Technology Today

Upon reading the two articles about Cornucopia I was impressed. Cornucopias are 3D printing machines that can print your food, hence the name, and combine all of your favorite ingredients into it. I thought it was interesting because I have never heard of anything like it before. It seems to be very convenient; put in all of your favorite flavors of food and out comes a plateful of dinner. Isn’t that what we’re all about these days? The object of the 21st century seems to be to make an object bigger (in some cases smaller), better, faster, and more efficient. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the advances of the 21st century are wonderful, especially the medical advancements. Sometimes though, I think we need to stop and smell the roses and slow down a little bit in life. Yea, the new stuff being created and invented all the time is cool, but is it needed?

Inventors spend millions and millions of dollars testing and building more advanced products all the time. The truth is, as much as we want all this stuff, we don’t need it. I admit I am just as guilty as most people out there. Whenever something new comes out I always want to be the first one to have it. I don’t necessarily get it right away but I usually beg my parents for every new piece of technology that comes out. When Dell created the new Inspiron notebooks, I jumped right on the band wagon and got myself a bright pink one. When the touch screen phones became popular, I ditched my 2 year phone agreement (for a price of course), switched to Verizon, and bought the coolest touch screen they sold at the time. I could go on forever with lists of new technology I have always had to have. But if I think about it, I only wanted those things because they were the cool new thing. I never needed any of them. The Inspiron notebook wasn’t needed; I already had an Apple computer that worked just fine. The new touch screen phone wasn’t needed; I already had a pink razor less than a year old. It was that I WANTED all of these things. People put all their money into these technological advancements and then they complain about the price or gas or the price of their education. Okay so I have kind of gotten a little off topic here but I think that the technological advancements have become a little too extreme. Nobody needs them; they want them because they make our lives easier for the moment. In the end though, looking at the big picture they only make our lives more complicated. So next time the newest version of iPod comes out, before you rush to the store, ask yourself if you really need it. Instead, put your money towards your college savings account and stop complaining about how expensive college is these days.

Here is a link to the Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy 3D printer I was talking about.

Saturn

Ever since I watched the movie ET in about 3rd grade, I’ve always wondered if life outside our planet existed. Whenever I think about it, I realize that it must exist since the universe is so huge. The most recent article I read out of Discover magazine covered this topic. Research done by NASA shows that life could not only exist in the Habitable Zone as it is called but also in areas once deemed the uninhabitable due to their size, distance from the sun, or other factors. The Habitable Zone, according to Discover magazine, is an area of space that is most hospitable for life. It must contain liquid water, organic molecules, and a source of energy.

Scientists are realizing that it is possible there is life outside the Habitable Zone. Several possibilities of this lie on Saturn’s moons. Two of these moons, Enceladus and Titan have been studied closely by NASA for a while now. While studying this, they discovered that cryovolcanoes were emitting water vapor and ice. This shows evidence that there could possibly be liquid under the surface of these moons. It was also discovered that methane circles Titan much like water circles the Earth. By studying this process on Saturn, scientists might be able to better understand how similar processes on Earth work. This studying has been done through Cassini, a spacecraft that landed on Saturn and brought with it a landing probe which then when to the moon Titan. The article I read is pretty long and goes into further details which explain much more evidence they found to support life on this distant planet or even its moons. Click here to read the article online.

Running During the Offseason

Since the beginning of January I have been running outside after school again. I stopped after cross country ended to take a break from running and well, let’s just say that the break lasted longer than it should have. So like everybody else in America, my New Year’s resolution was to get back on the sidewalk and start running. I usually run on the trail that isn’t too far from our school with my friend. It is a very good place to run in the winter because for some reason it is usually cleared off really well. The only problem is getting down to the trail because the sidewalks in the neighborhood are very snowy and icy.

This previous week we did not get to run much because of the ice storm that came. Ice storms are the worst scenarios for runners because it is almost impossible to run on a thick sheet of ice. Snow and most other seasonal commodities we can handle. For that reason, we took Wednesday through Friday off last week so we would not have to worry about breaking any bones. Monday though, we are going to start up again and hopefully we will not have any distractions this week since there are only 3 shorts weeks until the beginning of track season.

On the weekends I usually work out at the YMCA or I go to Aegon where my dad works. I only do this during the winter though, when I have no other options, because I hate running inside on treadmills. They have a way of boring me to death and I usually only make it 3 miles before I have to get off. I like to run outside better for a number of reasons: there is better scenery and I can breathe fresh air, not humid air all full of sweat. Unfortunately, I have to deal with it because the sidewalks in my neighborhood are solid sheets of ice or piled high with snow most of the time. Anyway, I hope that in the next two weeks I have before track I can really step up my game. The past few weeks we have been taking nice and slow, short runs. It is good to do this during the off season but with the track season coming up so quickly I think it would be better to increase my mileage a bit.

Here is a link to the track website:)

Farmville:)

So as of recently, maybe a few months ago, I have become addicted to Zynga Games on Facebook. My interest in these games started out seemingly innocent; I would play them on the weekends for maybe an hour tops. Now it seems I am playing them for at least an hour every night. Granted, I am over exaggerating a bit when I use the word addiction. It all started out one day when I got a request to be someone’s neighbor on Farmville. Although I had heard about this game and thought it looked stupid, I decided to try it since it was one of my really good friends who sent me the request. I played the game for like a day and the next thing I knew I was bored to death so I stopped playing. A week later I look at my requests and I had another neighbor request. I decided I would give the game another shot so I accepted it. This time I was sold on the game and continued to play it more and more every day. I try to put limits for myself on how long I can stay on these games but it seems that I always just dismiss them when it actually comes time to get off of them.

I have managed to limit the number of Zynga Games I play to four: Farmville, Café World, Petville, and Fishville. Even though I only play four, I still think it’s a bit excessive. The problem is these games aren’t the type of games you can just play once a week. For instance, if you only play Farmville once a week your crops will continuously wither and you won’t make a profit. I occasionally think about quitting the games but they provide me so much entertainment I don’t think I could bare to do it. Plus, the competition side of it is pretty fun too. My friend, who goes by Tulula on the blog, is in constant competition with me because we are around the same level and I’m pretty sure she has the same addiction I do to Farmville.

You might be wondering, what is so fun about these games? What do you even do? Well on Farmville you plow, seed, and harvest your crops, all for a profit. With the profits you make you can by an estate for your farm, animals, trees, machinery and more. It is almost as if it is a real farm and as you go you become a better and better farmer, thus resulting in you being able to harvest more advanced crops. It is hard to explain in words how fun the game is, but if you go on Facebook and try it you will probably understand. If you don’t play Farmville you probably can’t relate well to this post but if you do have a Facebook you might be able to. It’s like this Facebook users: every time you get on the computer (unless you are at school and haven’t been able to crack the code yet) where is the first place you go? For me, even before I played Zynga games, it was Facebook. There is even a group on Facebook that makes me laugh every time I see it called, “I was doing my homework and I ended up on Facebook,” because it’s like the story of my life. So basically I extend this post to not only addressing my Zynga Games addiction but also my Facebook addiction which I haven’t been able to cure ever since the summer after 8th grade. In fact, I have been counting and since I started writing this blog entry I have checked my Facebook page 5 times. Sad, I know.

Evolution and Religion

I grew up in the Catholic Church and since kindergarten they have been teaching me everything from the basis of Catholicism to what it is today. Every Wednesday night I would go to CCD class (religious ed) and they would teach me what most kids around here hear, “And on the 6th day God created man.” I never challenged this theory because it seemed that it was the only option, I had never heard anything different than this. I had heard of the word evolution but I thought it was just a bunch of crazy scientists talking; scientists who didn’t believe in God, which seemed very taboo to me. It wasn’t until I got to high school, when I learned about evolution in depth and I realized that somehow this had to be true. I learned more about it in my biology courses at school and through at home researching mostly on the internet. I realized that these people I thought were once just crazy scientists actually did have really good facts and information that was supported.

After studying Darwin’s Theory and the basis of evolution I realize that I can’t just ignore it any longer because it makes sense and to forget about it would be ignorance. This is where I am at today. I want to believe it because it makes sense but I feel like me believing it sacrifices what my parents worked so hard to instill in my brain. I feel that by believing in evolution I will let down my parents, the Father of my church, and everyone who has helped me become a member of the Catholic Church through conformation.

This brings me to what I personally believe: Religion and evolution can coexist. Albert Einstein once said, “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” But how is this possible? Can you really believe that God created humans and at the same time believe that evolution has occurred. I think that in a way you can. What I am coming to believe is that God created the world and that evolution was also started by God. This theory would challenge everything I have been taught but I feel that it is one of the only ways that religion and evolution can coexist.

So this is one of my blog posts for this week, but I kind of like it and I think I’m finding this topic a lot more interesting than I am finding my global warming topic. I might end up using this as my essay topic and ditching my original global warming topic. If I did this I would go into further details with evolution or maybe talk about how society is becoming more acceptable of evolution in many cases.

Here is a link to a video that I feel represents the point I am trying to get across. I think what Dr. Collins says is a good interpretation of how these two things can coexist. Unfortunately, I had to create a link because the emedding feature was disabled for this video.

Neanderthal's and Early Modern Humans

The one of the left is a picture of what a human skull looks like, the one on the right is what a Neandertal skull would have looked like.

This weekend I wrote an essay on evolution and religion and how they can coexist. I was thinking about using this as my big essay for this term although I have already turned my rough draft essay on global warming in. Due to this, I decided to read a little bit further into evolution and modern humans. One of the most fascinating things about evolution is that it supports the belief of Neanderthal people. Neanderthal’s are basically known as the cousin of early humans. At some point thousands of years ago we had a common ancestor with them. They looked very similar to early modern humans and are today extinct.

How did these Neanderthal’s come to extinction? This is a question that puzzles many scientists to this day. One possibility is that early modern humans killed them off. Possible evidence of this is found on the Neanderthal named Shanidar 3. Through very much testing, Shanidar 3 appears to have been killed when a spear punctured his rib cage. At this time period, spears were only being used by early modern humans. Now of course if this is how the Neanderthal died, it is just one scenario of this type of encounter. The main motive for this killing would have most likely been to eat the Neanderthal. According to Discover magazine early modern humans began to migrate from Africa to Europe, where the Neanderthal’s were living, 50,000 years ago. Then around 30,000 years ago the Neanderthal’s became extinct. The possibility that early modern humans killed the Neanderthal’s isn’t the only possibility though.

Some scientists believe there was a much more peaceful ending to the population of the Neanderthal’s though. Some evidence shows that Neanderthal’s and early modern human’s mated. It could be that because the Neanderthal population was so small compared to the humans they were eventually absorbed into the human population through this mating. This made me think, is it possible that some of us still have Neanderthal blood running through our veins? The studying of human and Neanderthal DNA has shown that there was very minimal interbreeding between the two closely related species.

Another possibility that to me seems the most likely is that over time the Neanderthal population died out from simply not being able to adjust to their climate. The fact was that there were far fewer Neanderthal’s than there were early modern humans. When there are far fewer of a species to begin with it often times makes it difficult for them to survive when a major climate change occurs. In fact, evidence shows that around the time of the end of the Paleolithic area extreme climate changes occurred. This would have been around the time the Neanderthal’s became extinct. A major weakness of the Neanderthal’s was that they relied heavily on the hunting big game while the early modern humans relied on hunting and gathering. If the big game became scarce for long periods at a time, the humans would be able to live off the gathering they did but the Neanderthal’s would most likely die off.

Here is a link of the article I wrote about in Discover Magazine.

Is Math Wired Into the Brain From Birth?

Recently I read an article in Discover Magazine about math and the human brain. The article suggested that math is wired into the neurons of your brain from the day you are born. This would mean that math is a natural instinct for humans; it is an interest we are born with. I could see how this would be easily disputed because many people will say that they hate math. The truth is, you may hate math now, but when you were an infant math was interesting and the very basics made some sense to you. By this, I don’t mean that babies are born knowing that 6 multiplied by 9 is 54 but rather that they can connect numbers in other ways.

In one of the studies listed in this article, scientists studied the brains of newborns. They did this by playing cooing sounds to the babies with different numbers of sounds in each trial. Following this, the babies were shown a set of shapes on the computer screen. The scientists measured the amount of time each baby looked at the shapes. Previous studies have shown that the length of a time a baby spends looking at something reflects how interested the baby is in that object or picture in this case. To make this easier to understand, a baby would hear, “tuu, tuu, tuu, tuu, tuu.” Following this, the baby would look longest at the five shapes. They would look somewhat less at the 10 and very little at the 15. This shows that babies do understand the basic meaning of numbers and that they can also connect pictures to sounds.

Interestingly enough, a similar study was conducted on rhesus monkeys that show they too have math on the brain. The studies showed that when moneys do math, they rely on the section of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus. This is the same part of the brain that humans rely on to do math. It also found that the rhesus monkeys had the same basic understanding of math that human babies do. Since humans and monkeys went on a different evolutionary path about 30 million years ago, this proves that this math intuition in our brains is at least that old.

The question that this leaves us then is why aren’t monkeys as intelligent as humans? The author of the article, Carl Zimmer, explains that our ability as humans to understand symbols is what sets us apart. Long ago, humans probably thought of numbers the same way as babies and monkeys do today. Once humans discovered symbols and began to use them the world became a different place.

Here is a link to the article, "The Brain," by Carl Zimmer