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Final Recess Day*
The last day of recess ended at the Siempre Verde garden. This is an urban garden run by members of the community. It’s super close to SFPC and most probably wouldn’t notice it when just walking by, but it really is a beautiful space. We had a gardener who put a lot of work into preserving the land for the garden speak about all the trouble one has to go through to preserve a space like this in the city from being developed over. A super interesting and inspiring story and a great way to end the last recess.
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Recess Day 3*
Recess day 3 began with a trip to the green roof of the Bronx County Court House. The building itself is really beautiful, but the roof is even more amazing. We just spent some time exploring and even climbing up some ladders to an even higher point on the roof!
Next we took a very cold ferry to Staten Island.
Word on the street is that it’s a pretty weird place and it wasn’t long before we met a strange person at the Maritime museum. We were just popping in as a back up plan to finding an entrance to some underground tunnels and the owner of the museum came up to us and was very weirdly excited that we were there, needing to take all of our zip codes for his records. Once we managed to get out of that conversation we tried a back way into the tunnels but were almost caught. As a last and final resort, we tried going in through a more obvious door in some woods that required buying tickets to a Chinese Scholars garden first. That gave us access to the woods with the door and we made it in! The tunnels were super fun - it’s really exhilarating to trespass!
And we even ended up making it to the Chinese Scholars Garden as well:
We finished the day looking over the water on the north shore of Staten Island before taking a ferry back:
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Recess Day 2*
Today was our first full day recess with Ida. Our first stop was the Greenwood cemetery. Ida’s friend gave us a tour and taught us a lot about the history of the people buried there, the differnet tomb styles, and the crazy plants originally intended as a small decoration that have taken over a ton of space.
Next we took a nice long stroll through Red Hook and checked out the Gowanus Canal which is heavily polluted…although it really doesn’t look too bad.
Finally, we ended the day at a Leigh Valley barge. This barge celebrates its 100th birthday this year which is so cool! It’s been docked in New York for the past 20 years and has served as a museum, performance boat, and home to it’s owner who is a professional juggler.
We ended the day relaxing and playing around on some sculptures while waiting for the ferry to take us back to Manhattan.
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Recess with Ida*
Zach started off this morning with a class on text processing which I was SUPER excited about. He did a little website scraping with Beautiful Soup which was a nice refresher since I usually use regex. He also showed us some ways to analyze text like the Levenshtein distance which measures the ‘distance’ between words. I think I want to use this in my particle system sketch to control forces between words - maybe words that are ‘closer’ to each other could have a greater attraction to each other?
We finished the day with Ida’s first recess field trip. We started off by checking out the remains of some abandoned subway stops that were build using the neumatic system. You can see them if you look out the window on the 6 line.
Next we made our way to the New York public library to find out that it was unfortunately closed because of Veteran’s day. They have some remains from the neumatic mail system that used to be used in Manhattan. We finished the trip by taking an air tram to Roosevelt Island. Wonder why? They apparently use a neumatic system for their trash. Overall a super fun day with great weather!
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Drawing and memory*
Taeyoon had a drawing + circuits class today which was super fun. At first his classes are always really overwhelming because I usually have no idea what the heck is going on. Once I spent some time with it and asked Taeyoon a few questions, I was feeling a lot better. I think it really helped to make drawing a part of the class because it really forced you to consider whether or not you fully understood the concepts - or at least enough to draw them out in a way that makes sense. Today’s lesson was focused on memory. We created a circuit with 2 switches - one switched and LED on and off as expected, and when a second switch was activated, it held the condition of the LED. So satisfying, even if it was a super basic memory model.
Check out my rendition of the idea of holding bits to create memory: ‘Meowmory’
