This week was largely spent working on diff-eq assignments and my 485 projects, as well as an awesome excursion to Bayer and the Neanderthal museum. The highlight was by far the Bayer trip. Before arriving, the only real thing I knew about Bayer (I even had the pronunciation wrong) was that they were the creators of Aspirin. I had no idea how large and diverse of a company it was, with all of its fields of research and production.
What really hit me were their reasons for research and their worldly sense of morals. Hearing our PR tour guide lecture us about the problems with the world economy and what Bayer is trying to do to help, it really made me think about the choices I am making that impact the world. But it also made me feel like I need to secure a nice chunk of land in Texas, wall it off, and become entirely self-sufficient for when the economy collapses. The first things to go in a faltering economy are the luxury services… and that would include most research positions. It kinda makes me want to perfect a fallback skill such as farming or mechanics.
Another fun part of the Bayer trip was seeing one of their production facilities. They had all sorts of robotic assembly lines packaging boxes and organizing items. At one point we went into one of the distribution warehouses which was fully computer controlled that used a robotic dolly that used chaos theory based algorithms to organize and retrieve items. On the lower floors, there were other robots the size of golf carts running around carrying crates and whatnot, all fully automated. They used all kinds of sensors in order to move about the building just like robots we had built freshman year out of Legos.
All in all, this week was fairly relaxing, or rather, I procrastinated quite a bit which as always, is catching up to me!
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