The Penn Bookstore

Hey!
So, as promised, I am going to describe my structure, the Penn bookstore.

The Penn Bookstore
The Pen bookstore is located off Walnut and 36th Streets in the University City section of Philadelphia. It serves as the main place for students to purchase course books, recreational reads, and Penn apparel. Students can also purchase school supplies, things for their dorms, and music and computer accessories; with the exception of the computers themselves, everything else is a little expensive (I guess we are paying for convenience). Almost every person at Penn has been in the book store or at least passed by it at some point; it is almost something we take for granted in having. For example, if we did not have this bookstore on campus, it would be very time consuming and unpleasant to go to buy our required books at some other store in Philadelphia. I chose to analyze the bookstore for exactly this reason; the bookstore is an everyday object, in a sense, but it make everyone's live easier whether he or she realizes it or not.

Just like I said in an older post, I chose to analyze the bookstore over three length scales: the meter, the centimeter, and the the millimeter. However, I have changed my mind over what substructures I am analyzing; I analyzed the length of the bookstore, the length of one book in the book in the window, and the length of one word on the book. I chose to change my substructures because it better reflects the three different length scales and it was easier to compare the bookstore to other structures. (I also should mention that I really chose the bookstore because of the way it's functions can compare to the functions of other structures; I really didn't think it would physically look like anything else in particular before I started doing this assignment).

Meter: I did not actually measure the length of the bookstore, but I estimated the length of one of the outside walls (the one facing Walnut street). I estimated the length of the wall to be about 30 meters.
Centimeter: I measured the length of the book in the window to be about 28 centimeters.
Millimeter: I measure the length of a randomly chosen word on the cover to be about 25 millimeters.
(these measurements are not very accurate, they are more like estimates to show the different scales of length!)

After measuring each substructure of my overall structure, I started to think about how each substructure related to another structure in the world around us.
1) For the wall, I thought it was similar to the structure of other walls on other buildings around campus and in the city; if one only saw a picture of the wall (without any banners or signs), he or she would find it find it very difficult to pinpoint exactly what building that wall is a part of. All the walls of buildings (for the most part - there is some interesting architecture out there) are perpendicular to the ground, are as tall as the height of the building, and are strong enough to prevent people from breaking into the them. Also, all walls have to be strong enough to support the massive weight of the building. Looking at it from a different perspective, the wall, with windows, sort of looks like those little square pretzels with holes; the windows are the holes in the pretzels. Also, the wall sort of looks like a railroad line turned on its side; the spaces in the railroad line are like the windows.
2) For the book, I thought it was similar to the structure of a cereal box; if one did not know that a book opened, it would look very similar to a cereal box in shape. I feel this is a little exaggerated, but I feel it can apply to engineers figuring out structures of complicated, unknown objects. For example, if an engineer saw a picture something that looked like ball, for example, he or she would assume that it functioned just like any ordinary ball - it would bounce and keep its shape. Without further examination, this engineer would know learn that this structure does not, in fact, function as a normal ball, but, for example, more of a dense block that is hard to move let alone bounce.
3) For the word, I thought it was similar to a parasite; it needs the book to "survive" or else it would be a blotch of ink lost in the world. The word is also similar to a parasite because it does not harm the book; both objects are in a sort of symbiotic relationship with each other. The book needs the word in order for people to know what type of book it, and the word needs the book or else it could not a word anymore. I also thought that the word was similar to the letters in an alphabet soup; if one did not know that the structure was unchanging, he or she would think that the word was fluid in the book and that the position of the letters could change over time.

After analyzing the bookstore for similar structures (which was very hard I might add), I though about how its functions are similar to other functions (which was the foremost reason for why I chose to analyze the bookstore in the first place).
The bookstore's functions are similar to the functions of the brain! Both the bookstore and the brain hold A LOT of information, for example. The bookstore holds thousands of books with a variety of information, fascinating novels, and entertainment materials. The brain holds so much information that researchers and scientists still do not know exactly how it is mapped out and interconnected among all its parts. Both the bookstore and the brain are there to help people; neither the brain nor the bookstore is there simply to look pretty or take up space. The bookstore, I feel, is somewhat taken for granted by students and factories just as the brain is; I feel that people do not realize how important something is until they do not have. For example, many students would not stop on a day to day basis and thank someone for giving them the brain that they have unless they saw someone who is struggling with brain damage or another neurological problem. I feel that this is also true of the bookstore on a much smaller scale; people would be very upset, and perhaps angry, if the bookstore closed and moved somewhere because now the distance to get books at the new store would be greatly increased, it would take longer to get something simple (such as chemistry lab manual), and it may not include a Starbucks, which is vital to some people's lives. The bookstore also functions like the candy section in a supermarket - the Penn sweatshirts and T-shirts being the candy. People flock to the bookstore to buy Penn apparel even though the bookstore's main purpose is to sell course books for courses. In a supermarket, some people will flock to the candy and junk food sections even though that is not the reason why the supermarket is opened. The brand new sweatshirts and the crisp notebooks are the chocolate and sugar that draw people into the store - not the idea of spending $300 on a chemistry textbook.

So that is the Penn bookstore compared to (really) random objects that have, in my opinion, similar structures or functions of the store. I feel that this exercise was a good way to begin to think like a engineer; I realized that one cannot look at one snapshot of an object (especially an unknown one) and begin to accurately describe its exact function. That one snapshot is only one second in time and the object could have changed shaped or position because one even begins to even analyze the first picture. This exercise also showed my that thinking like an engineer required out-of-the-box thinking in some respects; this is fine with me, I like being the first one to think of something new or find a brand new and creative way of looking at something that is not new.