which is deadly. This radiation is made up of particles that travel with enough force and speed to launch an electron from an atom or molecule. This radiation can be generated by nuclear reaction, very high temperature or due to acceleration of charged particles. I found this all quite intriguing.