Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Frankenstein Essay -- Literary Analysis, Mary Shelley

Natural: A Very Lucid Concept Will it ever be workable for a machine to be a natural being? It is an intriguing inquiry and one that is tended to in Frankstein by Merry Shelly, RUR by Karel Capek and The Defecating Duck by Jessica Riskin. These three writings give understanding into what makes an animal a natural being. From these readings one may interpret that the duck in The Defecating Duck, alongside the robots toward the start of RUR can't be viewed as natural creatures, while the beast in Frankstein and the robots toward the finish of RUR can. A natural robot is a confusing expression; a robot doesn't have the concoction capacity to be viewed as organically natural. Albeit a synthetic procedure was implied in both it Frankstein and RUR, it was brief, a short section for each situation, and didn't give enough data to have the option to characterize either as a natural being. Be that as it may, there is a meaning of natural that can be applied to demonstrate that robots have the capacity to be organic,â€Å"[10th meaning of organic] something as having a development and improvement practically equivalent to that of living organisms† (Merriam Webster Dictionary). As it were, to be viewed as natural one must have the capacity and want to live. To yearn for a friend shows that one wants to interface with somebody in their life, and in this manner demonstrates that individual has an aching to be separated of the world. The beast in Frankstein wants to discover an individual he can interface with, and winds up going on an excursion to discover one. This excursion starts with the beast watching and in the long run beginning to look all starry eyed at a ranch family. â€Å"I framed in my creative mind pictures of introducing myself to them†¦I envisioned that they would be appalled, until, by my delicate disposition and con... ...ple. They are precisely more impeccable than we are†¦ however they have no soul† (Capek, 9). This statement by Domin discloses to Helena how robots are not human but rather just laborers. Domin further communicates this point by saying that. â€Å"Everything will be finished by living machines. Individuals will do just what they enjoy† (Capek, 21). These robots, for the present, are complicit with their place and demonstrate no craving to live. The robots, and duck neglect to demonstrate a longing to live and accordingly can't be viewed as natural creatures. The robots from the finish of RUR and the beast in Frankstein, dissimilar to the robots toward the start of RUR and the duck in the Defecating Duck, can be called natural creatures due to their craving to live. These three writings raised fascinating focuses to a perplexing inquiry of natural robots. Causing one to accept that lone time will have the option to tackle this conundrum.

Saturday, August 22, 2020

Entrance to the Profession Narrative :: Essays Papers

Access to the Profession Narrative I recollect seventh grade Open House at my rural Catholic evaluation school in the southern bend of St. Louis’ Mississippi River. I recollect the glaring, bowl-formed amphitheater lights floating over processing guardians and timid colleagues, everybody searching for their own, or their own child’s work so they could make their outcries and continue ahead with the night. I recall it so well on the grounds that on my orange banner board expand, under a fifth grade school photoâ€with the red pullover sweater, plaid Peter Pan neckline, and bouffant bowâ€someone had composed â€Å"Aspiring Author.† I didn’t realize anybody knew. I didn’t even know myself. Perhaps it was in the tales I composed for our week by week jargon sentences. Or on the other hand the shows I established for book reports that ran fifteen minutes over our distributed five. Maybe I uncovered it in my Social Studies note pad with heaps of outlined, full-paragraphed meanings of Civil War subtleties, in the three-page sonnet I discussed from memory before the class, in energetic writing ventures, in my regular capacity to wrench out punctuation trees, or in the novella I turned in for a one-page composing task. It never became obvious me to well-spoken such an aspirationâ€perhaps on the grounds that it was excessively close. In any case, others could see itâ€this relationship with language. For whatever reasons, I kept on excusing that orange inflatable disclosure until quite a long while after I leftâ€I thoughtâ€the scholastic world behind for good. I see now why my undergrad years were such a battle. This bouffant-bowed competitor snared thrashing arms around a science major, when math and science had been just wellsprings of repetitiveness and wretchedness. Following a time of insufferable classes, I changed my major to Englishâ€more out of a feeling of disappointment than a feeling of right. My inspiration for getting a handle on onto science was the idea of an unmistakable, and maybe intriguing, work title following four years. My inspiration for running go into the arms of my previous darling was that it felt recognizable and characteristic. I flinched each time I heard somebody state, â€Å"Oh, an English major†¦what will you do? Teach?† Was that my lone alternative? I couldn’t do it. Indeed, I wanted to peruse and compose, to slither into sparkling passages of examination, to find thoughts as they uncovered themselves under my pen, yet everything appeared so†¦removed from life. Access to the Profession Narrative :: Essays Papers Access to the Profession Narrative I recollect seventh grade Open House at my rural Catholic evaluation school in the southern bend of St. Louis’ Mississippi River. I recollect the glaring, bowl-molded assembly hall lights drifting over processing guardians and timid colleagues, everybody searching for their own, or their own child’s work so they could make their outcries and continue ahead with the night. I recall it so well in light of the fact that on my orange banner board expand, under a fifth grade school photoâ€with the red pullover sweater, plaid Peter Pan neckline, and bouffant bowâ€someone had composed â€Å"Aspiring Author.† I didn’t realize anybody knew. I didn’t even know myself. Perhaps it was in the tales I composed for our week by week jargon sentences. Or then again the shows I ordered for book reports that ran fifteen minutes over our distributed five. Maybe I uncovered it in my Social Studies note pad with heaps of showed, full-paragraphed meanings of Civil War subtleties, in the three-page sonnet I discussed from memory before the class, in enthusiastic writing ventures, in my characteristic capacity to wrench out language structure trees, or in the novella I turned in for a one-page composing task. It never became obvious me to understandable such an aspirationâ€perhaps in light of the fact that it was excessively close. In any case, others could see itâ€this relationship with language. For whatever reasons, I kept on excusing that orange inflatable disclosure until quite a long while after I leftâ€I thoughtâ€the scholastic world behind for good. I see now why my undergrad years were such a battle. This bouffant-bowed hopeful snared thrashing arms around a science major, when math and science had been just wellsprings of repetitiveness and hopelessness. Following a time of intolerable classes, I changed my major to Englishâ€more out of a feeling of disappointment than a feeling of right. My inspiration for getting a handle on onto science was the idea of a reasonable, and maybe fascinating, work title following four years. My inspiration for running go into the arms of my previous darling was that it felt recognizable and common. I flinched each time I heard somebody state, â€Å"Oh, an English major†¦what will you do? Teach?† Was that my solitary choice? I couldn’t do it. Truly, I wanted to peruse and compose, to slither into sparkling passages of investigation, to find thoughts as they uncovered themselves under my pen, yet everything appeared so†¦removed from life.

Friday, August 7, 2020

bye

bye i graduated! *confetti noises* i took a semester off back in 2015, so im doing things a little out of order. instead of walking last spring, i finished my last semester of undergrad in the dead of winter. ill start work at  mit lincoln laboratory  next may, and then ill do the whole cap-and-gown thing with the 2018s in june. as far as endings go, the last few weeks of my last semester at mit were more of a slow burn than a bang. i sang my last concert with the wellesley-mit toons. classes ended and finals week started and i scheduled dinners and lunches and walks with friends, taking advantage of suddenly-open afternoons. i would see people and wonder if it would be the last time i saw them, if not ever, then at least for a while. i watched lady bird (excellent and emotional) and swiss army man (also excellent, also emotional) and went to a house party. i took my last final exam (6.006, intro to algorithms). i packed up my things. a few days after christmas, i submitted my thesis from a local coffeeshop in my hometown called mission coffee.     a few words on my thesis. content warning for the following paragraph, for mentions of suicide and mental health at mit. my undergraduate thesis for comparative media studies, at just about 50 pages of double-spaced garamond, was the most difficult thing ive ever written in my life. its about suicide and mental health and community wellness at mit and represents my own coming-to-terms with the place suicide takes within our culture. think of it as an extended reflection on what it means to be creating a community of people that care for each other in an environment that also has a reputation for unreasonable stress. i guess its my contribution to the many student  stories  of mental health  at mit. if you would like to read it, its called the cultural life of suicide: observing care and death at mit and the file is available here  (eventually a more-official-looking version will be made available with the mit libraries through dspace  but i think that takes a few weeks to happen).  my hope is that it can serve as one more resource, a record of how things are right now, to those at mit who care about ma king it a better, more humane place. i emailed my thesis to my advisor and that was it, basically. i went to some doctors appointments. i got my wisdom teeth removed. i reflected on the fact that i was totally, officially, finally done with undergrad. i looked back at my notes and found this paragraph from december 10, after my very last time singing with the toons (a guest performance for the olin college powerchords): toons sang for the olin powerchords' final concert tonight -- my last time singing with the toons, one final gig after our mit concert last night. tired and dry-mouthed because of being up late afterpartying at sigep, but the snow coming down and the music we knew well and everything everywhere mattering. snowballs and shuttle buses and moments to save for nostalgia. at dinner it came up that i was graduating and one of the powerchords asked me how does it feel? and i said i couldn't explain it, i felt like i had asked that question so many times to so many people and only now do i really understand why it is such a hard question to answer. but maybe this is the way of things. and i feel joy, and sentimental, and nostalgia for the present, and anticipation for what's next. silly with contentedness. there are things that happen when you graduate. you get gently removed from the club email list and the club slack channel and placed in the dignified-sounding alums group. sometimes this doesnt happen immediately so you get some trailing emails delegating tasks or announcing meetings that no longer apply to you. you add your permanent email address to all the mailing lists you want to stay on because you know mit is going to take away your @mit.edu email address eventually. you return all your library books. you hug lots of people and feel regret about the ones that you know you missed. and there are lots of thoughts. they come in a rush, all at once like they know youre finally done and you have the bandwidth to pay attention to them now. a few days after i turned in my thesis i wrote this: when it was done i felt exhilirated and free and giddy. and it was only a few hours later that i started feeling afraid. god, how i'm glad it's done, but, god, how i wish i had more time. when i was reading it before sending it i could see all the holes i wanted to fill. clunky sentences with all my writing tics; comma splices, chaining pairs of concepts together, lists of adjectives and nouns all cobbled together. organizational failings, wandering chains of thought, digressions, themes that appear and never get developed. ideas i had that didn't fit in anywhere, or that i didn't know how to understand, so i gesture towards them in passing or lump them into footnotes. and logical weaknesses, which are the scariest. statements i wrote down, which i think i stand behind, but i'm not sure if they are really well-supported. the thing is very far from airtight. what if you are wrong? i keep thinking. what if you make people angry, and they will be right to be angry, because you got it wr ong, and you didn't paint a fair portrait of this work? you should have done more interviews. you should have taken better fieldnotes and gone to more meetings. you should have managed your time better so that you weren't still making edits a half-hour before you submitted it. you should have spent more time writing. you should have spent more time editing. i guess its kind of like this austin kleon doodle, but after the last dot theres a lot of insecurity and also the wide open feeling of having completed something bewildering and not knowing what your life means in the absence of the thing youve been working on for so long. and that was true of my thesis and also true of mit in general, because suddenly while all my classmates are starting classes again and going to advisor meetings, im running errands in california, like going to the bank and getting my moms tires rotated, and somewhere in the back of my mind there is a small voice going um, excuse me, but what just happened? and the rest of my mind is going shh shut up just go with it. but it turns out being done and being home also meant lots of other things, like hanging out at midnight in a 24-hour mcdonalds or taking the BART to san francisco to reconnect with some old friends you havent seen in a while and reading a new book along the way. and i read zoe todds note to the exhausted anthropology student  and listened to the wailin jennys  and  darlingside  and maggie rogers and felt a little better. and i cleaned up house, digging through all my old files and documents from the last five years and organizing them all into neat filetrees and subdirectories, cyberspace boxes packed nicely in cyber-storage. and this also feels right, in a way, like there is a natural time for everything and when it passes, theres no point dwelling on it any longer. i scanned the papers i wanted to save and threw out the rest and very soon everything was in boxes and my room was empty. and as i left mit there were the familiar sounds of the kendall square t stop, and the doors closing, and then the quiet air of moving forward. Post Tagged #6.006 #a cappella #CMS - Comparative Media Studies #CMS - Comparative Media Studies #Wellesley-MIT Toons