I began with the question of whether you could create ads for intermediary steps in the supply chains for the many products and devices that use rare earth elements. Supply chains are incredible opaque, and the need for them is driven by demand in the final products. My experience with efforts to clarify them in a way […]

I’m hoping to get some direction in class on two ideas, since I have unwisely spent time becoming invested in both. Idea #1 What if we tried selling all points of a supply chain as much as the end product? Uncover as much specific information for the supply chains of as many rare earths, or heavy […]

My poems for this week juxtapose the language of Trump’s 2018 Federal Budget with the Sequoia National Park text I’ve been using. Because the federal budget is not a text I enjoy engaging with and we learned natural language processing tools, I thought it might be interesting to use these new tools to decipher it. I found […]

This week we refactored our code–I updated my Sequoia Park AIM poems from last week. I didn’t get to correct a number of things I intended to–modularizing took longer than expected. There’s something weird going on where I’m getting a lot of the same rhymes line after line. After some trials I thought I had successfully […]

This week we were tasked with creating our own poetic form. I went to Yosemite over Spring Break so I was thinking about Sequoias–I was kind of amazed when I found this Sequoia National Park guide from 1937 on Project Gutenberg. I was stuck on how to create a poetic form from this when separately, I […]

Since there’s a Magic the Gathering API, I was hoping to continue working with card text this week, but in a more robust way. But, for some reason I kept getting a handshake error. I googled it, and people suggested using the request library, which I gather is somewhat more secure. I downloaded the libraries, […]

I decided to continue working with the same texts from last week because I was dissatisfied with their ultimate form. I thought it might be interesting to pick out words based on their length, which would allow me a lot of control over the line length and rhythm. My very ambitious goal was to create […]

This week for our assignment on cut-ups, I decided to mash up the text of about 30 Magic the Gathering Artifact, Enchantment, and Instant cards and the recipes from Student’s Hand-book of Mushrooms of America, Edible and Poisonous by Thomas Taylor. I picked arguably the best cards from these categories from the Magic Card database, […]

This week I spent some time learning about rare earths, which have very obscure element names but are ubiquitous. All their names end with the same few letters which seemed like it might lend itself nicely to computational manipulation. I wanted to play with the scientific taxonomy and naming conventions of these strange elements, the […]

For Temporary Expert I’m currently researching the concept “Limits to Growth,” which led me down the path of researching Phosphorus depletion, something I didn’t really know anything about. I decided to use source text from Phosphorus Futures, a research group. I liked the alliteration I noticed on the website and thought this might be fun […]