What if #7

What if every professor I have did not wait until the week before spring break to make everything due? I would be a lot less stressed out. I am not exaggerating at all. I am having to skip a very important class to attend an outside event. MY chemistry class has an exam on monday. I have a chemistry lab on monday. I have to read a book and do a reflection on it by next week. I have 2 outside events due next week. I have 7 blogs due next week. I have to write a 5-7 page paper for next week. I have a huge Bio test the day we get back from spring break. Thats the one that really pisses me off. I cannot believe what kind of person gives college students a very large important test the day after a week of straight binge drinking. Professors know that college kids do on spring break, they are not stupid. Another thing that really annoys me is that Science majors get SCREWED more than any other major on campus. We take two 3 hour labs a week. each lab counts for only 1 credit. So really, I am taking 18 hours of class per week, but only getting credit for 14. It is not fair to the students. If we re paying for 3 hour, we should get credit for 3 hours. I cannot wait until I am done with all this pre-requisite bullshit. Yes I am mad because I just found out everything possible is due in 5 days.

What if #6

What if human cultures did not advance past the lifestyle we lived in the paleolithic or neolithic age? In the paleolithic age, we were strictly hunter gatherers. During the neolithic, we used agriculture to support ourselves with little or no surplus. Over the millennia, humans have gotten overly dependent on others and extremely lazy. If right now, farmers stopped producing surplus and only grew food for themselves and their families, I guarantee that a huge amount of the world population would starve to death within the month. Only people who were self-reliant and could actually fend for themselves in the wild would be able to survive. The hunters, fisherman, and farmers would be the only people that could survive. It is extremely annoying. The human race will never experience a divine apocalypse because we are going to kill ourselves. By the time we are done with this planet, there will be no green left on the earth, and we will have been taken over by robots. People say that God wants us to use our talents so we do not waste them. I think that may be true to an extent, but if we use our talents to develop technology that destroys the earth little by little, I do not think God appreciates such talent. Thank God I am fortunate enough to not be alive when the human race self destructs. I am happy that I know of places where I can escape the industrialization, development, and destruction of the planet. How long will I be able to escape it though? How long until the wild that I escape to turns into cities?

What if #5

What if we had already developed the technology needed to live on the moon or on mars? What would we use the colonies on extra terrestrial planets for? I think I have a couple good ideas, some controversial, some not. My first and best idea would be to use them as a kind of quarantine for incurable, transferable diseases. Diseases such as AIDS would be the perfect candidates for such a colony. If we were to transport all humans infected with a certain disease we could wipe out AIDS from the human race. If there was nobody to transmit it, then we could not catch it again and we would no longer have to spend money on research for a cure. AIDS would be the perfect disease to do this with because it is not an airborne pathogen. It is only transmitted through contact with blood of an infected person. I am sure it would be possible for the human race to contract the disease again, but i think it would be difficult and we would be able to locate its origin. After the infected have all died of natural causes, other humans can inhabit the space colonies and decrease the overpopulation of earth.

Hot Zone Reflection

I recently finished the nonfiction book The Hot Zone by Richard Preston and I am surprised to say that I found the book hard to put down. Because of time constraints, I was almost forced to read the book quickly, but unlike most required reading, I actually did not mind being under pressure to finish reading. The Hot Zone really presented some new information to me that I had never thought about before. It made me ask myself “what if?” throughout the entire book and made the viruses discussed in the book a lot more real to me.

There is really nothing to argue about with this book. Since it is a non-fiction piece, there is no questioning the validity of the information. I think the book made me realize for the first time how vulnerable human beings are. I think the reason it made me think so much is that it struck so close to home. Most of the time people hear about exotic diseases, it is never effecting the United States nearly as much as other parts of the world. It actually scared me a little bit, and every time I had to put down the book, I felt like I was still in a Biohazard Level 4 lab. The book made me a bit paranoid to touch things with a cut on my hand, and I found myself washing my hands a lot more often. I think it was because I was so immersed in the book. I think Preston is a very effective writer, because it has been a long time since I have read a book as gripping and real as this one.

The subject of the text has to deal with viruses they call “hot agents”. A hot agent is a virus that has been known to have a high mortality rate in humans, and is not safe to handle or work with without a biohazard space suit. One of these hot agents makes its way from Africa to the Philippines and finally to the United States by way of monkey. A monkey seller located in Reston, Virginia, a suburb of Washington D.C., imported some diseased monkeys form the Philippines and they had an outbreak of a Biohazard level 4 virus in the monkey house. The U.S. army and the Center for Disease Control were put in charge of the operation to sterilize and euthanize the monkeys in a controlled environment in order to keep to public safe.

There are really not many opinions in this text because of the nature of nonfiction writing. I would think that most nonfiction authors try to include as little opinion in their works as possible in order to deliver a historically accurate read. In order to make the book more credible, Preston flew all over the country in order to interview eyewitnesses and participants. As a reader, I was appreciative of Preston while reading. I appreciated the fact that he did fly a lot of places for interviews, and that he did so much work to write a book. It made the reading experience more personable because I was able to relate better to real life people, knowing their background.

Another thing that made the book more believable was the act that he used his interviews and put quoted directly into the book instead of writing about the events from the interviews without any quotes. Even though he did was not able to use his own words when using the quotes, he still had a lot of pages with no dialogue and just description. Preston’s word choice and style really help the reader understand what is going on in the book. Even somebody with no biological or scientific background would be able to pick up this book and almost fully understand what happened throughout the book. It is amazing how well Preston explains certain parts of the text. I went from knowing nothing about hot agents to knowing a fair amount without doing any research.

I really enjoyed the book and the subject of the book. I think Richard Preston is an extremely talented science writer, and would not hesitate to read another one of his science related books, fiction or nonfiction.

What if #4

What if our marriages, jobs, and lives were decided by our parents at birth like back in native american times? Would people generally be happier or more unhappy? In my opinion, such practices would lead to less stressful lives. People would not have to worry about finding the right spouse, the right job, or the right pay. It would all be decided by our parents, and would most likely be what our parents did. Instead of attending classes for 17 to 21 years, we would be masters of a craft by the age of eighteen. We would be fully competent in our profession because we would be learning to do exactly what we would be doing for the rest of our lives for fifteen years. We would not be learning information that did not pertain to our craft and we would therefore be able to achieve mastery at a much earlier age. We would not have to spend a couple of introductory years mastering the craft out of college either. We would have greater lifetime earnings because of the supplementary time of work and apprenticeship. Overall, it may be a good idea. Also, i heard recently that in cultures where mirages are still arranged, there is less divorce... ponder on that for a bit