Author: EliseC

There are many forms of torture, but have you ever thought of solitude confinement as one? In the ted talk “What happens to people in solitude confinement” with guest speaker Laura Rovner, she talks about the suppressed downside of solitude confinement.

It’s not often you hear that solitude confinement is pernicious to the brain and body. Being stuck in a prison cell the size of a bathroom for years on end is gruesome. It can damage your five scenes, often causing felons’ vocal cords to lack practice, resulting in only being able to talk for an hour before wearing out. Another result is losing eyesight, not being able to see faraway things because looking out the window only leads to cement and nothing farther than a few feet away. And to add on, imagine not seeing another human for years. You lose all social skills, and could even get a serious mental illness from being stuck alone for years. Many inmates attempt suicide, and some succeed.

However, you and I may wonder the same thing. How has this been hidden from us these whole years? That’s because the government has been belittling it, and making sure that no one knows about it. They have been gagging the officials, family members, and anyone who knows about it. Yes, you probably have heard the government talk about other countries are providing made prisons for their prisoners, but it seems like they are contradicting themselves. Why are they doing the exact same thing? I personally think that solitude confinement should be banned and the government should enlighten its citizens on things happening right under our noses.

Solitude confinement is not only hurtful to the inmates, but the government is tolerating it. Solitude confinement makes people forget who they even are! Solitude confinement is a form of torture through and through and should not be allowed in prisons. Prisons are created using our tax money, so we should know the output of our money. Let me put you on one more thought, could you be able to bear? To be stuck in solitude confinement for years, even decades?

In the short story “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury, there’s an indistinctly meaningful side of the story. Ray Bradbury is known for being a horror, science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery. In almost all of his stories, there is a dark side that is intricately woven into his stories, along with a deliberate theme. Seen in many of his tales like “The Veldt” or “All Summer in a Day”. In this tale, he conveys the theme of “A seemingly small thing could make a huge difference.

Eckel, the cowardly protagonist with death surrounding his thoughts travels back in time to kill a dinosaur, and learns a huge life lesson. Before Eckel travels back in time, Travis, the guide warns Eckel that stepping on a thing as small as an ant could disrupt the entire future world and could even erase humanity. Eckel however is incredulous and continuously asks why he couldn’t step one foot into the ground. After one example, Eckel still thinks that that is a paradox and continues to question. After finally understanding, he agrees. This could foreshadow that in future of the story, he’s going to step foot onto the ground. This is because he repeatedly asks why and does not believe it.

A few minutes after traveling back in time, they arrive to the spot where they are going to shoot the dinosaur. However, the moment the dinosaur steps into view, Eckel is steeped with consternation and panic and immediately backs down and almost sprints back to the time machine. His talking is heard by the dinosaur and it comes towards them. Fortunately, Eckel’s companions are quick to shoot the dinosaur down. After all this confusion, to Eckel’s horror, he indeed has stepped foot in the mud. Travis knows how bad it could be and threatens to leave Eckel stuck in time; but after much argument, Travis hesitantly leads them back to the time machine and travel back in time.

However, to their horror again, something has changed. The atmosphere feels different, and the walls are painted another color. Eckel, pale-faced and sweaty turns his muddy boot upside down and lifts a crushed up exquisite butterfly from his boot. He dreadfully asks the official who is president, and with a reply of “Deutscher”, he knows he screwed up. Eckel drops to the floor, the butterfly falling to the floor beside him. And Travis, cocking his rifle shoots Eckel as a sound of thunder rings across the room.

From this extremely tense scene, we can see that Eckel stepped on a tiny butterfly and changed the entire events of yesterday, and the years before. By stepping on a seemingly small thing, he changed the way words are written, what’s in the air, and who became president. Bradbury illustrates this theme through this sci-fi short story and teaches us an important lesson.

Many people have been fighting for their rights for the last hundred years. However, people are still arguing if racism has ended. Before America was even founded, blacks were sent to America to be slaves for wealthy white families. There was a time when blacks couldn’t even drink from the same fountain as whites, they couldn’t sit in the front of a bus. Whites ruled the roost, and black’s were castigated when they did things, no matter how small.

However, people still fought back. People like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, and those who were not even remembered. Those people fought for their rights, no matter how burdensome it was. One of the greatest and most remembered act was Martin Luther King’s famous speech “I have a dream”. He spoke about how he wanted his little kids to be able to live in harmony with other races, to be able to hold hands with one another.

Yet to this day, we can still see racism in our lives, even through some may not admit it. Just a few weeks ago, there was the killing of George Floyd, a man who was killed by a police officer. There have been many other scenarios like this one, where racism can still be seen. If you ask me, I would undoubtedly say that racism is still there, whether or not you want it there. I repudiate that people can be treated this way just because of their skin color. In the depths of this argument between if there is still racism, I would say, that no matter how hard that people like Rosa Parks fought, humanity just can not take it away.

Have you ever taken a reading test at school? The ones that test how fast you read? Well, turns out that reading slowly is actually more helpful than reading quickly. In the Ted Talk “What Reading Slowly Taught me About Writing” by Jacqueline Woodson, my perspective on reading actually took a turn.

Reading slowly can not only allow you to enhance and deepen your understanding and connection to the story, but also helps to diminish your stress level. When you read slower, you can concentrate harder on each word and not think about anything else. And when focus more on the story, you tend to ponder more about it and catch unobtrusive details that may reveal a lot about the plot, or the theme. This also leads to a decrease in stress levels. This happens because once all your focus is on one specific thing, you’ll be absorbed by the book and forget about the things that are stressing you out.

You might be wondering why reading quickly is bad. However, there are always two sides of the problem. Reading quickly may cause you to rush, and whenever you’re in a rush, there are ominous results. For one thing, rushing causes you to panic, which also causes stress. This is one of the biggest lose-lose situations of reading quickly. It takes away the purpose of reading, which could be to calm down, or lower stress levels. One of the good things of reading quickly is being able to read and extensive amount of books in a short period. Allowing you to find books that could be more interesting or finding a genre of books that you find mundane.

However, this does not apply to everyone, since everyone’s brain works a different way. Some people may find that reading quickly allows them to absorb more books, and when they find a book they enjoy throughly, they can take time to slow down and reread it. On the other hand, there are people who like to take things slower and just spend more time on each book than speeding through them. Whichever way you prefer, if you want to understand a book deeply, it requires rereading, mulling, reflecting, and you being able to fathom every part of it.

In the short story “the Lady, or the Tiger”, the kingdom has a tradition. If one is needed to be on trial, they would have to go into arena, where there are two doors. One with a beautiful lady, the other with a ferocious tiger in the midst of the room. If the person in the arena has chosen the room with the tiger in it, they are considered guilty and a felon. This tradition is considered an entertainment in the kingdom and many find it very enjoyable to watch just as one would watch a T.V. show.

One day, the King’s daughter, the princess, is found being intimate with a very wealthy prince. Since the King is so fond of her daughter, he sentences him to the lady or tiger trial. Even though his daughter loves him so much, she is almost necessitated to watch because she is so entertained by it. Behind the door of the lady, is a lady who is a fangirl of the handsome prince. While, the other door contains the tiger. However, the princess knows which is behind the door and is uncertain which door to direct the prince to. She is envious because she think the prince secretly loves the other girl, but is also afraid to see her lover ripped apart into shreds by the merciless tiger. The intrepid prince is so trustworthy in the princess that when she gives him a laconic point to the right door, he immediately, without hesitation steps towards the door.

This brings me to the theme of the story. This theme also proves that themes can repeat in different stories since I’m going to steal the theme from the short story “the Lottery” .”Don’t blindly follow traditions just because they are traditions.” Even when the princess’s lover is sentenced to the fate of either being married or being eaten alive, she follows the tradition. Even when knowing that it’s wrong. She follows the tradition for the sake of her entertainment and just because it’s a tradition. Just like in “the Lottery”, the tradition could be cause very grievous consequences, as severe as killing your lover.

Today’s Ted Talk was about how false information on the internet can cause major disruptions in our society. For instance, when some Syrian hackers hacked into verified press and fabricated an extremely surprising story about a bomb hurting the president. This fake news was instantly retweeted about 4,000 times in about 5 minutes. Many major companies were fooled by this tweet and ran their company according to a world in were the president was hurt, which therefore made the stock market crash by almost 139 billion dollars in just a single day.

Because our technology is so advanced, adroit, and enhanced compared to olden days, it is much easier to create photos, videos, tweets, articles, etc that look and sound very authentic. There are many AI automatons and apps who are battling other AI apps who are trying to find the make out if the photo or article is real, or is a concoction of made-up stories. To add on, lots of people are avid social media users, who check social media many times a day. In which spreads the false news and information even faster.

This has been very damaging to the society as from the president example, we can see that the stock market has lost a big fortune. In a foreign country, spreading false information will cause you to become a felon and spent 6 years in prison. Many people do this because they want to cause harm to something or someone, often spreading false stories of them doing horrific things. The other reason is to gain attention and for people to notice them.

In this video, the speaker talked about many ways to stop us from being cajoled into believing the false news. One of the easiest ways is to be vigilant. Another way is to look at other articles about the same situation and see if it is telling the same thing. The last one is to use common sense. There could be small nuances that could just not make sense, or the whole thing could just seem as if the writer is a rudimentary in writing. Whichever way you chose, always be careful about rumors and things on the internet since you never know what’s real or what’s fake.

I can never appreciate enough the fact that Dee has left the house. My whole life, I felt like I was the ugly one, the lowest of the family, the shadow behind Dee; the precious perfect child everyone wanted their child to be like. Even when we were tiny babies, she would always be the one pushing me around and calling me names. From very young, Dee ruled the world.

However as we started hitting puberty and starting become mature, Dee changed in the way I feared, she grew to think that the whole world was balanced on the tip of her finger; everything she wanted would be given to her on a gold platter. After sending her to the school in Augusta, she seemed to believe her outlook even more. Now that I think about it, it’s absurd that I would even raise money for Dee, while hating her so much. However, I can look back on my life and name more than a hundred things that I’ve done that seem zany.

When I heard Dee was coming back to visit, I can promise you it was not the most pleasing sight. I locked myself in my room for one whole day, staring at the ceiling while dreaming, and pretending to sleep when mother came to check on me. Finally, out of hunger I went out, stuffed some snacks into my pocket, grabbed my dinner plate and sprinted upstairs. Surprisingly, I did not spilling anything in the process of running. A day before Dee came home, mother and I mowed the lawn and got our ducks in a row.

The moment Dee came into view, I had the urge to dash into the house; which I tried but failed because mother caught me. When we greeted Dee, she had changed her name, into something like Mango. She had actually changed quite a lot and had finally, finally thought more about our heritage, and other things that weren’t related to appearance. I’m ashamed to say this, but I actually like this new Dee, or should I say Wangro.

This ted talk about generation z has made me become aware of the things that are happening and it has shed light on many ways technology is bad for people. Generation Z, also known as gen z is the age group of people born within 1995 and 2015. I am a gen z and this video has really related to me and my life within the realm of technology. I had never really thought about how bad technology was for me, I have only thought about the positive side. I always thought of technology as a blessing, something to help me learn new things and expand my knowledge, however after watching this ted talk; the amount of negative impacts from technology seemed to compound every time I think about it.

The first point she talked about was memes on the internet that only gen z seems to find amusing. There were memes of death, which seems to be a subject talked about repeatedly in my classes. My peers talk about how they would rather die than complete this one homework assignment, which isn’t even that hard. It must have been so hard to take in for my teachers, as one of my friends have told our human skills teacher that she even considered suicide once. The look on my human skills teachers face was ghastly; and for me to think about it now is extremely hard. Since I know how hard it is and was for many people to get food on the table and survive, it’s extraordinary that people in gen z are thinking about taking their lives.

The main reason why death and suicide is such a common thing in the gen z community is because of the stories, horrifying things we hear and see on the news, social media apps, and google. The ted talk brought up many examples, one of them was a screenshot of the news on a normal day, however the negative stories were circled in red. How many red circles there were was a paradox. I couldn’t believe my eyes, more than half were stress-causing stories, wars in Iran, why Trump’s tariffs were causing bad things, a school shooting, an interminable list. However, this is not the only negative affect of technology, the internet is replete with stories similar to the ones I listed above, and those aren’t even the worst.

The ted talk speaker gave a personal anecdote, in 2016, there were stories about these killer clowns who would kill you if they found you. A very photo of these clowns would give you nightmares for months. For the speaker, she was afraid to even leave her house, afraid to even speak or write the word clown! You can see that technology can have such a immense impact on your lives, the speaker was even afraid saying a common word like clowns. It may not have been true, but whoever put the story out must have been in a state of inebriation to have even thought about ruining a child’s life like that.

The main lesson from the ted talk was instead of focusing on the negative affects of technology, turn the technology into place full of positive and helpful things. There are people in the gen z like Malala who have already accomplished so much, and they have been helping the world through many ways and means, from singing songs, to creating non-profitable organizations, to even just educating the public about the current situation and the dangers of technology. The main takeaway for me personally is to change the negative things into a place where anyone can educate themselves, read about people’s amazing journeys, and other positive things that can brighten ones life.

This article was about a group of scientist who have discovered a six new coronaviruses from studying bats in Myanmar. Before I read this articles, I barely knew anything about coronaviruses, but this article freshened me up. This task is a really dangerous one since the scientists are uncovering new virus that could be really fatal to them. They put on bodysuits and go into caves where they try and find things that could help them discover a new virus.

For this specific cave, scientists went in, where around half a million bats are living. They collected droppings from the bats, and took them back to their labs. They then found six unidentified new coronavirus. It’s amazing, the fact that they found six new viruses from just that one cave. It scares me to think how many more viruses there are in the world.

Another thing that was mentioned many times in this article were bats. They were the main source of many coronaviruses and the source of many deadly viruses like Ebola. I was surprised since in our History class, we just did a chapter on pandemics and I chose the Ebola pandemic to learn, so I learned so much about it. However, somehow I managed to skip the fact that Ebola was incubated by bats. That was a really cool fact.

I think those scientists, and the field of science are constantly in a lot danger, especially when things get hands, like finding new viruses. I learned a lot from this article and it really helped me understand the situation we are in and the pandemic that’s happening right now.

as soon as you lose a

beloved one, and you’re life start to

crumble, thoughts of

death start to arouse,

ending in

frustration, you think “what did i do to deserve this

gruesome thing? didn’t i do so much for the world,

however it repays me by removing a loved one, on

instagram everyone seems

just fine, it’s

killing me how their

loved ones are still around”,

maybe it’s happened to you before, and

nope this is

obviously not the best way, to

pass your depression,

quite frankly it’s

really the worst way there is. the first

step is to change a habit, it could be

tiny or a big step, yes it may be

ugly but it helps a lot, this will

vanquish your depression and

when you have changed, it’s like once you’ve mastered playing your

xylophone, after that, it’s all a breeze. The past of

yelling and depression all seems so

zany.