The Void Reaver

`               For whatever reasons that you personally may be scared of the dark, I think there is an actual scientific reason for why that people should be scared of the dark. There comes a point in a person’s life where they become ridiculed for being scared of the dark, kind of how there comes a day where you are required to stop acting like a child and suddenly become an adult. Evolution happens whether you believe it does or it does not, in fact, there is tons of evidence in multiple living things that proves it. As much as I want to respect the Christian idea of creating the world, let us just look at history and how many times they have been right in contrast to radical ideas. So far, the radicals have nearly always been right, but only after dying from being jailed by the church.

                Humans are not exactly the pinnacle of evolutionary standards, but we have developed different advantages to adapt against some of the more major setbacks. One such example of our evolution is the development of opposable thumbs. Without these, a lot of inventions would not have been invented, heck; it would even be difficult to eat a banana. Imagine the difficulties of playing on a video game system, and I agree that we would have adjusted our living style to account for this, but it would be more difficult.

                Now to get back on topic, night should be a very scary place for every human, because we rely a lot on sight, and we know that there are other animals or bugs that are out there that are much more adapted to the night than we are. A sudden noise. A piercing shriek. We immediately think the worst even when logically we know that we are safe. The problem is that we cannot see what is going on. Now especially animals that prey or hunt during the night are certainly the scariest. This video of a praying mantis shows how quick and efficient it is at killing and hunting down animals. Now if only they were actually large enough to attack humans, would we have to truly fear for our life. In League of Legends, Kha’zix is an adaptable bug from the darkest dark of the game and one of the best assassins, and seeing him leap onto your screen just incites fear. The dark is a scary place. We develop some fears because they help keep us safe, so who knows? Just be careful out there.

Middle School...

            Let us talk about botany, a subsection of biology. My school does not offer botany as an “important class” and the same goes for other science classes like ecology, geography, and astronomy. I am sure everyone has heard that story where a middle school student, usually a sixth grader wants to be rebellious, like most sixth graders are, and decides to try drugs for the first time. Then you hear all about how he wants to buy weed, and ends up smoking it, but after a while, he becomes enlightened when he realizes that all this time, he has just been smoking oregano. In fact, my friends and I were joking about doing this, by selling oregano to middle school students as a joke and to fundraise for our club. Keep in mind it was only a joke and we do not condone the use of drugs, unless you are living in Colorado, in which case we do.

            My middle school classes were all terrible, as in I learned next to nothing in them except for a few catchy phrases, like “There actually is no such thing as cold, but instead, a lack of heat,” so interesting, but exactly how does that happen. I think that middle school classes should be a lot more interactive with the students, because middle school was an extremely hard time, and I can personally testify to that, and this is actually where many students decide on how they want to live their life or when they decide to do drugs or take alcohol, which all might affect the development of their brain much later in life. Students will often come to regret their decision later in life, and so if classrooms or schools were more interactive and encouraged students to actually learn, instead of trying to strip them of all individuality. This is shown by the Calvin and Hobbes comic about snowflakes, shown here.

            I also think that parents play a deciding factor in a student’s behavior, as in the students will often model their parents, or at least how their parents want them to act. This was always me, because I always kind of was the child that my parents wanted their life to be, as in go to one of the best colleges and earn tons of money. Personally, I was fine with a mediocre college with a mediocre life, and it was not until high school when I realized that my ambitions did not align with my parents.

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.