Doctah Jekyll and Meestah Hyde

                Today, Kennedy High School put on a musical about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one of those traditional boring books that you would complain about in a traditional classroom setting, but a really interesting plotline if you want to see or read it. Now, I know that there are probably parts in the musical that are not in the book and parts in the book that are not in the musical, but I am sure that the general idea about the science is the same. I was thinking about Jekyll’s thought process about how all evil must be eliminated from the world, and I am pretty sure everyone agrees with this. The problem is, who defines what is good and what is evil.

                In a manga that I once read, called Death Note, it steps on this idea of differentiating between good and evil. For a quick summary, it is about a model teenage student who obtains a book that is able to kill people, and he uses it to cast “judgment” on those that he deems are not good enough to live by his standards. This often switches between the two perspectives, the police and the student, and a conversation that pops up occasionally in the police force is if what they are doing to catch this killer is really the right thing to do, because the killer really is only killing criminals and other mass murderers. Honestly this compounds upon history too, as in the winner gets to decide, or the victor is the one who writes the storybooks. Thus, to say, if the police caught the killer, the police would be deemed heroes, but if the killer killed off all the police, the killer would be deemed as righteous and not opposable.

                This just shows that there really is no difference between good and evil, just a matter of perspective. I like to rant about the difference between this because of sometimes how unjust a school system is, but Jekyll’s real point was to remove anger and other malevolent feelings. This would be interesting if it worked, but some of these emotions are what makes us human. If I saw a person who never got angry, I would not actually classify them as a human. It would be more like a robot if a person were to act like that, not to mention that competitiveness would be stomped out, and since I was raised on competitiveness, I think I would be bored for most of my life.

Slow Down for What?

                I am attending a state-wide mathematics competition tomorrow for an organization called Math League, and more can be found here. I like how much math and science programs have expanded, especially the STEM and another competition that I compete in is Science Bowl but we have already finished that in February. Not to mention robotics, even though I do not do much, the fact that there are more and more teams competing in Iowa and the United States. Although we are not technically doing as well as the Chinese are, it is very difficult to push the progression of education.

                One of the things that I do not think many adults understand because it has been awhile since they were teenagers is that teenagers prefer to do things at their own pace and if they are pushed sharply to do something, many will just push even harder back. Teens need to have an immediate reward and not a long-term questionable reward. As a teen, many do not think ahead or into the future much, and instead are all about instant gratification. I do understand, unlike some of my fellow peers, that education is very important in this day and age, but with a high unemployment rate, will there be room for the students who have no work experience, instead with a high education, to be hired? By job, I also do not mean getting a Ph. D in pharmacy but then end up working in a McDonald’s restaurant. As you can see, job security is not very much trusted in, and I do not think social security is either.

                At my school, we have a program where we can advance eight graders to a high school level. I think the school gets more money if these students take these classes. Back when I was an eighth grader we literally had only one person who advanced to the high school level, but now the school advances them regardless of whether or not that they are qualified to be in the class. I really am not trying to insult or offend the ones at our school, but many of them have been advanced past algebra and into geometry. Algebra is honestly one of the main fundamentals of math, and when these eighth graders do not learn it; they fall behind really quickly which is apparent in their grades. In our rush to surpass China and other “intelligent” countries, we are in fact making our own resources worse because we make them seem a lot smarter than they really are. History has shown us that this does not work. In the 1970’s there was a large movement after the Russian satellite, Sputnik, but instead what arose in America was a counterculture where people lounged around much more than they worked.

Open Your Doors

            I think that the iPhones and smart phones are getting a little bit too smart for us, or at least want to help us more in a bad way. I am going to assume that everyone who has a computer and the spare time to read this blog also has a smart phone and knows what I am talking about. The Open Feint application wants to know where you are and if a game is playing, it will often ask to use the location, usually for no good reason except to just compare your high score to others in your area. Or for those pop-up advertisements that exclaim how there are hot singles living in your area, and since I live in the middle of nowhere that is Iowa, I must be the hot single in the area. More often than not when you post to some sort of social networking site, it will post where you are currently at.

            This also means that your phone has a Global Positioning Device or GPS inside your phone, and while you think you have complete control over it, you really do not. No business in their right sort of mind would put a monopoly on a function that the business still owned. While you think that you can turn it off, and I know this kind of sounds like a conspiracy theory, it can probably be turned on with ease if you have ever piqued the interest of any government official or bureau. It would take no work, and just for a kill safe switch, I think that the device could be activated even if the phone was dead. That one person, I cannot exactly recall his name right now who released information about the NSA and security breaches, showed that the government is going to pretty high lengths to spy on every day monotonous activities, if you searched something really weird into google, like how to breach a military base, I can definitely say that they will trace you down, unless you are a really professional hacker that does not make mistakes, like in all those books that I have read.

            Although we live in the “Land of the Free” sometimes it just does not feel that way, with more and more government conspiracies popping up and some of them becoming more and more plausible. All that would appease me is if any of the government officials would just come out with all the secrets and give an apology to the American people. I would forgive them and accept it, because people do make mistakes, but it is what you do in the future that helps change them.

Could You Survive?

                So, this guy from Popular Science made a homemade crossbow because he was simulating a post-apocalyptic world where ammunition from guns would be scarce and hard to retrieve. A crossbow or a composite bow would be perfect because it packs a pretty high punch because it did put a hole through modern day “armor” or at least a car door. The ammo would be easily recoverable and crafted if we had either trees or just from scrap metal. Sure, the fire rate would not be optimal, but it would be enough to, sorry for the video game term, kite the zombies and continuously take them down one by one. After killing a multitude of them, if they had any brains, they would move on and realize that it would not be worth the time and energy chasing after you, kind of like a wolf.

                Now, I know the next thing you guys are probably thinking of is how cool you would be portrayed, and since bowmen hide in the back, they would be cowards. Now, in order to up the cool factor compared to swordsmen, think about The Hunger Games, was Finnick the main character? No, he was not. Katniss was the main character, who had the bow as her main weapon in an era of modern or even futuristic technology. Some more tips can be modeled after the best rapper of all time, 2chainz. He wears not one, but two chains. This doubles his overall cool factor and in general scare factor. It would be difficult to dual wield a bow, but take a hint from the night hunter class in Diablo III, it looks cool and wreaks a ton of damage.

                To be honest, I really do not think that this has even the slightest likelihood of happening, but when it does, I’ll either go down blazing, full guns and glory, but more likely I will be cowering in a corner wishing that it was a dream. Normally I feel like I am cooler and collected than most, but when pressured, I make impulsive decisions that I regret 90% of the time. I mean, peer pressure works a lot of the time, and am I right? The best I would hope for is a group of friends that I could travel with, because having people around makes things less scary and overall just boosts morale.

Doppelgangers

                Scientists have now proved that cloning a human cell is possible, which is almost the pinnacle of cloning, but they still admit that it is difficult to create a full human clone or even transplant some of these cloned cells into a human. It then made me question the usefulness of it, but it is in these small baby steps that help scientists build off and make progress. I personally think that cloning a person’s cells to replace bad ones is a fantastic idea. People will not need to know their blood type nor will they have to wait for a blood transfusion if the hospital is running low on blood. This is the same with organ donations, because if someone has a punctured lung and needs a replacement, the choice between a large bulky metal lung and a cloned lung is fairly easy to choose. Even if a person does obtain a lung from a lung donor, there is still a high chance that the body will reject the lung because it seems like a foreign substance, and so the body’s autoimmune system attacks it and thereby wasting a completely useful lung. A cloned lung would have none of these problems, because it came from the person’s body itself, and the person could continue living as before,

                Others think about the morality of this situation. That thought process goes like it is basically creating a human who may or may not have a consciousness but then just creating a person to save another person’s life. Cloning is a type of creating life, and I honestly do not think that Frankenstein is a good example, because it was not the monster’s fault, the doctor who created him was much, much worse than the monster. I agree with the fact that we should not just create life in order to save another life, but without a brain, I do not think that there is a conscious in the body, so as long as a brain is not created, I think that we should definitely clone other parts. There are others who think that we have gone way too far out of our limits in what we were meant to do, but I think we are just doing what we need to do to ensure the survival of the human race, not that we have helped the environment or the surroundings in the couple thousand years that we have been alive. This is just developing technology which I think that people should just get used to it, like we have to in jobs or just suffer the loss of a job. This is basically a human way to cope with natural selection.

7 Billion and Counting...

            Has anyone actually took time to realize how great natural selection is? It weeds out the weakest traits in a species and although it probably hurts the population at first, it strengthens out the species as a total. One of the reasons humans are so prone to diseases and natural disasters is that we have been trying to play as a God in our species. We feel like we are so much better than nature and can do a much better job than it can because we humans actually have consciousness of what we are actually doing. Our results in this effort have only really harmed the surroundings, like the environment, and we are definitely pushing the limits of what it can tolerate. Littering, fossil fuels, and habitat destruction has hampered the ability of the environment to tolerate human life.

            One of the reasons that I think we are constantly looking for a new planet to inhabit is because deep down within each scientists’ heart, they know that the Earth will not last much longer going at this rate, because they have seen all the statistics and there would be no way that the Earth has not been pushed past its carrying capacity. Our population has reached 7 billion and is still counting, which is putting a much larger strain on food production, and we have already used up a lot of Earth’s land that is already arable.

As some optimists claim, “We will be totally fine, because so far the human population has been able to produce scientists that know what they are doing and have been and will always find a solution to whatever problem arises.” This is honestly just a roundabout way of thinking, like how about we stop waiting to the last moment before we do anything. I can easily prove this with modern and historical examples. An easy modern example is most car companies. On average, cars in America usually do not get over 30 miles to the gallon, while in China, they have much higher emission standards that cars made in America would not be allowed to legally drive in China. Then entire world still uses gas made from oil, a non-renewable resource, and while some have electric cars and scooters, there is not nearly enough. It is known that there are plenty of other renewable resources that we can draw from, but “it is not enough to fuel everyone” the world has plenty of resources as long as we use them sustainably. We have not switched over yet, most likely due to greedy corporation heads who want to first exhaust all the money from using fossil fuels, then when we have an energy crisis that could have been easily prevented, people will complain. It is a very vicious cycle.

"Face" the Truth

                According to a recent study done at the Boston Museum of Science, facial expressions around the world are not as similar as people may have once thought they were. To quickly summarize, when the group of scientists asked people to categorize facial expressions from all around the world, and separated them into two different groups. One group had to separate such expressions into predetermined categories while the other had to separate them just by what they thought, with no limits on grouping. The predetermined group test was a test done much earlier in history and thought to have no mistakes, which is why many people assume that everyone around the world has the same emotions associated with the same faces. This experiment was, in fact, flawed. This was shown through the newer experiment because nearly all of the participants had different groups in which they separated them and they had little to no correlation.

                This relates further into school and everything we have learned. In my AP Language class, we learned about logical fallacies and specifically one of them kind of applies to this case right here, which is also known as “tainting the well” which means that a person would insult another person and thereby nullifying anything he or she had to say. For example, calling someone a liar would pretty much mean they lie all the time and therefore cancel anything they say. This applies here to the predetermined group because it already has expressions down for people to group them in, so it greatly reduces the margin of error, but while reducing that margin of error, it also reduces how accurate the results are. As the test results came out, different people have different ways of classification.

                This is also like parenting and how I really hate how some people are not tolerant of others. I am sure everyone has seen those Tumblr posts about how everyone should be equal and actually has very good points. One such post went:

                                “You’re getting a tattoo? What will your kids think of it?”

                                “Nothing, because I won’t raise them to be as judgmental as yours,”

This shows that parents often taint  the well of the child when they grow up because everyone knows that a parent is one of the biggest influences on a child because most of the time, they are the ones that is there for the child the most, and so their personality, whether good or bad, will rub off on them.

Iowa Test of Useless Skills

                Our school has just finished taking the Iowa Assessments which were not difficult for me personally, but I always hate being judged by people who do not really know me and compare me to everyone else in the nation. For those of you that do not know what they are, it is a standardized test given across either the nation or just Iowa, I cannot recall at the moment but that is not very important. I feel that because the United States heads of state feel insecure about the future of education due to the quickly advancing “geniuses” in China, they put more and more importance into school. This, at first, sounds like a good idea, because with school, the students will be educated and learn a lot, which will then carry into life. Anyone who has ever attended or is in a high school knows that this is not even close to the truth.

                School has always been “eat, regurgitate, and forget” and I am not just saying this with no credentials, I am at the top of my class and I will say that I often do this. I can also safely say that if you gave me a test on everything that I learned in my freshman year, with a bit of luck, I would say that I could maybe get half of them right. Even the more prestigious Advanced Placement classes are subject to this, though all of the teachers I have had have said, “You are going to need to this remember this material, because the entire rest of the year builds off of this material,” and I do remember the information… at least until the end of the year comes about, which is when I do not have to be graded on how “smart” I am. I do pass the class with a good grade, but it doesn’t have any actual real life value or application after the class. Even if the class would have an effect on my life, my school does not present it in a viable way.

                One of the problems with me taking any applied classes is because those are usually labeled as the “dumb kids’ class” because at our school, an Advanced Placement class gives a lot more bonus grade point average points than a regular course would give. For example, our school’s accounting class is not taken by any of the class’s highest ranked people, because many of them are expected to just take one of the two advanced classes, either calculus or statistics. I think the school should have more applied courses that people actually see the reason in learning it.

The Walking Death

            Horton Hears a Who was a popular book by Dr. Seuss when I was just a wee young lad. It lately has been adapted into a movie, but one of the main points that I would like to point out in the book is that, no matter how small something is, the thing’s life still means the most to them even if it seems meaningless or stupid and small to someone else. This translates into real life pretty easily, because many people do not really think about the microorganisms that go on in our body, but take them for granted and do not always treat them correctly. These organisms keep you alive day to day and so it would be nice to not endanger it with a stupid dare or a hashtag yolo action.

            One of the reasons that I mention this is because of a deadly zombie-like parasite amoeba that lives inside a body. This article here can give more information on the how. I think is a good breakthrough in how to increase medical abilities and technology. Researchers from the University of Virginia have determined that these amoebas do not release toxins and eat a dead cell like people originally thought, instead these amoebas will actually consume a living blood cell and devour it. Many people die from this disease each year and one of the reasons that it has probably been different to stop it, is probably because we have currently been using the wrong type of medication to treat it. In other words, the way how we used to treat the disease was like a person repeatedly being stabbed and having small chunks of his body ripped out by another person, where a bystander would come along and hand the person being stabbed a gas mask, to try and keep out the poisoned air without even trying to remove the stabber. Now with this problem fixed, these people will be more easily saved.

            I do not really believe the next sentence, and I know it seems heartless but just for an opposing point, if this is really such a great breakthrough after all. Everyone knows that the world is being overpopulated right now, and anyone who does not is probably uneducated about the Earth’s resources. There are currently seven billion people in the world right now, and still growing. There is only 3.5% of the world’s land that can be used for agriculture, so would it not be a good thing if we tried to keep our population down? People are trying long-term plans to try to keep population down, but we most likely are already over the limit.

Daylight Savings Time Saves No Time

                Anyone able to tell me what we Americans do that nobody else in the world does? Yeah, it really is not that hard to think of one because we do a lot differently. One is we have our temperatures in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius, and the other is the metric system compared to whatever we Americans have is called. I know most of these things seem pretty pointless to bicker over, and it really has not harmed anyone. One of the major differences between the United States and the rest of the world that affects everyone is Daylight Savings Time. In the fall, we jump ahead an hour, where in the spring, we jump back an hour. Honestly it has never made too much sense to me and although enjoyable in the fall, it is always stressful losing an hour in the spring. Previously, none of these differences have affected anyone in a harmful way and although it may be a coincidence, this study, with extra links if you want to learn more, shows that when we jump an hour forward, there is a greater amount of heart attacks, comparatively, in the fall when we are delayed an hour, there are a decreased amount of heart attacks.

                I admit that this could be only a coincidence and has nothing to do with each other, but it has been recorded consistently over the last couple of years. One must admit that it does make sense because I am pretty sure everyone has felt the agony of losing an hour of sleep and then the wonderful sense of relief when waking up in fall and having to be somewhere at 7:00 but when you wake up thinking it is seven, but then seeing that it is only 6:00. Heart attacks rates are proven to increase with the amount of stress a person has, and there is officially nothing scarier than waking up an hour earlier to a teenager, not even a large test that he or she has not studied for. Although being a student and a youngster, I can usually quickly adapt to this change, whereas elder people have much harder times adjusting to the time delays and jumps. To be completely honest, there is nothing that makes me angrier than not getting enough sleep, which makes me in a terrible mood and just wants to die. Coupled with the strain it must have on your body and your heart easily translates into a heart attack. I do think we should conform and not have Daylight Savings Time.

Pretty X-Static About This

                Sometimes in a deeply intense debate about overpopulation on Earth, many people often forget or lower the value of a human life. Not only on the topic overpopulation do people forget, but it happens often when people talk about war. This can only be attributed to the standard expectations of people. What I mean by that is that the common people only expect that soldiers will die for a country and do not really give it a second thought. The other case is that I hang out with extremely insensitive people, but let us just assume that I do not. This article displays a new invention that helps wounded soldiers, who may have died previously without it, from blood loss by quickly inserting a microscopic sponge that expands and absorbs the blood while also sterilizing it.

                This is a great invention and it already has approval to be used out in the field. Although after a great invention that makes a person a lot of money, the person would be tempted to stop unless they had completely good intentions when making it, I know I would be heavily tempted to stop, but I think that this should not be the end of a possible long procession of improvements in medics on the battlefield. Just thinking about it a little bit just shows that this is not a permanent solution, rather a temporary one. By no means am I saying that this is a terrible invention but that it could be improved. Of course, having invented nothing yet, I have no room to judge as if I were on their level, but just throwing my thoughts out there. This only lasts for four hours so it is really only a temporary solution, but it really is better than nothing.

                This not only makes saving the soldiers’ lives easier but it also makes the medics’ lives easier, according to a previous article, it replaces as many as four to five rolls in a medic’s pack which would make the pack a lot lighter or could carry a lot more supplies with the same amount of weight carried. If I were a doctor though, I feel like it would be difficult to remove the sponge after it clogs up the artery because it is supposed to take all the empty space in an artery, but I do suppose the worst thing that could happen is to cut off the artery and replace it with a pig valve like they do to heart attack victims. I mean, it is a much better alternative to dying.

Trix in the Cereal Eye-sles

            On television, there are a multitude of advertisements playing for children’s cereals. These commercials will often contain an animated cartoon with a repeated catchphrase such as “going cuckoo for Cocoa Puff” or “Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids!” This later helps the child remember which cereal he or she wanted to buy. Not only do these companies try to reach out to the child through television advertisements, these companies try their best in stores too. Anyone who has shopped with a child or seen a child picking which cereal they want next know that many of them are indecisive, and by indecisive I do not mean that the child cannot pick one, but instead, he or she wants to pick all of them. In middle school during a graphic arts class, we learned about strategies designers used to entice children to pick a certain brand over another. One of the main strategies that many people already know about, before even designing the cereal, is that the children’s cereal will be placed on the lower shelves in the supermarket, while the cereal for adults are placed higher up. This is because the children are shorter and therefore will see this cereal first.

            One of the graphic tricks that I used was to use an animated character, since cartoons often appeal to many kids, and brighter and lighter colors that reflected the supposed “taste” of the cereal. Apple Jacks cereal is known to have a bright green color, the same color of a Granny Smith apple, which seems to imply all the tastes of the original apple. Let us also face that many of us are human, and most humans enjoy being happy. Very rarely do people associate happiness with the darker colors, like black or brown, and usually think happy colors are yellow and a bright green. This, of course, is not considering the other kind of “happy” whose colors are pictured as fifty different shades of gray, if you’re into that kind of stuff.

            A group of researchers from Cornell University did another study on whether or not eye contact from cereal boxes would increase a type of “brand trust” with them. I had not even thought about this. It makes more sense the more I think about it though. When a person makes eye contact with a person while talking, it usually brings a deeper level of trust into the conversation, while a person with shifty eyes, like many people do in books, usually means the person is lying or at least does not give the full truth. This, although a small design, does grant a bit more money to the company for minimal effort.