William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is a tale of spousal abuse and marital intrigue. Its main conflict is between Petruchio and Katherine, a suitor and an unwilling bride, respectively. While some of its observations remain pertinent, it is less than timeless. More updated representations of romance can be found in modern romantic comedies, like 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, which focuses on, yup, Harry and Sally. Their relationship is, for most of the movie, more nebulous than the one presented in The Taming, but by the end of the movie, the characters are married. Where they are separate are the ways in which those characters reach marriage, and those different ways reflect the time periods that both works were written in. The different ways that the main characters of The Taming of the Shrew and When Harry Met Sally approach marriage prove that power is more evenly spread in a modern romantic relationship than in a historic one.

Petruchio has rather low standards for marriage. In Act 1, Scene 2, lines 61-62, he explains this plainly. “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; If wealthily, then happily in Padua.”

Katherine’s father is rich, so Petruchio deems to court her. Katherine, who is known for her rude, violent behavior, is somehow not opposed to marriage, be it generally or personally. In fact, in Act 2, scene 1, line 33, Katherine worries that “I must dance barefoot on [my well-tempered, attractive, and therefore oft-courted sister’s]  wedding day.” A wedding would seem mutually beneficial, then, but their first meeting leaves Katherine angered. She simply dislikes Petruchio. After a long argument in which Katherine tells Petruchio that, essentially, she’ll never marry him, Petruchio says to Katherine’s father:

“Father, 'tis thus: yourself and all the world,

That talk'd of her, have talk'd amiss of her...

And to conclude, we have 'greed so well together,

That upon Sunday is the wedding-day.”

Katherine says to Petruchio:

“I’ll see thee hang’d on Sunday first.”

(Act 2, Scene 2, lines 280-289)

Regardless of her prior interest in marriage, she has made something very clear. She can’t stand Petruchio. She would rather kill him than marry him, if one is to take her words literally. Marriage has historically been seen as the final goal for women, especially in an era where very limited options for work were available to them. For Katherine to refuse marriage, after acknowledging that she has basically succumbed to the societal pressures, means that she bears an impressive amount of hatred for Petruchio. Regardless of her wishes, though, Petruchio married her that Sunday.

Like Katherine, Sally wants marriage. When she informed her boyfriend Joe of this interest, he told her that he didn’t share that interest. Recognizing their different motivations for a relationship, Sally pragmatically broke it off with Joe. Sally recounts to Harry, “We wanted to live together, but we didn't want to get married because every time anyone we knew got married, it ruined their relationship… Joe and I used to talk about it, and we'd say we were so lucky we have this wonderful relationship, we can have sex on the kitchen floor and not worry about [kids] walking in. We can fly off to Rome on a moment's notice... And [at the circus, a] man had [a little kid] on his shoulders, and she said, ‘I spy a family.’ And I started to cry. You know, I just started crying. And I went home, and I said, ‘The thing is, Joe, we never do fly off to Rome on a moment's notice.’”

Where Katherine was married against her will, Sally was denied marriage. What’s different about these situations is that Sally was allowed to break up with her significant other when she wasn’t getting what she wanted from a relationship. Katherine got absolutely nothing she wanted from her relationship with Petruchio, but because renaissance-era Italy was less progressive than synthpop-era America, she was not allowed to end the relationship. The power of termination was in the hands of Petruchio, or even in the hands of her father. It certainly wasn’t in her own hands. Sally’s ability to end her relationship is a distinctly modern one.

After the wedding, Petruchio took it upon himself to make a more compliant, mild-mannered Katherine, through the time-honored traditions of gaslighting, torture, and just plenty of abuse. If one is to, again, believe that Katherine speaks without sarcasm, then it would appear that he was successful, as Katherine said to two insolent wives:

“I am ashamed that women are so simple

To offer war where they should kneel for peace;

Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,

When they are bound to serve, love and obey.

Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,

Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,

But that our soft conditions and our hearts

Should well agree with our external parts?

Come, come, you froward and unable worms!

My mind hath been as big as one of yours,

My heart as great, my reason haply more,

To bandy word for word and frown for frown;

But now I see our lances are but straws,

Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,

That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.”

(Act 5, Scene 2, lines 170-185)

Strong women don’t last in this era. The odds are stacked too strongly against them. So, when Katherine, a once-defiant woman, goes on and on about the inferiority of the female gender, it is clear that all traces of her personality have all been replaced with the vision of her imagined by Petruchio. She not only accepts the marriage that she had once been so fully opposed to, she accepts her role, the woman’s role, as a servant.

Harry experienced a similar change in opinion regarding the dynamics of romance. In his youth, he confidently asserted that women and men can’t be friends due to the possibility of sex always hanging in the air. But after around a sexless friendship with Sally, his mind began to change. In reflection, he told her, “You know, you may be the first attractive woman I've not wanted to sleep with in my entire life.”

Sally managed to change Harry’s mind, and in a rather effortless way. She didn’t need to resort to such extreme measures as Petruchio did to get Harry to come over to her way of thinking. In fact, her friendly presence was all that was required to change Harry’s beliefs. That a woman could change the mind of a man is uniquely modern, especially considering Katherine’s conclusions about women’s inferiority.

Marriage was an apparent goal to Katherine and Sally. Katherine denied marriage with Petruchio; Joe denied with Sally. Katherine was too bold to do deny as she did, and so her personality was erased, whereas Sally managed to change her male friend’s personality quite passively. The differences in era, the dichotomy of “then and now,” make their situations quite different. Per old traditions, Katherine was stripped of self for having fight in her. In the modern case, Sally was actually able to change Harry. The gender reversal shows a greater equality in power among both genders in a heterosexual relationship. Sally was able to break up with Joe, while Katherine was forced to marry Petruchio. Sally’s freedom would not exist in that older era. The power granted to her by the passage of time put her on equal footing with all of her male counterparts. Her ability to remain independent, to date those she’d like to, and to express whatever opinion she has is an ability granted by modernity and its progressive tendencies.

Marie Curie was born in 1867 as Maria Salomea Sklodowska, in a Russian-controlled Warsaw. After her mother’s death, she went to a boarding school, and then left the boarding school for a prestigious, selective school, where she graduated as a top student. As there was no higher education for girls in Poland and no money in Curie’s family, Curie worked as a tutor and attended illegal, underground university lectures until she could afford schooling in Paris. She had to learn French very quickly in order to keep up with the classes at the Sorbonne, which was Paris’ top school. Eventually, she graduated top of her class in master's degree physics. After receiving research funding, she got a second master’s degree, this time in chemistry. When she tried to become a teacher in Poland, she learned that there were still no spaces for women at universities there, and so she returned to Paris. She married another famous scientist in her field, Pierre Curie, and her initial scientific discoveries were all completed with him.

In her work, she discovered that rays of energy cast from uranium allow air to conduct electricity, and that compounds like pitchblende, which make the air even more conductive than uranium, does must contain an element that was, at this point, undiscovered. Through this, she discovered Polonium and Radium. Through observations of the elements she had unearthed, she also discovered radioactivity, the reasons that these elements gave off heat. For the discovery of radioactivity, she shared a Nobel Prize in Physics with her partners, one of which was her husband. This made her the first woman to ever win a Nobel Prize, and she won it only six months after acquiring her Ph.D, in 1903.

When her husband was later killed in a vehicular accident, she was promoted to fill his position, as their Chair of Physics. Naturally, she was the first woman to fill this role. When she finally managed to isolate a sample of radium, she was awarded her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry. In total, she became:

• The first woman to be a professor at the University of Paris

• The first woman to win a Nobel Prize

• The first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics

• The first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry

• One of six people/organizations to have won multiple Nobel Prizes

• The only person to have a Nobel Prize for both Chemistry and Physics

Her death, by aplastic anemia, in 1934, was almost certainly caused by the radioactivity she had exposed herself to in her studies. She was not only impressive for doing all this while being a woman, she is impressive because her scientific achievements have been bested by none. Because she was able to do this in an era where science was hardly open to women only accentuates her greatness. She opened the door for female scientists in the global community and remains one of the most recognized scientists in the world.

Listen to my music-thing, "Marie Curie," at https://www.soundtrap.com/play/3mjLmOfrRQuppItOf3eEig/marie-curie/.

Sources:

"Marie Curie." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 8 Sep. 2014. Web. 4/11/2016
<http://www.famousscientists.org/marie-curie/>.

"Marie Curie." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television. Web. 11 Apr. 2016 ,http://www.biography.com/people/marie-curie-9263538>.

James Nguyen’s breakout exercise in cinematic failure, Birdemic, was a success on all fronts. Its unique blend of Hitchcockian terror and Al Gore-ian philosophy is unprecedented and remains unsurpassed. It unfortunately fails the Mako Mori test as there are no female characters that have independent character arcs, but, there are no character arcs in the movie at all, so it’s at least equal in this regard. Surprisingly, though, it passes the Bechdel Test; two named women talk to each other about something other than a man: going pee. Don’t let this fool you, though. The main male character works as a high-profile salesman whereas the main female character works as a model. The women are much more likely to be nude at any given time than the men are. So, to ensure equality in sexuality, I have developed a new test that is specifically designed for such topics.

THE BIRDEMIC TEST:

For every sexually posed female, there must be at least one equally sexually posed male. For as long as the female is in underwear or is nude, the male must be equally in underwear or nude.

Birdemic, naturally, does not pass this test. It wouldn’t necessarily be better or worse if it passed the test, because it exists in such a state of perfection that no minor overhaul could change it. It does make me think that other, more judge-able movies should be held to such a standard.

I’m not the hero. If asked me if I was the hero, I’d tell you I wasn’t. Perhaps the ease is implicit, wrapped in the word “hero”; if you asked if me if I was a hero, I’d tell you I wasn’t, for I see “hero” as too grand a phrase for a planet mundane enough to exist outside of a comic book. So, even in the context of a vaguely colorful story, there are no such things as “heroes.” But, then, if you asked me if I was the protagonist of said story, I wouldn’t know what to say. It can’t be known before I’ve asked the question of myself. Should I ever claim that I’m the protagonist, let me bite my tongue, for I have not yet been asked if I am the villain.

I drew my conclusions on this topic when I was eleven years old; they are outdated. Consider this essay the grand re-opening of a case five years shut. The case files contain many since-disregarded conclusions that I’d like to shine some light on.  If I tell you that I am not sorry, reject my thesis; I have not researched my topic thoroughly enough.

With all of this in mind, let me introduce a question that can be objectively answered: what happened?

When I met him, he asked the normal small talk questions and I gave him the normal small talk answers. “Nice to meet you, Alec, my name is Harry. This is my second year at Lakota. Yes; that rather racist image on the rock wall does bear a lot of resemblance to the logo of the Washington Redskins. Shower Hour is right before First Shift Dinner, which is right before Free Play.” The answers I didn’t give: “The other bunk is essentially the cool kids’ bunk, as it was last year, so my best friend Zach and I practically feel targeted, that our bunk should be filled with the weirdos, the Europeans, and the European weirdos.”

Zach, the kids from the other bunk, and even some counselors immediately considered Alec to be of “the weirdos,” though I couldn’t see it. Nothing he did seemed especially strange, at least. He asked the questions one could be expected to ask and he laughed when one could be expected to laugh. He was the only person I’d ever met to wear a swim shirt, and perhaps, retrospectively, that fact was very in line with the insecurities he would come to show, but it didn’t strike me as very strange then. Everyone else thought I was blind. Though I’m not known by most to be optimistic, I’d rather attribute it to optimism than to blindness.

Soon, he had taken a clear liking to me, even though I didn’t pay that much attention to him. A counselor that had noticed Alec’s affection towards me and his odd nature, Ben, asked to keep an eye on Alec. It seemed an odd request, but I respected Ben, so ten minutes later, when Alec began to run away from the bunk after yelling something akin to “you don’t understand me!”, I took it upon myself to chase after him. “Wow, you’re fast!” he exclaimed.

I tried my best not to laugh at his amazement with my speed. I was nearly world-renowned for being a god-awful runner, at any distance. “Hardly.”

“Pretty fast,” he insisted.

I moved past it. “Why are you running away?”

“They just don’t get me.”

“Who are ‘they’, Alec?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. Did I hear you say you liked tennis, earlier?”

He had heard correctly. It was the only sport that I could be positively compared to my athletically-minded peers in, so I most definitely liked it. In a couple of nights, him and I had taken to having a couple rallies on the tennis court. We kept the tradition up semi-regularly for at least a couple of weeks, and our conversations became rather personal.

“At school, I get really bullied.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. We discussed it for a while, and he eventually asked for advice. “Develop a thick skin; just know not to let everything affect you.”

“Hmm, okay. Oh, and don’t tell anyone this Harry. You promise?”

“Yeah.”

“And don’t tell anyone this next thing, okay? You promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. So. You know about the boat when Hitler ‘died?’”

“Yeah.”

“Well, my uncle was a famous German painter. When I went to Germany, I looked inside a painting of his with special glasses that he left behind for me, and I saw the bodies frozen, like, they were stuck to the hull of a metal ship.” This seemed like gibberish to me, so after I challenged every part of it, he said, “Look, that’s not the point. I looked with my glasses harder, and I realized, it was a time ship.”

“Are you suggesting that Hitler is alive?”

“He’s waiting for the right opportunity to come back!”

I later brought up the conspiracy with Alec while Zach was within earshot. Alec, naturally, looked supremely pissed.

“You promised, Harry! I thought you weren’t gonna tell! I thought we were friends!”

The night before Alec was set to go home was the night that it all culminated. I was in bed reading, Zach was in bed reading, and Alec was in bed taking offense to it all. Then, Alec asked to see Zach’s almanac.

“I’m reading it right now; hold on.”

“Dude, I asked if I could read it. Please?”

“I am reading it, so no.”

“But I asked nicely.”

“That doesn’t change anything if I’m reading it.”

“BUT I ASKED NICELY!” Alec screamed. He jumped from his bunk bed onto Zach’s ground level bed and tried to grab the book out of hands. Zach threw the book to the ground and Alec’s hands rerouted themselves towards Zach’s neck. “Why doesn’t anyone like me?” Alec violently commanded.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I came to this camp to get away from bullying! Ah!” Zach had begun to block his body with his oversized pillow. When Alec finally managed to cast the pillow aside, Zach scratched Alec’s neck so that it bled and darted out of the bunk as two counselors, including Ben, walked in.

“What’s going on in here?” Ben asked, which caused Alec to scream and charge at him. The counselors, with their combined, adult strength struggled to push Alec into the back room of the bunk. “What are you doing, Alec?”

“I wanna KILL him!”

“Kill who?”

“I… AH! I came to this camp to get away from bullies!”

When Alec returned from the nurse, very late that night, his eyes seemed to be just black pits. His skin was paler than mine. He immediately crawled into bed where, presumably, he fell asleep. I shuddered the night through.

It has occurred to me that there is an easy way out. I could ask, “are things really so black and white?” Then, things would be so black and white; I could answer, “things really aren’t so black and white.” I could throw away the case without indicting a soul. I could chalk it all up to some untouchable gray territory and I would be free from asking.

I once thought that Alec simply dealt with what the rest of us dealt with. Young boys are cruel to each other, occasionally indiscriminately: some campers would tie him up and poke him with brooms, but they’d slap each other as a greeting; some campers would call him names, but they’d insist that they only do it to him because he’s the only one who bothers asking them to stop. It’s just survival of the least easily scarred. In the summer that this story took place over, for instance, I was berated regularly for the length of my hair and for my inability to play sports, but I didn’t care. Now, I’ve grown to think that such an expectation is not fair. Alec, who, to me, still seems normal, yet was easily broken, shouldn’t have had to be as cold as the rest of us. The standards that we held ourselves to should not have been the standards that we held someone else to. Since that summer, I’ve written approximately three essays on why the SATs are an inadequate gauge of ability, and this seems like a fourth. In ways that everyone else could see, he was not like us: he was a scientifically minded student scoring poorly on the SAT math and reading/writing sections while we were the College Board; he was a visual learner confronted with memorizing an audiobook; he was Murph from “The Yellow Birds,” entirely unprepared for war and death.

I’m inclined to cut myself slack. After all, I was the only one who really attempted to be his friend, and I even succeeded for a while. That’s more than anyone else can say. Still, I failed to keep his secrets and failed to defend him. It sounds patronizing, now, to claim that defending him was my job, but Ben asked me to look out for him and I failed.

So: I am sorry. I am sorry that I spilled the conspiracy stories that he told me in confidence, I am sorry that I stopped playing tennis with him, and I’m sorry that I failed to stop the other kids. I am guilty because I so consistently call those who picked on him “the other kids,” as if to put as much distance between myself and them as I can, even though I don’t know if such a divide truly exists.

These are answers that I am glad to have, I suppose, but now I am aware that some questions are simply unanswerable. I can’t ever know whether or not his explosion might’ve been averted if I had stuck with him, in the same way that I can’t know whether he’d have been better off if I hadn’t shallowly befriended him in the first place. I can rest with a conscious slightly cleared, knowing that I couldn’t have known better. I can say that, although it may or may not have been helpful to him, at least I tried when no one else did. Though I wonder where Alec is now, I’m too scared to Google him. I don’t want to know whether I’d feel huge waves of emotion or cold apathy upon seeing his Facebook profile picture, should he even have such a thing. In much the same way that Private Bartle of “The Yellow Birds” could hardly stand to look at Murph’s disfigurements, I fear Alec. I fear the sunken eyes that we sent back home to his mother. Even though I’ve attempted to clear myself of blame, through the process of writing this essay and otherwise, I still can’t bring myself to look at someone I never knew.

After all of this, I still don’t know if I’m one of the other kids.

New scientific discoveries are made every day. Technology is an ever-present force in almost every American’s life. In schools, there's a very vocal push for STEM education, to make sure that the United States stays competitive with other nations in producing computer scientists and engineers. With all of this, it would be very reasonable to assume that science education is in a great state. This, however, is not the case. The importance of science is overlooked by almost all of the parties who have influence over it. Compared to other classes, especially English and math, science is hugely under prioritized.

One major hurdle towards STEM success is that the standardized tests that often decide kids’ futures basically don’t care about science. For example, the SAT has eighty minutes devoted to math and between one-hundred and one-hundred-forty minutes devoted to English, depending on whether or not students take an optional essay, and zero minutes devoted to science, although recently, there was a slight push to include questions relevant to science in the English and math sections. The ACT has sixty minutes devoted to math, either eighty or one-hundred-twenty minutes devoted to English, depending on whether or not students take an optional essay. and only thirty-five minutes for science. These tests are so important to students that high school curriculums are often based around helping kids do well on these specific tests. As these tests are mostly lacking science, students and educators have very limited motivation to learn and teach about science, respectively. Additionally, science SAT subject tests are nowhere near as as ubiquitous as the traditional SAT is. If learning science has such limited relevance to college acceptance, schools will always prioritize the avenues of education that send their students to college. Therefore, science takes a backseat to reading and math.

Costliness is another significant issue. Science education, in its most effectively educational form, is more expensive than math or English education. Science education is most effective when peppered with laboratory experimentation. Researchers at Penn State found that “...school laboratory activities have special potential as media for learning that can promote important science learning outcomes for students [sic].” However, “construction costs can reach $150 to $200 per square foot [for school laboratories], according to Motz and other experts, an especially daunting proposition, considering that NSTA recommends 1,440 square feet for a lab serving 24 students. Adding laboratory furniture and cabinets can cost another $25,000 to $60,000 per room.” This is because laboratories require advanced equipments, materials, and types of major upkeep that reading and math classrooms don’t need, because of the nature of science. Chemistry classes require expensive chemicals; biology classes require specimens; physics classes require models and modelling materials. Scientists barely receive enough funding to run a lab; schools certainly don’t. Since science is more difficult to fund than other classes, science is rarely taught properly.

Even the government is out to get science. In 2002, there was a law passed called the “No Child Left Behind” Act (NCLB). NCLB makes schools enforce standardized testing, and schools that fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) on these tests for enough years consecutively suffer harsh consequences. AYP is just an average improvement over their previous year’s cores. Much like the SAT/ACT, NCLB places a testing emphasis on English, specifically reading, in this case, and math. “No Child Left Behind requires that… each state must measure every child's progress in reading and math in each of grades 3 through 8 and at least once during grades 10 through 12… states must also have in place science assessments to be administered at least once during grades 3-5; grades 6-9; and grades 10-12.” This means that K-12 students are to be tested on math and reading seven times each and science only thrice. Even more importantly, however, is this: “Science is not included in AYP calculations.” Because of this, the three times they are tested on science won’t affect their schools’ AYP, and won’t cause their schools to suffer or not suffer. Teachers don’t have the motivation to prioritize science at all when the federal government practically punishes them for teaching anything but ELA and math.

The College Board and whoever designs the ACT spit on science by ignoring it and removing the motivation to teach and to learn it. State governments spit on science by refusing to create budgets that will allow teachers to properly teach it. Finally, the federal government spits on science by passing laws that force teachers to emphasize ELA and math over science to a huge degree. Science education isn’t just about school, as anyone who might stop to think about it would realize; it’s about the safety of American innovation and the health of the populace. Science education promotes the advancement of medical and technological sciences, which are integral to a continually growing society. The powers that be all have the ability to change their rules, their allotment of money, and their allotment of test space, but since NCLB was introduced, science education has been on an apparent downward spiral towards technological and medical illiteracy.

Works Cited:

"Description of the ACT." Test Descriptions. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.

Hofstein, Avi, and Vincent N. Lunetta. "The Laboratory in Science Education: Foundations for the Twenty-First Century." The Laboratory in Science Education: Foundations for the Twenty-First Century (2002): n. pag. Pennsylvania State University. Web.

"SAT (2016) vs PSAT (2015)." RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.

Sawko, Jessica. "Update on 2015 Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)." California Classroom Science. N.p., 23 Apr. 2015. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.

Schachter, Ron. "School Science Labs." District Administration Magazine. N.p., Nov. 2008. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.

"Testing: Frequently Asked Questions." Testing: Frequently Asked Questions. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.

Jason Greene y Harry Freed, arquitectos

Cliente: Tomás Arango

Nuestro cliente se llama Tomás Arango. Es muy listo y feliz. Tiene 15 años. Vive en el Centro de la ciudad. Le encanta skateboarding y jugar videojuegos. Le mucho gusta plantas, y le gusta verde y la playa.

La casa de Tomás es en la playa en Los Angeles. Es cerca de un parque y un supermercado. Es una casa mediana, moderno, sofisticado, y elegante. La casa tiene dos pisos. Es muy bueno para perros y gatos. En la piso primero de la casa, Tomás tiene muchos partidos.

• La sala de estar tiene dos consolas y una mesa para la tele fantástica.

• En el dormitorio de Tomas, hay una piscina caliente.

• El comedor tiene cuatro sillas elegante y una mesa.

• Hay a baño en el piso primero  y cuatro dormitorios en el piso segunda.

• Tiene un bidé y un lavamanos en el baño.

• No hay un sótano en la casa de Tomás.

• Tiene una nevera frío, una estufa, y una fregadero.

• Hay muchos videojuegos divertidos.

• En el piso segunda, hay un baño más, con una ducha.

• Tiene un invernadero grande, también.

Fotos:

El piso primero y el invernadero:

La fachada (muy narcisista)

¡Hola! Are you at least partially ready to embark on the psychedelic journey that is my You and the World Blog Post #3? I know that I am at least partially ready to embark on the psychedelic journey that is my You and the World Blog Post #3! You’ve heard me here, researching online and discussing green energy and the necessity for it; you’ve heard me here, introducing original data revealing portion of the population’s view regarding green energy. This blog post will regard my “Agent of Change/Action Piece,” and will involve me jumping on a solar-roadway powered bandwagon. Welcome to the final blog. Welcome to the  Post of Change!

The Action Piece was a simple assignment: do something to support your issue. In my case, the Piece found itself being a presentation to my advisory. If you wouldn’t like to click that link because you’re lazy and because you have very little motivation, that’s ok, as I can easily describe it: it references this infographic with information relating to the economic aspect of installing solar panels from 2011 and it mentions that panels have gone down in price by 60% since then. I had a great time in advisory, and I’m hopeful that I successfully brainwashed them into supporting my agenda!

A picture of me presenting to my advisory. They are clearly enthralled.

In researching for that presentation, solar roadways were easily the most important thing I found. They are hexagonal plates with photovoltaic cells, pressure sensors, heating systems, and light emitting diodes in them to replace roadways. They take the pressure off of the individual for installation of panels, and instead relate to the community as a whole. They not only capture light energy, they also remove and filter snow and ice, warn about when vehicles/pedestrians/animals are are coming. 

Electric cars could be charged with them, therefore eliminating the need for gas-burning cars. Houses could be charged with them, therefore eliminating the need for natural gas/coal burning energy plants. The future is now, and only you can prevent wildfires.

Hi! Welcome to the second blog post regarding my You and the World project on green energy. Last time, I suggested that more attention need be payed to green energy, and gave facts why. They mostly were about how much of our country could be easily fueled by solar panels, or more surprisingly, cow farts (If you’re too lazy to click the link and see for yourself, I’ll just tell you that there’s a cute picture of cows and you’ll be missing out if you skip over my first YATW blog post). This time around, I produced some original research to see the public’s familiarity and open mindedness to the subject.

I sent out this form, and returned these results. To those of who who aren’t going to click on either link, the first page of the form sees how much responders know about solar panels (cost, savings per 20 years, savings per month, how quickly the investment pays itself back, etc.), and the second page gave the correct answers to the questions first page and asked this of the survey-takers: “Knowing the above info, would you invest in solar panels for your home?”

The results for the first page showed that most people didn’t know much about solar panels. Between the joke responses showing that people don’t really care and the incorrect answers showing that people are uneducated, it became clear that people need to know more about green energy. It seemed that after learning the information I had on the second page, however, most people decided that they would invest in solar panels, and I believe that that is the most important info I gathered: the world would gladly go solar if they knew anything about it.

Responses to “Knowing the above info, would you invest in solar panels for your home?”

This leads to the next part of the YATW project: Agent of Change. For that, I need to go and utilize the information I’ve gathered to put out an effective way of changing this situation. For me personally, I believe the best use of my time in that aspect would be to further educate the masses on green energy. I shall do this by putting information I’ve found to be important around my neighborhood.

Stay tuned for that!

¡Hola! Me llamo Harry. Tengo catorce años, y soy un estudiante de la Science Leadership Academy. Aqui tengo mi clases. SLA está en el centro de Filadelfia. Esta cerca de La Rittenhouse Square y unos parques. ¡Las clases en la SLA son divertidas siempre, porque los profesores son muy comicos!

Mi clase favorita es la Historia de Africana Americana, porque me encanta platicar sobre la historia. Para tener éxito en la clase de Historia, es necesario participar activamente. En la clase de Historia leemos libros de texto, escribimos ensayos, y hablamos muchos, y me gusta hablar. Una computadora es necesario por buenas notas en todas las clases.

Tenemos muchos profesores en la SLA. La Señorita Manuel y el Señor Todd son dos. El Señor Todd enseña la clase de Historia, y historia es mi favorita. El es amigos con el Señor Kay. La señorita Manuel es la profesora en la clase de Español. La clase es fácil, pero divertido. Ella es cómico, tranquila, y bueno en enseña.

La SLA es una escuela fantástica, en mi opinión. Lo que mas me encanta de SLA es mi amigos. Me cae bien mi amigos porque ellos son bastante fresco. No me gusta nada es la tarea. La tarea no es mucho, pero es difícil. La SLA es muy divertida, muy libre, y bastante fantástica.

Mi video es fresco también.

This is our team’s educational presentation on cellular respiration, for our ninth-grade bio-chem class. We didn’t go into creating it knowing much about the subject, but one of the things we wanted to know specifically was about ATP. We kept hearing it, and had no idea that it was adenosine triphosphate, or that if a phosphate was removed it became adenosine diphosphate. One important thing that we learned besides the ATP/ADP thing was that all kingdoms of life use cellular respiration- we do the same thing that bacteria do!

Next time, we will work harder on evaluating the information. In its current state, the review is just three non-interactive questions, which is certainly something that should, in future lessons, be changed.

“Hey, you put that non-recyclable plastic into the recycling bin” or “Hey, you put that recyclable plastic into the trash bin!” These are scoldings that are heard frequently. “Is it really important? Do I really have to care about where this ends up? How will my life change?” These are retorts often thought but seldom uttered. In this first blog post for my You and the World project, I seek to answer those questions, and talk a little bit about poop (which will make sense soon, I promise).

To start, let’s establish that things can’t be recycled infinitely- every iteration of an item can’t be used as the thing it was last, as quality is lost every time something is reconstituted. A prime example from HowStuffWorks is paper. Paper’s second life will be of a lower quality, meaning it might be lined instead of copy paper. After that, it might not be able to surface as paper at all, and someone might take personal initiative to turn their paper into art or furniture, at which point it has reached the approximate end of its lifecycle. Americans mostly know their job in this (even if they don’t follow through); recycle plastics, papers, and metals, throw out everything else. But is there a point at which it isn’t worth recycling something? Is there a point at which something isn’t a resource, it is merely garbage? Michael C Munger thinks so. He believes that if any item can’t be clearly and efficiently turned into another useful item, it may be just as eco-friendly to shift our focus entirely off of reusing trash and onto turning real, usable materials into energy.

Materials like cow feces (see now?). I’m not limiting the terms “real” and “usable” to poop, but it certainly applies. Here is an interesting infographic on the subject- the most interesting thing it points out, however, is this: “Two adjacent dairy farms in Rexville, WA  produce enough methane to provide electricity for about 1,000 homes.” That’s twelve-hundred cows fueling one-thousand homes. That’s incredible. That raises a very important question: why is this not more widespread?

These guys make lots and lots and lots of gas. Like, a lot.

I’m not trying to refute the usefulness of recycling-bin type recycling- whether or not  that’s truly effective is not an easily answerable question. Some say recycling isn’t even really followed through with. There is no debate on one front, however: green energy is good. I can’t imagine anyone could disagree with saving the environment and saving money.

Recycling is more than just putting things in a bin (though that can help). Recycling is reusing materials, ideally in a way that makes the repercussions tangible. That means composting, and solar panels, and turbines. In a world where so much money is spent on creating energy in processes in which so much exhaust is output while we have the capabilities to cut that price and to clean those emissions, why do we continue? For my You and the World project, I want to help people (my own family included) meaningfully recycle.