Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Breaking away essays

Breaking away essays The move breaking away is about four teenage high school graduates name Dave Stohler, Mike, Cyril and Moocher. Dave the main character has decided to spend the year hanging out and having a good time with his friends. Breaking Away is about the hostility between the college fraternity students at Indiana University and the locals called cutters, which are Dave and his friends. Dave is a very talented bicycle rider and wants to be like the Italian racers.   He idolizes the Italian racing team, because he enjoys bicycle racing to the point that he imitates them.   He won many local races without breaking a sweat.   He poses as an Italian exchange student to get Katherine, a sorority girl, to like him. Cyril was beaten up after a sorority girl informed the frat guys the "outsiders" were singing to Katherine.   Mike was enraged when he found out and arranged a fight between the two groups at a local bowling alley. This movie is about the differences between the wealthy frat students and the locals.   Dave and his three friends are not doing anything with their lives after high school.  Mike is jealous of the fact that the frat students are still involved in sports because he used to be a high school quarterback and challenges a swimming race, which he lost.   Throughout the movie the friends start to separate because they realize they want different things in life.   Moocher goes and gets married and wants to move to Chicago to follow in his father's footsteps. Cyril plans to retake the college entrance exams even though he won't get a basketball scholarship.   Dave gets a job at his father's car dealership after being treated unfairly by the Italian team at the exhibition race when they threw a bar in his front wheel.   In the movie they spend a lot of time fighting with the frat boys because they are jealous of their upbringings.   In the movie the school frowns on the feud between the two groups.   The school decides ...

Monday, March 2, 2020

The History of the Kaleidoscope and David Brewster

The History of the Kaleidoscope and David Brewster The kaleidoscope was invented in 1816 by Scottish scientist, Sir David Brewster (1781–1868), a mathematician and physicist noted for his various contributions to the field of optics.  He patented it in 1817 (GB 4136), but thousands of unauthorized copycats were constructed and sold, resulting in Brewster receiving little financial benefits from his most famous invention. Sir David Brewsters Invention Brewster named his invention after the Greek words kalos (beautiful), eidos  (form), and scopos  (watcher). So kaleidoscope roughly translates to beautiful form watcher. Brewsters kaleidoscope was a tube containing loose pieces of colored glass and other pretty objects, reflected by mirrors or glass lenses set at angles, that created patterns when viewed through the end of the tube. Charles Bushs Improvements In the early 1870s, Charles Bush, a Prussian native living in Massachusetts, improved upon the kaleidoscope and started the kaleidoscope fad. Charles Bush was granted patents in 1873 and 1874 related to improvements in kaleidoscopes, kaleidoscope boxes, objects for kaleidoscopes (US 143,271), and kaleidoscope stands. Charles Bush was the first person to mass manufacture his parlor kaleidoscope in America. His kaleidoscopes were distinguished by the use of liquid-filled glass ampules to create even more visually stunning effects. How Kaleidoscopes Work The kaleidoscope creates reflections of a direct view of the objects at the end of a tube, through the use of angled mirrors set at the end; as the user rotates the tube, the mirrors create new patterns. The image will be symmetrical if the mirror angle is an even divider of 360 degrees. A mirror set at 60 degrees will generate a pattern of six regular sectors. A mirror angle at 45 degrees will make eight equal sectors, and an angle of 30 degrees will make twelve. The lines and colors of simple shapes are multiplied by the mirrors into a visually stimulating vortex.