Month: August 2022

 

As I stepped off the plane, I felt a heat wave engulf me until sweat dripped from my forehead. Discomforted, I asked about the outside temperature. “It’s 110℉—that’s India for you,” a local replied.

 

As one of the most hotly contested topics, the climate change crisis has accelerated rapidly in recent years. Within the past few decades, human activities like burning greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels, cutting down forests, using transportation have dramatically increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and, consequently, the average global temperature. Rising temperatures are causing environmental degradation, natural disasters, weather extremes, food and water insecurities, and economic disruptions to name a few. As sea levels continue to rise, glaciers melt, coral reefs die, oceans acidify, and forests burn, the cost of climate change reaches irreversible heights.

 

However, many organizations worldwide have already taken measures to counteract the issue. For example, in the automotive industry, Tesla has already produced nearly 1.91 million electric vehicles since 2009, in accordance with its mission to “accelerate the world’s transition into sustainable energy.” Additionally, at least 92.7 billion solar panels have been installed across the world today, producing cleaner renewable energy that keeps us from burning fossil fuels. Some proposals for the future involve cooling Earth’s surface by spraying artificially-made, reflective particles into the planet’s atmosphere, scattering and reflecting sunlight back into space. Other proposals involve planting the oceans with iron to cause large-scale phytoplankton growth, thereby removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Such methods could potentially work but require further research.

 

Right now, I will view this issue through a temporal and representational lens, especially focusing on how many people overlook the importance and prevalence of this issue. By citing the long-term effects like hotter temperatures, more severe storms, and increased droughts to name a few, I ultimately hope to balance talk of urgency with hopeful and creative ideas if we, as a society, are able to inspire positive change and finally put an end to this.

 

There was a plane crash and every single person died. Who survived?

I stared blankly at this riddle. I parsed the lines again and again, searching for a subtle clue. Unable to find something, I took a deep breath. My eyes drifted from one word to another, heavy with defeat. Upon the eighth word, however, they stopped—”single” … as in a bachelor, I thought. I grinned. Logic puzzles have been a channel for my creativity.

To me, navigating through their twists and turns make them all the more thrilling to solve. Through logical reasoning, I not only have been able to come up with solutions to different challenges but also have been able to extend these patterns to aspects of my own life.

Take the time my family found small water spots within our attic. To better understand if these spots were signs of water leakage from old or damaged roof shingles, we needed to have a bird’s-eye view of our roof. Using a small old remote-controlled helicopter toy, an Arduino (a microcontroller platform that controls specialized pieces of hardware using code), a tiny camera module, a power module, and a storage module, I built a makeshift drone for practically free. Coming up with the idea was the easy part; executing it, though, proved to be the real challenge. I started by building a functional video component on the original Arduino board. Then, incrementally, I tried to enable video recording with the camera and storage module. Lastly, I tried attaching all the modules to the toy helicopter in a way that would still enable the helicopter to achieve liftoff with the additional weight. By breaking down this task into smaller and more manageable pieces, I learned it makes the entire building process significantly easier. Ultimately, this new gadget let me see my roof, record the entire flight, and examine the recorded footage at various magnification settings. We found there to be no distinctly misplaced or damaged shingle, but it did give me the chance to play with some new Arduino components.

As I trudge forward in life, difficult challenges or riddles don’t discourage me from leaving my mark—not even the married couples who survived the plane crash.