You have probably heard of what is happening in the White house. Trump has gotten impeached. But this doesn't mean he is gone yet. There is still one more step until Trump is out of office.

In case you haven't heard Donald Trump was impeached recently for pressuring Ukraine to dig up bad information about Joe Biden, another presidential candidate. This was an abuse of power and an obstruction of congress. His aim was to get Ukraine to open an investigation into the Biden's and declare as much publicly. Trump denied all claims by the Democrats, saying it was a 'witch hunt'.

Since Trump has been impeached there still is one more step to finalize the process. The first was the articles of impeachment brought to the House of Representatives next will be a trial at the Senate in January. If two-thirds of the senate vote to convict Trump, he will be removed from office.

You might be thinking that Trump is finally gone. Sadly, he probably won't be removed from office as majority of the Senate are Republicans. So it is very unlikely that he will be convicted. I think that the whole situation is kind of pointless, because the election is only next year. The damage was done. All we can do is hope that we get a good president next year.

Continuing with the extremely long(and tiring) process of detecting colors, I have finally found the solution to it. Last time I had so many loops that the program got confused. Now I kept it fairly simple with only two colors and one loop. I made it so that the color sensor would be constantly checking for the color blue by going to the left. When the color sensor detects the blue it would move to the right and restart the loop. So now the robot will follow the edge of the two mats until it doesn't see blue anymore.

This has set the foundation for my understanding of the color sensor. Now I can use it properly in more advanced programs.

Follow the Edge from Ishaan Jain on Vimeo.

In this project I experimented with color. This was a big leap because I used almost every sensor and technique we knew including conditions, loops and two different sensors. It is still a work in progress and has a few issues. What we were trying to do was when the color of the mat changes, the robot would perform different action. The problem is that the robot would run the program whenever it saw the color. So, it would just go in circles. I will eventually fix the problem, but here is what I have so far.

Here is a simplified version of the code above:

if color is blue then stop, go back and turn right

else if color us brown, stop, go back, turn left

else if color is red then, turn left, and continue going forward

else - do nothing.

if object is within 5 cm go back and turn the medium motor.

So far, this is not working as expected as this video shows - the sensor seems to get a little confused when it reaches a yellow mat. One other thing I need to fix is to activate the above conditions only when the mat color changes, and not while the robot is driving on the same color mat.

As you are sitting on your couch or watching a movie, the biggest holiday of the year is taking place in a dozen other countries. If you live in America you have probably not heard of it. Even I didn't know about it until today.

Boxing day is celebrated on December 26th, the day after Christmas. Many people wonder what the original reference is of this holiday. Today, for most Americans might be a day to clean up the house or remove the decorations, but in Europe the party isn't over. Boxing day is a celebrated bank holiday, and in some countries. even serves as a second Christmas. Surprisingly, even former British colonies like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa also celebrate Boxing day. But America wanted to do the same thing they did with the metric system. They chose to not observe it.

Boxing day is a rather unusual holiday. Almost everyone has a different view of why it is celebrated. Many people also know it as St. Stephens day and Wren day. Boxing day is claimed to be the biggest shopping event in the UK, so most people are outside buying what they really wanted for Christmas. Surprisingly, many famous boxing events have also happened on boxing day. This video by a Canadian youtube channel explains another theory of why boxing day is celebrated-

Alright, maybe that wasn't too accurate. The most common reason that Boxing day is celebrated because of the tradition of gifting servants Christmas boxes.

I think boxing day is a very interesting holiday. I still have the urge to celebrate a little more but, Christmas is still enough for me. It does seem like a lot of work, but today I think you should just relax.

Now that I was writing simple programs like turning and moving, I decided to take it a step further by using more sensors and pieces. I added a color sensor and made a new program. I also decided to make the program cooler by putting a gear operated spring loaded shooter. One more thing I added was a condition. The condition was if an object was within 5 cm it would stop, turn around shoot the bullet and keep going. I added a infinite loop and within it I made the condition.

This taught me how to create multiple conditions and multitasking which I will look into next time. Conditions and loops can definitely make advanced programs simpler to write!

mindtorms4 from Ishaan Jain on Vimeo.

The definition of music is vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion. Many people believe that music has the power to change a person. I myself believe this because music has changed me. A few years ago when I lived in India, music wasn't a big thing - it was just an after-school class that my parents sent me to once a week. I didn't practice enough and didn't take it seriously. I was also in a group class and didn't get much attention from my teacher. I also had to play on a digital keyboard, though I didn't know enough about the difference at the time.

When I moved here in Jersey City, one of the first things my parents did was buy a piano. We got a used Yamaha U1, which is an upright piano - very old, almost 40 years but very well restored! I really liked it. The next step was of course to find a good piano teacher. We had the option between two teachers. One lived close to us and the other lived a little bit further but seemed strict. We decided to choose the strict one. His name was Paul Vazopolos and that was one of the best decision we made.

When we met him for the trial class he seemed really nice and he told me to practice at least half an hour. Since I barely ever practiced before, I had a hard time making time for this in my schedule. I was also going to a new school. but over the course of his classes, I became better and better. Then he told me to practice for 45 minutes. And I did so, as far as possible. I had many recitals in which I played pieces that he chose for me. That was when I brought up the Moonlight Sonata 1st Movement by Beethoven.

I told him I wanted to play this piece and he was actually quite excited about the choice. We worked on it for a quite a while to learn this rather difficult piece. The Moonlight Sonata uses many complex techniques to produce its beautiful harmonics. Mr. Vazopolos taught me the broken chords and the chords in the piece. I also learned different rhythm patterns to help me play the piece steadily. There were short long short long, short short long long, long short short long, short long long short and all short and all long.

These patterns really helped me pick up the speed for the next part: the Moonlight Sonata 3rd movement. One other very important technique for piano is dynamics.Dynamics are how soft or loud you play. The two terms are forte and piano. Piano means soft and forte means loud. If you are able to control your dynamics you be able to perform really well. Another thing that helps with your dynamics is right-pedaling. The pedal makes the sound last longer. So if you want to end a piece dramatically you can use the pedal.

After learning the 1st movement, I started on the way more complex 3rd movement. This is much faster, playing at 140 beats/minute and with lots more broken chords, pedaling, and dynamics. After 6 months of intense practice, I was finally ready to perform in a public space! Here's a sample of the 3rd movement that I played at the TECCS Show in March 2018. Hope you enjoy listening to it!

Playing the piano has been one of the most exciting and fulfilling accomplishments of my life. It took a lot of work and effort but I learned so much about sound and music and got a better understanding of how complex playing and composing music can be. Music helped me find something in me that I never knew before. That is my love of performing. I usually thought to myself that I was too timid or scared to go up in front of my class and present something, let alone a concert hall! I am really thankful for my parents and Mr. Vazopolos for making this come true. And of course, a deep bow to those geniuses of the past: Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin!

As a reward for qualifying in the Carnegie Hall performance my parents let me build my own gaming pc. You might be thinking why build a PC when you can just buy an Xbox or a Ps4 for cheaper. Well, a PC can be overclocked, you can use it for many other purposes (like, you know, school work!) and if you really play video games, you can stream on twitch. Most really good video gamers also play on pc. I was very excited for this and awaited it for almost a year. I had no idea how much testing and research was required. When I found out I was actually more excited because it would help me in the future if I ever have to fix a motherboard or computer.  

Selecting the Components

First we listed all the parts we would need. A motherboard, CPU, RAM, SSD, a Case, a Power Supply and a Graphics Card. We first decided on our CPU. It was a difficult choice but we chose AMD over Intel. AMD was easier to overclock and Intel could completely get destroyed if we overclocked it too much. The most recent one also had a integrated graphics card, which made it easy to start with, considering how expensive mid to high end graphics cards are at this time (blame the Bitcoin mania). Next we chose our Motherboard. This was actually very hard because we kept thinking whether we should use a microATX or a ATX case. We finally decided on n ATX board just because it gave the most expansion options for the future. The Gigabyte board we selected also had wifi on the board itself, saving us from buying a separate card. We chose the rest of the parts  by thinking mostly about the cost and compatibility. My father advised me to work with good parts that we could keep using for my entire high school period without any speed issues. These parts are also quite future proof and we can easily upgrade different components later to improve the performance eg. adding a Graphics card once the prices come down, adding more memory, adding a CPU cooler and even upgrading the CPU! He also provided me with a used 27" monitor, which still worked and looked great!

Here is the final parts list we got:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

The final cost came out to be about $640, which was about $40 more than our original budget. Of course, this did not include a full Graphics card as we were able to do fine with an integrated graphics CPU! Adding a card like the Nvidia Geforce 1070 could easily have added $400 or so to this cost. Something for me to work on for later, I suppose!

Photos

Assembly

We spent a few more weeks researching and once we had all the parts, we finally started this highly technical project. We opened everything and started with the motherboard. We carefully screwed the motherboard into the case. After this we added all the other parts one by one. Connecting the Power Supply was scary and we had to make sure we used the correct connector on the correct port on the board. The directions given with the motherboard, PSU and the CPU helped but it still took a whole to do this. The most fun was getting the LED lights working - this also was not as straightforward since its connection was not clear in the directions. But we eventually sorted it out. Finally, when we finished the building part, we got into the testing stage. We downloaded Windows 10 and we had to update and turn on a bunch of settings in the bios of our motherboard to allow for a little overclocking.

We were done with most of the important stuff, and now we could finally start up the computer and begin testing out the graphics and cpu power.  We downloaded a few games to see how they would run it. We started with Fortnite (because..why not?) and ran a few games on Google Chrome. We also downloaded applications like CPU Monitor and GPU Monitor to record how the CPU handled these games. It went very well at first. We still had a few tweaks to be made like the display resolution (the monitor could handle QHD resolution but I had to bring it down to 1920x1080 pixels to keep it stable) and I also played around with my RGB lights and discovered that my motherboard’s RGB lights could be synced with my case’s RGB fans! I also managed to sync it with my RGB keyboard. It is a really cool sight, especially at night. Here's the final outcome:

This was one of the more exciting rewards I have got, and I learned a lot from building it. I can now even help out in my school's Technology class!

Now that I know a little bit more about coding and the Mindstorms I decided to build a new robot with better balance and re-written code. I ended up making a funny little program. I added a touch sensor and a ultrasonic sensor to detect things. So, when something comes close it can either stop or avoid it. Now that I built a new, more stable robot the coding is much easier and I will continue to use this as a base for future experiments. The Mindstorms has definitely been one of the best gifts I have got. I look forward to making more projects and Legos in the future.

The videos below show how this program runs:

robot-step1 from Ishaan Jain on Vimeo.

bye

Have you heard of Hurricane Florence? It is an ongoing hurricane that hit both the Carolinas causing people to abandon their homes and flee both of the states.”It's somewhat rare for hurricanes this intense to make landfall in the Carolinas”, said Suzana Camargo, executive director of the Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "It's a not a typical track," she says, referring to the storm's expected path.

Homes of over 4,200 families have been destroyed. There are still over a 100 people still needed to be rescued. The entire barrier island of Emerald isle is under water. One other town named New Bern is also facing great difficulties. New Bern resident Peggy Perry told CNN that she and her family were trapped inside her home."In a matter of seconds, my house was flooded up to the waist, and now it is to the chest," she said. "We are stuck in the attic."

The National Hurricane Center says the Neuse River near the city is recording more than 10 feet (3.05 meters) of inundation. Roberts says the storm surge continues to increase as Florence passes over the area. The wind speeds in the eye of the storm were reaching up to 90 mph. There were many efforts to save the people.

Jason Weinmann, a 47-year-old retired Marine, also joined the rescue effort. He brought with him a military transport vehicle that he bought at a government auction 10 years ago."That's why I got this thing, to use in times like this," he told CNN. Weinmann helped 10 people out of flooded neighborhoods and brought them to a shelter in New Bern.

It appears that the number of hurricanes that are happening is rising. There have been over 13 hurricanes over the world in just 2017. A few weeks ago Japan was hit by one of the worst hurricanes yet. With huge waves, this hurricane killed many people and caused extensive damage.

These hurricanes are really threatening. They make people who live around the coast scared and uncertain for their future.

I feel that, living so close to the sea, we need to be prepared because there will possibly be more dangerous hurricanes are coming. Satellite images captured at least two more hurricane moving towards the east coast. The predicted cause for the rise in the number of hurricanes over the past decade is believed to be climate change. Climate change makes the sea level rise by melting icebergs and ice shelves. The iceberg creates energy in the water and creates a storm. If this keeps up, all of New York could be underwater in 10 years or so. A lot of people may have to leave their homes in order to survive these deadly storms. Since I live in Jersey City this cycle of hurricanes might affect me and my friends too. We may have to leave our homes or live without power and electricity for weeks. This is a very serious situation and is affecting the whole planet.

I recently got a hand-me-down LEGO Mindstorms Educational Kit from a friend of my parents and it is really extremely cool.  Its exciting to see how I do create and do many amazing things with it, beyond just building things. At first, I wasn’t so interested but now that I know all the cool stuff you can do, it is really fun.  When I opened the box and saw the instructions I knew I wanted to build the Gyro Boy. The Gyro Boy is a  fun robot which was on two wheels and programmed with a self-balancing code. The code was very complex and I couldn’t understand it, but with the help of my dad, I was able to break it down and understand separate blocks in the code.

Also, due to the fact that it was self-balancing, I  was having problems with movement. I decided to build an extra wheel for it so it could at least move and stand.

As a first try with this slightly modified gyro, I tried to improve its sensing system by adding color sensors. I added a logic code to do different things when detecting different colors eg. if it saw red, turn right. I was having some problems with this but the balancing code kept getting in the way. Finally I realized that I should just build a simpler robot for my little code tests.

More on upcoming experiments in a few days...bye!

Have you heard about  #PlaneBae? It was a viral story that became famous off of Twitter on the Fourth of July. If you have heard of it, it is a big invasion of privacy. Do you think that someone should interfere with other people’s business. The fact this happened is no surprise, since it has happened countless times before. Humans have always been social, nosy and wide-eared. Many people have been meme-ified. Some people do it on purpose just for the fame.

It all started on a regular flight from New York to Dallas. Actress and photographer, Rosey Blair asked a stranger if she and Houston Hardaway(Rosie's boyfriend) could switch seats so they both could sit together. She agreed and sat next to retired soccer player named Euan Holden. They started talking to each other. Rosey and Houston sat behind them attentively listening to their conversation. She said her name was Helen and was also a fitness instructor. Rosey had her phone out by then and started live tweeting their conversation, occasionally sending videos and photos of them. Helen and Euan had started flirting and asking each other about their future.  The story soon took off with 900,000 likes and Blair getting more followers by the minute.

After the flight they were still together. They got their baggage together and left the airport together. Soon news shows like Good Morning America and the Today show found out about this story and invited Rosie and her boyfriend to talk about it. Euan and Helen were also invited but Helen, who was not liking her newfound fame, declined. Euan accepted the fact that he flirted with a stranger and was documented without his permission and even took on the nickname #PlaneBae.

Originally everyone thought this was a feel-good story because it had a happy ending. Soon afterwards Rosie’s followers tried to uncover who Helen was and when they found her social media accounts, they threw mean and sexist insults at her. She had no choice but to delete all her social media accounts. Blair on the other hand actually encouraged them to expose her real identity and took this viral success as a way to promote her acting career. She even asked for a job at Buzzfeed. In late 2014 another one of these viral twitter memes was created. It was called Alex from Target. Alex was a regular teenage employee when a girl took a picture of him without his permission. It got over 1 million views and retweets. It also got Alex 300,000 followers and he did nothing.

Stories like these make you think that social media can be very dangerous. Anyone can record anything and post it to social media because you don't know who will see your posts . I believe that this should stop because it might be funny to the audiences but it is cruel to the person that is being exposed. If Rosey would have recorded it she at least should have asked if it was okay. She didn’t think about Heather’s privacy at all. Anyone can become a meme if they do something that is of interest to other people.

This is a story about one of the biggest accomplishments of my life. It all started 5 years ago in India. I was interested in learning piano and started taking lessons. It wasn’t such a big thing and I didn’t practice that much. I took group classes and  was fine with it. Later my family moved to the US and things changed. I got a new teacher. His name was Mr. Vazopolos and he was strict but very good. He helped me push myself and play very complex pieces. He also made me practice 45 minutes every day. I also became much better at piano because I was doing a solo class.

About a year later in June 2017 Mr. Vazopolos introduced me to the American Protege International Piano and Strings competition. The competition was in Carnegie Hall. He told me to audition for it. So I started preparing for it. I was planning on auditioning with the Moonlight Sonata third movement. It wasn’t easy so I had to practice one hour everyday until the competition date! On January 20th I sent my audition in. I was nervous because I thought I didn’t do well. But I got in! I was really happy, but I still needed a lot of work.

Later on June 30 I went to Carnegie Hall and performed. It was surely an amazing experience. The Weill Hall was the smaller of two halls and was really beautiful and the piano was also quite amazing. A lot of other kids were there too. I had almost my entire family there to cheer me on, including some of my friends.  When it was my turn to play I got a little nervous, but I took a few deep breaths and walked onto the stage. I had expected the hall to be much bigger but turns out it wasn’t so big after all. It had about three hundred seats and was beautiful. I played the best I could and enjoyed the experience very much. After the concert my family and friends celebrated and we went for lunch nearby.

It was an amazing experience and I absolutely loved it. I think it made me more confident in performing in front of large audiences and made me better at piano overall. I hope to enter this competition and other ones in the future. I want to continue my experience of performing in great halls for as long as I can.

Some people feel the need to always put down their thoughts in a diary or journal. According to research, this is a very good idea. This helps children in many ways. Journaling helps kids get better writing skills and easily express their feelings. Journaling is very different from writing in a diary.

A diary is a report in which we include most of the stuff we have done in a day. A journal is a general record booklet that includes specific aspects according to which it is to be written. Journals are usually consisting of a focused topic. To some people, Journaling helps them explore situations.

A question remains about Journaling. Is it good or bad? Many people have different opinions about this. According to PsychologyToday.com, Journaling helps you see other people's perspectives alongside your own. It is also said to help you take a definite course of action and lower your emotional reactivity. There are also some negative aspects. Journaling makes you live too much in your head. It will keep in negative things that have happened to you and make you think too much about how to record life than experience it.

Sometimes Journaling can offer some of the same benefits as meditation by refining your relationship with your mind. Author Julia Cameron convinced many people to write a morning page because it provokes and comforts the rest of the day. It is also important to write with a pencil and not type it because when you write it you are connecting your mind to the paper that the pencil is touching and you will achieve inner peace.

I believe that Journaling is good for you despite the odds. I enjoy writing with a pencil because when I am typing I usually get distracted or unfocused. I believe all the therapists that said journalling helps people face their fears, set goals and feel liberated. I think Journaling has made a big impact on my life ever since I started writing narratives about the fun stuff I did every week. I encourage you to write too.

This painting contains an outline of my head. It shows what goes on inside my head and my interests through pictures. I took these pictures from magazines and used water colors for the background. Each of the images I put in there represents one of my hobbies or characteristics. This was a very fun activity and other people really liked the fact that I had a bird on the top. I was supposed to put it inside my head because I really liked Toucans, but I didn't have any space.

For more than 2 months there have been shootings all over the U.S. This is happening due to the fact that anyone can buy a gun because of their second amendment right. The NRA(national rifle association) is promoting buying guns to protect themselves, but no one knows what some people might do with them.

The shootings have happened in many places like Parkland, Maryland and Las Vegas. One of the saddest ones was at Parkland when Nikolas Cruz injured and killed 17 high school students. My school and many others did a march for this tragedy.

I think that what is happening is terrible. People cannot just buy guns and do whatever they want with it. People all over the world to raise awareness of these shootings and stop gun violence.

You might be thinking why doesn't the government just ban guns. The thing is the NRA is paying people to support guns, so the politicians can't refuse. If I was in that position, I would  definitely oppose the selling of guns

The option might be really tempting because you would rather risk protecting you and your family and letting dangerous people buy weapons than living undefended, but how will you protect people by giving dangerous people access to weapons. So to the NRA, when you sell weapons instead of protecting people you are attacking them