Back to Business S2-E1

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Cool it with a baboon's blood,

Then the charm is firm and good.

Acorns, Alchemy, and Anthropology

This semester I have much more time to work on research projects and that is exactly what I am doing! This semester will be my last at Phoenix College and I've been looking forward to this semester because of the academic freedom I have. Over winter break I finished up collecting my data for the long bones and I will be finishing data analysis by the end of this semester. Along with that, I am using the same long bones and I will be doing a Fourier transform to do a morphometric analysis to turn long bone exteriors into harmonics to examine the degree of curvature as it relates to bone strength using mechanical beam theory. Which is exciting because I will get to use R for the very first time!

Another part of my academic freedom is a math Professor and I are doing an independent course on the History of Mathematics. I will be going over a collection of important mathematicians and their proofs including Euclid, Archimedes, Al-Khwarizmi, and if time permits LaPlace. The purpose of this class is to develop a deeper understanding of the evolution of mathematics. I will be creating original proofs of my own proving the works of those named above, as well as writing about the influence and affect each mathematician had. And I want to be creative with looking at how these mathematicians influenced the world not just looking at how it affected the course of math but other facades of life too. For example, in researching Euclid I have found that his work was greatly influential to lawyers and logic. Notably Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson had a deep appreciation for Euclid and axiomatic thinking. Jefferson even drafted the Declaration of Independence using Euclidian logic.

And finally what's up with my title? This semester I have a new found obsession with Acorns and I can't get enough. After walking around PC's campus and seeing acorns all over the ground I wanted to find a way of using them. I see it as waste to through them away. So Mr. Haberkorn and I have been for the last few weeks working on processing these acorns. We want to make bread and stew out of them, just like the Native Americans did. And we also want to extract the tannins out of the nut meat and shells of all of the acorns to see if we can make an adhesive out of it. This experiment which in the beginning was just for fun has turned into an experience in sustainability, chemistry, and anthropology. It will defiantly make this semester interesting. Here are a few pictures of the acorn processing.

Original Tannin removal process, ineffective.

On the left boiled acorn shells, the dark color is the tannins,
On the right water with tannin that is being boiled to extract 
the tannin.