Blog post # 9 or 10... I give up... The Rest Of The Five Stages

Seeing as I have two books going at the moment, I suppose I should do a post on the other one. Is that against the rules? I don't think so... Oh well!

    A great thing about this book (it makes blogging easier) is that it devides scientific topics by discoveries, and tells a story about each one. It sucks that I have to pick just one! (flips to random page) Robots it is!

     Rodney Brooks was one of the first people to do a thesis paper on AI (artificaial intelligence), for him the refusal of the call was a huge part in his decision. He wished to create plans for a computer software that would be able to think for it's self. This was a huge step to take in computer enginering. "In fact, our most advanced robots, such as the robot rovers on the planet Mars, have the intelligence of an insect."(Kaku, 109)

      To go from an insect to a fully functioning humanoid you would need to establish a thought process, which was the first big problem, his first prototype could manipulate speach, but did not understand it. As an added difficulty, the number of neurons that a fruit fly (a comparable insect) has in it's brain is around 25,000 a human has around 10 billion. It would call for computers to suddenly increase their complexity by as much as 400,000 times. Although he accpeted the call, he had many thoughts of quitting, and to top it all off, he was not able to come up with the software. "fourty years ago the Artificial Intelligence Labritory at MIT appointed an undergraduate to solve it over the summer. He failed, and I failed on the same problem in my 1981 Ph.D thesis."(Rodeney Brooks)
  
      Quick question, is it still a journey archetype if the hero never succeds?
      Here's a quick video to let you know where we stand with AI:

Blog Post #9 (I think) The Ordinary World

     Though I find that many of the people in A Brief history Of Time deserve to be called a protagonist, one story (from the first chapter) really caught my attention. It was that of Galileo Galilei, who was one of the first to publicly believe in the copernicus' model where the sun was the center of our solar system and the earth rovolved around it.
Nicholaus Copernicus
     Copernicus believed that people would be willing to accept the theory, as it was able to explain why jupiter's moons orbited jupiter rather than following a complicated orbit around the earth. He owned one of the first telescopes, and made the observation himself, that jupiter's moons orbited jupiter. When Galileo was presented with the information, he published a paper about it, and left it alone. Really his ordinary world was a mideval version of ours, with a house, a job, and books to read, what realy changed this was when he was detained by the church as a heretic and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. As an interesting fact, the church only admited that they were wrong to condem Galileo for his ideas on November 1st 1992, 359 years after the fact. 
Galileo Galilei 
      People in Galileo's time were under constant pressure from the church. If you didn't believe what they believed, you could persercuted as tougly as if you had killed a man. The church origionally thought that all other heavenly bodies orbited in spheres around the earth at fixed lengths, the final sphere consisted of the stars that were fixed to our view and never changing. Outside the final sphere of fixed stars, the church supposed a heaven and hell existed, when this idea was challenged, they we're not happy. it must have taken a great deal of courage to challenge something that many people had held on to for hundreds of years, it took him 10 years to full publish his unedited copy of the paper, for fear that the church would have him killed.   

Refer to Last Title But This Is The Second Half of Blog Post #7/8

     I've personally done a lot of thinking of creator vs. science based on what I read in this book, as well as others. What i find so profound is how he begins the book with an imediate slam on religion
 "At the end of the lecture, a little old lady in the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.' The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'And what is the tortoise standing on?' 'You're a very clever young man, very clever,' said the old lady 'but the tortoise is all the way down!"(Hawking 1)

      I feel that he is deliberatly trying to make an example of the the shortcomings of religion  in places where modern science clearly prevails. This makes it seem as if religion is for the "crazies" of the world, and has no place in modern society. Stephen Hawking does not believe in god himself, and has made his views public on many occasions.


      Stephen Hawking has made his views about god public on several occasions. This is just one, which aired on the Discovery Channel as a Curiosity. On a seperate occasion, Stephen Hawking produced a report on god that aired on Channel 4 News which aired on September 2nd 2011 where he tryed to disprove the existence of a god by useing the theoretical framework of M-theory
Now, Stephen Hawking may feel that is there was a god, he would not have been born with MS. This is where I feel he draws his scientific inspiration from, and has become his overall goal; to disprove the existance of a god. in almost every book that I have read where he is either a main author or co. author, the book becomes more about how science and god conflict with each other. In his book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking says that: "Creation myths all attempt to answer the questions we adress in this book: Why is there a universe, and why is the universe the way it is?"(Hawking 124) He feels that there is no need for a god, and that if there was, he or she would not have let the human race become so out of controle. One final quote that I feel sums the situation up is one from his book The Universe in a Nutshell next to this picture:

"By the year 2600 the worlds population will be standing shoulder to shoulder and the electricity consumption will cause the Earth to glow red-hot." (Hawking 159)

Hawking, S. W., and Leonard Mlodinow. A Brief History of Time. 10th ed. New York: Bantam, 2005. Print.

Hawking, S. W., and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam, 2010. Print.

Hawking, S. W. The Universe in a Nutshell. New York: Bantam, 2001. Print.

Simoni, Michelangelo Di Lodovico Buonarroti. God Created Man. 1511. Fresco. Sistine Chapel Frescos.

Blog Post #7 Even Though It Is Actually #8 (Part one so it won't be too long) Which Is Really Confuzing

     It seams very unfortunate for me to always read nonfiction books, because they do not have a clear journey in them. What I often find, and have learned to do, is speak chronologically, where you can treat every little discovery as a journey in its self. It makes picking the individual stories out a tad bit harder, but overall, an adventure begins to appear.
 
     Many of the books I have read begin with a history of science in it's entirety, which its self is a huge journey with a climax around the discovery of the Theory of Quantum Mechanics. As the old story goes, Einstein did not wish to accept Quantum Mechanics and simply ruled it out as a fluke. He did not accept the call to adventure and never made it out of the second stage of the journey... from this persepctive. Even though he didn't accept Quantum Mechanics, he single handedly, discovered a new set of laws regarding to the realitivistic effects on a body in motion that completely challenged Newton's views of the universe, where an event in one place can be measured to have happened simultainieously everywhere in the universe. From this persepctive he had already found his elixer and was starting on the road back when Quantum Mechanics stepped in and blocked his path.

     Now that that has been said, The book I am currently reading (as I gave up on The Stand, one, for it's length, and two, for it's extreemly boring but important beginning) is A Breif History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

      Most of the book is pretty strait forward (relativly speaking), and leaves me with little locate or cycle questions, Im sorry to do this, but I can't really think of any real integrate questions either. So, here goes my final question: Does Stephen Hawking have a hiden agenda of trying to disprove the existence of a god?

Blog Post #6 Archetypal Characters

          The Character that I feel most compelled to write about is Nadine Brown from The Stand. At first, not a lot of information is given about her, making her feel unknown. You almost feel like you can’t get to know her very well with the information that is given.  From what you do know, she seems to be heading to the sanctuary created by mother Abigail, and follows other characters along that path. What really begins to strike you as odd is that she fights the other characters. She is reluctant to go with anyone, and has a seemingly unneeded distrust for everyone she meets. None of the other characters in the book exhibit such behaviour, so I have begun to think of her as an archetypal shapeshifter. Later in the book, Nadine begins having dreams about Flag, the leader of the “evil” camp. That is what I felt was missing at first, everyone else was having dreams of mother Abigail, where as she had none at all.        

Blog Post #5: Classics

          When I think of something as a classic, I think of it as something that will be remembered positively by many people, and even though their views of said subject change over time, it is still a universal favourite.

          The book that I am reading, called The Stand, is a genuine classic. Not only was it a bestselling book, 3 part movie was made based on it. It incorporates the journey to the special world as a disease begins to wipe out humanity. When only a few people who had been born with immunity are left in the world, they are divided into two camps, one lead by mother Abigail, who speaks to the survivors in their dreams and leads them too her house in Colorado. The others are lead by the devil’s personification: flag. This man represents the evil that we have in our world today, as he is always trying to restore a “pecking order” much like the one we have today. All in all, Stephen King was able to create a story that spoke to people. It showed how, under extreme circumstances (though they really needn’t be) we can come together as a race and dispel the evil that grips the world already. It’s an idea that everyone holds close, that one day, they will be able to be accepted as their selves,  and not as someone that they made up to “fit in” and for this reason, The Stand is a classic. It pertains to ideas that are held as the highest possible standard of human existence, and this view has never changes, though it may be distorted, the image can always be made clear.      

William didn’t look up again until he had fed. “We’re vampires.” He finally whispered to the murdered couple. -James Patterson, Violets Are Blue pg. 39

            The vampire-like killers in this novel remind me of the young vampires from the twilight series. In this book, two boys and their pet tiger have been living and feeding off people in San Francisco for some time. Like the vampires from twilight; they were taught by those who were original vampires, and essentially created by them, though they were not infected by a bite. They are more like serial killers than vampires though, as they wish to kill not to spread the vampire “curse.” They are also better at covering up their tracks than the twilight vampires, and never leave any DNA or finger prints at a crime scene, where as the twilight vampires kill their victims and leave them where they drop.