Search the net, search blogs, search your mind. Synthesize, hyperlink, blockquote, and trackback.
Your writing should be a synthesis of the 5 paragraph essay AND a blog post.
Refer to one or any texts from your course: Macbeth, BNW, Can. Lit., Film, News, or other online media.
Your question:
What does it mean to be human in an engineered world?
Time: 2.5 hours
Submit a printed copy to your teacher and a trackback to this post.
CBC RSS feeds. Browse the many RSS feed categories. Select at least one to be added to your blog’s sidebar.
To construct your Personal Universe Lexicon, start with a new post. You may wish to construct the list with pen and paper first and transfer it to your blog later. Begin by following these instructions:
Write down as many words as you can then sort the words into the categories outlined below. Complete each category. Write as quickly as you can.
Categories:
All the words on the list must
Use no adverbs. Use no plurals.
Keep track of the words with your blog. Move them around each other in the list every day for a week. Choose one word at random from the list; write what the word(s) sparks, what the juxtaposition of words builds for you.
Trackback/pinkback your list to this post.
Start here(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity).
Are any of Huxley’s machines “smart”? Does Huxley’s future have any need for computation? Why, why not?
Consider Huxley, what would be a “predicted future event believed to precede immense technological progress in an unprecedentedly brief time”?(Look at a the real world goal of Zyvex)
Is Asimov enough?
What would Young Macduff give as a cheeky response to the “rise of the machines”?
Will we decide that we’ve grown powerful enough? Can we draw a line and say, “this far and no further”?
How do we control the techno-scientific juggernaut before it dehumanizes our species?
Is it possible for us to refuse to do something that we can do?
Must we forever grow in reach and power? Or can we, should we ever, say, “Enough”?
Is it possible that our technological reach is very nearly sufficient now?
Are our lives sufficiently comfortable?
The question of who will be the first clone is, in the course of things, unimportant; the real issue is what will follow. Who will be that last?
Attempting to alter the human body is nothing new, so why not alter the genes? Once the first step has been taken, why not continue down the road?
Why not inject an embryo with the patented genes of a champion?
Future contests won’t celebrate human excellence, but “who’s got the better biotech sponsor?”
Will the ‘average’ human, once ‘improved’, have no more reason to run marathons?
Compare Somatic Gene Therapy to Germline Gene Therapy
Who wants an ugly baby?
Should scientists treat illnesses the patients do not have?
Who would want exact copies of humans?
Human genome has “slightly more” genes than a mustard weed.
Could you genetically engineer higher intelligence?
What do Jacques, Gordie, and Wayne have in common with a pig?
Find a “copyright-free” etext online at, say, Project Gutenberg or here or here
Start a new blog.
Parse your etext into manageable chunks and insert into your blog.
Add graphics and organizers. Edit theme. Voila.
Look at Castle of Otranto and The Jesuit Relations and the History of New France as examples.
Search for works by the following at Gutenberg:
Austen, Jane
Barrie, J.M.
Brontë, Charlotte
Brontë, Emily
Dickens, Charles
Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Carroll, Lewis
Chesterton, G. K
Christie, Agatha
Twain, Mark
Collins, Wilkie
Connor, Ralph
Conrad, Joseph
Corelli, Marie
Defoe, Daniel
De la Mare, Walter
Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir
Eliot, George
Galsworthy, John
Haggard, H. Rider
Hardy, Thomas
Henty, G. A.
James, Henry
Jerome, Jerome K.
Joyce, James
Kingsley, Charles
Kipling, Rudyard
Leacock, Stephen
Mansfield, Katherine
Maugham, W. Somerset
Maupassant, Guy de
McClung, Nellie L.
Melville, Herman
Montgomery, L. M.
Moodie, Susanna
Moore, Clement Clarke
Nesbit, E.
Oppenheim, E. Phillips
Potter, Beatrix
Sabatini, Rafael
Scott, Walter, Sir
Shaw, George Bernard
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Sinclair, Upton
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Stoker, Bram
Swift, Jonathan
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Trollope, Anthony
Wallace, Edgar
Walpole, Horace
Wells, H. G.
Wilde, Oscar
Wodehouse, P. G.
Woolf, Virginia
Yonge, Charlotte Mary
One day it occurred to a certain emperor that if he only knew the answers to three questions, he would never stray in any matter.
What is the best time to do each thing? Who are the most important people to work with? What is the most important thing to do at all times?
The emperor issued a decree throughout his kingdom announcing that whoever could answer the questions would receive a great reward. Many who read the decree made their way to the palace at once, each person with a different answer. Continue reading Three Questions – by Leo Tolstoy
ENGLISH 30
Read Greene’s “The Destructors”
Discuss anything you wish on your blog after giving the story full consideration.
Synthesize into your discussion of the the story some/many/any ideas from:
When adding an image to your page with a link to an image on another site, you may get unexpected results. This is called hotlinking: when images appear to be embedded on your page, but are simply linked to someone else’s page.
Advantages: no bandwidth or disk quota used from your account because you are not storing/delivering the image here.
Disadvantage: many “smart” sites forbid and display a 404 error. Some may just limit to a finite number, say 5 visits per day. Unscrupulous sites will surprise your visitors with a redirected hotlink path to images you didn’t want to show. YIKES! Hence, HOT- linking, as in play with fire? … gonna get burned.
The ethics of “hotlinking” can be equated to the ethics of stealing an image without the original author’s permission. Look for a “you are forbidden” message. But that’s not all, a web server can simply detect a hotlinked image and replace it with anything they like. Be warned, if I can program the snowotherway server to refer all attempts at hotlinking to a 404.html file, so can any other. Judge wisely, test and retest a “hotlinked” image before committing it to publication. Unscrupulous webservers fight this “theft” in unscrupulous ways, so be very careful.
Now, a smart web host, like snowotherway, will use server settings to eliminate the practice of “hotlinking” into your file folders to “steal” our bandwidth. And, no, I won’t refer redirects to “unscrupulous” images.
Commercial sites like Amazon.ca, and imdb.com, may even encourage the practice of hotlinking for obvious commercial reasons. But they are huge, have tonnes of bandwidth, and they may profit if you follow an image from their site.
Conclusion, a human is the only judge of what a picture image on the ‘net looks like. No computer or software can actually “see” an image. So be warned, what you tell another site to deliver in an image to your web page, may not be what your visitors get.
Out,
D. Sader