Day 5: Prefominanylu

To begin, it is important to announce that Cici and I have selected this lucky creature to be our internship mascot. His name is Prefominanylu. He keeps us company at the computer.

Anyways, today was rather productive. Di stopped by the Reading Room to give us a quick lesson on how coding helps make PCA more effective. He had written a code on Matlab that enabled insignificant parts of images to be blocked out so that PCA could focus on the significant parts. We didn't learn how to write any code (not yet), but we learned how to apply Di's code onto the images of the Gough Map and use the skills we had learned yesterday (PCA) to further manipulate the images.

I ran the code on 9 different sections of the map and enhanced the resulting images so the hidden writing became more prominent. Hopefully, some of my results will be useful to the professors/historians at Oxford!

Allyse and I were on the computers for what seemed like forever, but we actually had several nice breaks. First, the surprise fire drill happened. Second, we experienced our typical (and predicted) mid-afternoon crash and felt the urge to go outside and lie down on the grass. So that's what we did. I also read aloud a couple pages from Lord of the Flies to Allyse as we were getting fried by the sun. (Hopefully it wasn't dreadfully boring.)

As you can see, my day was pretty prefominanylu! (@ Cici)