Month: June 2020

Many times in life you feel, ” Wow, what if that happened, would the world be like this right now?” Today, when I read the short story: A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift; we are once again faced with questions like: would we be facing this pandemic, would Donald J Trump be president, Would the US be a world power?.

In this story, we wonder, if his proposal was actually taken into force, what would happen? First of all, the following suggestions are only my insights. We might not even be alive if force was taken to eat all those babies when they came to the age of one. Even if most of us are still here, many people such as Abraham Lincoln, the son of a poor mother who would have would give her son to a rich noble, would not pass the age of one. He would be butchered, eaten, and would not become the US president. If he was not the president, who would save the Union, who would free the slaves. The US would not be like now, it most likely would have been a North and South. His proposal, if taken into force everywhere, it could result in the world population reduced to less than half. If the people were reduced, Japan would not have wanted more land and try to conquer China and help start WW2, people would not have been greedy to get more land when settling in America for there would be land enough for the reduced population. The rich people would have eaten soo many babies, that soon they would not be enough people to be their servants because the babies that were to become servants had been eaten! Many things could have happened just because of one proposal!

Things could have gone better or worse for the humanity. But I do know one thing, the fate of the world would have been pretty interesting if people decided to listen to the proposal!

Samuel M.

Kimberly is a teacher at Moses Lake High School and she is talking about climbing a pole at the beginning of the video. About climbing a 40 foot tall pole and stand with both feet at the top of the pole. Then If you fail at climbing the pole, you just jump off and the rope tightens and your classmates catch you. Some people would go halfway up the pole and get too scared and get rescued. She also talked about another girl who wouldn’t even touch the pole because she was scared. And on the inside Kimberly was scared and stuff, but on the outside, she was like oh it’s only 40 feet no big deal and stuff. And she talks about how easy the first 38 feet is because there was a pole to hold onto. Then at the top the people were supposed to stand on a pole that both of your feet couldn’t fit on the top of the pole. And the teenagers were like encouraging her and cheering her on and stuff. And when she stood on the pole, she jumped off, and the teenagers caught her. And then she started talking about texting with her son and stuff. And then she said her son texting with his girlfriend and accidentally sending pictures to her instead. And then after she talks about this texting thing, then she starts talking about Abraham Lincoln and how strong he is and then Abraham starts reading and asking questions and Kimberly starts talking about how Abraham needs to shave and stuff. And then she starts texting her son again about how she could be better at parenting. And he responds with not question my abilities. And then she starts to talk about when people get in trouble and if they did a bad thing, don’t start by talking to them with curiosity and stuff. And yeah.

I think building robots to handle problems that are sometimes to complex for people to do or having them perform certain tasks are bad ideas because have you ever thought of what might happen if a robot stops working and starts making a mess of the whole situation?

Well I think that we should try to avoid the process of making robots and letting them do our work for us.

For example, say, Violet, the robot is cleaning the room where the test patients for COVID-19 if she misses a single spot then within a few minutes or even seconds, the germs can spread and infect people who do not have the virus. Another thing that I don’t like robots doing for us is surgeries.

Once I saw in a world encyclopedia, there was a robot, yes, a robot, doing a gal bladder removal surgery. The patient and robot where in France but the surgeons where in USA! But that got me thinking, what if the robot lost control and messed up? That would be a huge problem then.

Overall I’m just concerned about the use of robots and I hope we can just keep the number of robots used in the world low because besides the happiness and entertainment they bring, a misprogrammed robot can be quite a handful!

“A Modest Proposal” is a story about how someone reacts to the state of Ireland’s poverty and an idea of how to solve it. Here is my opinion and reaction to this story.

The story is about how the author, Dr. Jonathan Swift, is unhappy about the state of the kingdom. He proposes that they should eat youngsters, and that is a win for them, because they can get food, and can get money for more food, and don’t have to pay that much money for food, since they don’t have a child, and they can save money, in which they use for more food.

I honestly don’t like the idea of being roasted on a spit over a fire. Even though my parents might get fed, I will get fed to another random person. This isn’t the best idea, and I am forced to conclude that Dr. Jonathan has no idea what it feels like to be eaten. He is one of the posh people, and may not care about the lower class. He probably just gets annoyed that there are to many beggars asking him for some measly money so they can eat something.

To sum up all of this, I don’t like this idea. If I were him, I would probably establish an early 1729 Red Cross or something. Don’t eat baby meat. I think there is something called cannibalism. I wouldn’t apply much from this story into my daily life.

-Justin

In Ireland, there are 120,000 kids born a day. His proposal is to fatten up these undernourished children and feed them to Ireland’s nobility. Children of the poor could be sold into a meat market at the age of one. He also says this can solve overpopulation and unemployment, since families no longer have to pay expenses for the children. The author gives the numbers for his statements and gives specific numbers about the number of children to be sold, their weight and price. He also gives some recipes for preparing this “delicious” meat, and he feels sure that creative cooks will soon be selling them. He also says that this will have positive effects on family ethics: husbands will treat their wives with more respect, and parents will savor their children ( reverse psychology). His conclusion is that the movement of this project will solve thousands of problems in Ireland.

I find this absolutely horrendous. Parents value their children’s life above themselves and all others. Taking them away, and knowing that someone else is going to EAT them, makes them feel despaired. This is not a “Modest Proposal” more like a “Cannibalistic Proposal”. Although this was all reverse psychology, it is wrong and unjust, I disagree with these actions.

As COVID-19 gets worse and worse, we constantly think about vaccinations and other things to stop COVID-19. There was a vaccination being tested in January, and since then, there are no antidotes to this novel disease. There are, however, steps to improving upon the vaccines.

Now, do vaccines really work for COVID-19? Can we use something else? “A common saying in robotics is that robots are best suited for jobs too dirty, dull, or dangerous for humans.” This has brought scientists to try to use robots to solve this situation. Robots are very powerful tools: “’Instead of manual disinfection, which requires workforce mobilization and increases exposure risk to cleaning personnel, autonomous or remote-controlled disinfection robots could lead to cost-effective, fast, and effective disinfection,’ the researchers wrote. ‘New generations of robots, from macro- to microscale, could be developed to navigate high-risk areas and continually work to sterilize all high-touch surfaces.”

The first robot was Stevie. However, this idea didn’t work: “The Stevie robot already had sensors allowing it to navigate independently and stop when it detects the presence of a person. A directed light source that automatically shut down when it detected motion nearby could be a useful feature. Akara toyed with the idea of putting a disinfectant UV-C feature on Stevie, but eventually dropped it when they couldn’t find a satisfactory way to integrate it into the robot’s design.” There needs to be an improvement: “The team began drawing up plans for a new robot that would combine the navigational features they’d designed for Stevie with a UV-C light. The robot wouldn’t have any anthropomorphic [or having human characteristics] features, but would be designed to work alongside humans. They would call this one Violet.”

“Akara has focused on making Violet portable and compact enough to be able to operate in tight, crowded spaces that are otherwise hard to clean: bathrooms, waiting areas, the nooks and crannies of public transit. It also has a protective shield around the back of the light, and motion-detecting sensors so that people don’t have to vacate the area while it’s at work.” This is a very big improvement. Since Violet covered all the mistakes that Stevie had and it also had the features of Stevie, it should be successful.

In conclusion, I think scientists are too slow on inventing. Maybe the schools don’t allow students to have a lot of creativity, but that is another subject to talk about. I still think that they should be much faster at thinking of how to resolve it. At the time of the article, COVID-19 is almost half a year old (about 5-6 months)!

“Seventh Grade,” by Gary Soto tells a story about how Victor, a young boy who wishes to make Teresa his girl, tries to impress her. He is encouraged when he finds that he and Teresa share several classes including English and French.  In French class, he decides to pretend that he knows how to speak the language, trying to impress Teresa.  While he does not fool the teacher, Teresa was impressed and approaches him after class asking that he tutor her.  The teacher, Mr. Bueller, wisely remembers his own youthful foolishness and does not give away Victor’s secret.  Because of the teacher’s kindness, Victor decides to go to the library and check out extra books on learning to speak French. 

One possible reason the author wrote this story was to bring adults nostalgia. As everyone these days are stressed about work and taxes, this story helps show them what their school lives were like, and compare it to their own. Victor always made a fool of himself trying to impress Teresa, probably what a lot of people have also done. If they had put themselves in Victor’s shoes, would they have done the same thing? Mr. Bueller also had a moment of nostalgia when thinking about his old girlfriend, and how he had impressed her by pretending to be rich. Overall, the story was a pretty interesting one.

Curtis Zhang

6/9/20

Generation Z thingy

People in Generation Z, or Gen Z are doing very incredible things right now in the world, but they are also being exposed to negative things and are, as a result, acting very negative. Generation Z is acting this way because of the News, the Internet, and the pressure from outside. 

News nowadays pumps out enormous amounts of news on sad things that are happening around the world which Gen Z read about and become so accustomed to it, they stop reacting to bad news about horrible things happening, and start to joke about it. This may seem harmless, but if you keep that habit until adulthood, you might end up deciding to kill themselves or harm others. 

The Internet is also contributing to the negativity of Generation Z because generation Z has something called the Internet which can give you nearly anything you can ask it in under a second, while previous generations never had anything like this. This will make their patience a lot lower, which will make Generation Z act more annoyed all the time that real life things not in the Internet are not as fast as the Internet, which will make the Generation Z people feel annoyed, making them harder to deal with and more negative in some cases. 

The pressure that The Generation Z experience to get good grades in grade school and college is very great, and they sometimes will have a mental breakdown or worse, suicide because they have failed a test or gotten a bad grade. This is also true due to the fact that they are always joking about death and bad things that they hear about in the news, so they might suicide when they get a bad grade or fail a test. 

Generation Z is a very negative group of people because of the Internet, the News, and the Pressure to get good grades. Generation Z should probably try to act less negative by not reading too much news, not using the Internet as much, and trying not to stress getting good grades as much as we do today. 

From this ted talk I learned that people are in different generations and this is a thing. I’m a Gen Z which is if you’re born from 1996 to 2015. Gen X is if you’re born from 1965 to 1976. You’re a baby boomer if you’re born from 1946 to 1964. Know we grow up with technology and Ipads.

In this short story, the main character really likes this girl in his class, and he tries to impress and be friends with her by going to the same French class as her.

He is constantly thinking about the girl, Teresa, and when the teacher asked him to say a proper noun, he said Teresa. He constantly tries to impress her and during French class, he tries to impress Teresa by saying “French”, even though it was complete gibberish. At the end of the class Teresa was impressed and started to talk to him and asked if he wanted to study with her. The boy was obviously excited and said yes, but this was still at the end of French class. Even though the teacher knew that the boy was faking it, the teacher didn’t interfere, having sympathy for him.

The moral of this story is that we shouldn’t fake who we are, if we do, in the end it would be us that will get a hard hit. Fake it until you make it.