Oops.

I just realized that I had only done half of the web blog postings for this week even though I read the material earlier. I'm sorry for posting this late. I must have forgotten in my driving, worrying about the paper and my grandpa (I found out that he is in the hospital scheduled for surgery due to a bad case of pnemonia).

So here are the rest of the blog posts if you will still accept them.

SWIFT

I really like this essay. It's funny and gets his point across while really holding the reader's attention, which is part of what can make satire like this so great.

One line that, for me, really characterizes the entire piece is the comment that, "I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children." In that short paragraph, he gets a great "dig" or "stab" at the heart of the problem which is that wealthy Irish landlords have largely caused this problem by taking advantage of the poor under their control, that starving children are the ultimate victims of those greedy actions, and that it is the responsibility of the land lords to do something good about the problem.

HAWKING

As cool as it would be to live in space, I think that we are a lot farther away from having the technology to do that without the help of Earth and a lot farther from needing to live in space than Hawking suggests. He seemed to think that making a colony in space that would be completely self sufficient would be simple, but I don't think that it would be. After all, we can't even get a small attempt to make a totally self sustaining environment to work in a confined space on earth. The Bio-dome experiment failed didn't it? We can't, as of yet, create our our mini Earths with self sustaining ecosystems that's good enough to support human life without outside assistance. If we can't yet do it on a small scale here on Earth, how in the world does he expect us to do it for entire colonies in space?