Yesterday we finished up our inquiry websites, and they're closed from editing.
It was a lot of work, but I'm 95% sure I linked everything I needed to. I also finished rainbow's end, and I really enjoyed it. I actually liked reading the books for the project, and I'm excited for endersession where I'll be studying even more about science and the future.

This week I returned from my long spring break and extra weeks of college visits.
I began to work on my group's project, and started to write parts of the abstract. I'm also preparing for an interview I will conduct this weekend for the project. I haven't had much time to read Rainbow's End, but I am when I can.

This week I wrote my second inquiry essay.
Here is an excerpt:
To Kurzweil, change can only bring about perfection. Toffler however, is strictly against the concept of rapid change: “As we accelerate and introduce arrhythmic patterns into the pace of change, we need to mark off certain regularities for preservation (Toffler 395). Unlike Kuzweil, who is excited for complete and drastic changes to society in the future, Toffler is more of a conservative. The entire concept of the book, the concept of “Future Shock” is one that Toffler wishes to prevent. Future Shock is the theory that Toffler developed about a “sickness” that will take place in the future, unless we stop it. He believes that the rate of change we are experiencing is so drastic and rapid that soon humans will become “overstimulated” and go into a state of shock because of the changes in society and technology.

I'm finding Future Shock interesting. I recently started reading the book, and I can already tell that this prediction of the future is dated. Nonetheless, it is still interesting to read, and gives a great insight into futurists from our past. This week we also watched several scenes from "She's the Man", a movie starring Amanda Bynes that is loosely based off of twelfth night. I could see many similarities between the movie and twelfth night, and enjoyed spotting scenes in the movie that were similar to ones in the play.

We continued reading 12th night!
One of my favorite scenes came up during the reading, where Andrew and Viola are pitted against each other in a duel, and each told that the other is a fearsome opponent. I remember when watching the staged version at the globe, it was hilarious and amazing. I realized I really like the story of twelfth night, but that the prank on Malvolio went a little too far. Yes, he was mean, but he didn't deserve to be destroyed that badly.

This week we spent a lot of the time reading and performing scenes from the amazing play 12th night. Both the scenes I performed I played women interestingly enough, and I played both Mary and Viola, and had a great time doing it. I have seen the show before at the old globe, and I must say it is a great and hilarious Shakespearean comedy. I'm looking forward to reading more about the show, and maybe watching some movies of it.

Here is an excerpt from my essay this week:
Soon, our exponential growth will grow to the point where one day of progress will equal decades of progress at the rate of a couple years ago. Kurzweil’s belief in exponential technology growth is something that resonates with me on the deepest level. Not only do I have personal experience with the concept, but the many graphs and statistics in the book also completely convinced me. Kurzweil’s book is not just about the law of accelerating returns however. He stops generalizing, and makes specific predictions regarding our future.
For example, he predicts that this “Singularity” will occur by the year 2045. By that year, he predicts nanobots, microscopic robots to be an essential part of our life. With these robots bolstering our immune systems and physical bodies, we could potentially live for thousands of years. Solar energy will be freely available, and environmental problems will be solved by more efficient technologies. We will be able to think faster and more efficiently than ever before, and human creativity and knowledge will flourish (Kurzweil 25).

This week we weren't in class much, but it was great to go on our field trip to Emma! Our class went and saw Emma by Jane Austin at the Old Globe for our romantic comedy studies. It was incredibly entertaining, and I recommend it as a musical. I also continued to read the Singularity, and am finding it more confusing, but even more interesting.

This week I did all three of my groups dialectical journals.
Here they are:

From pages 1-50
1. "Consider Gary Kasparov, who scorned at the pathetic state of computer chess in 1992. Yet the relentless doubling of computer power every year enabled a computer to defeat him only five years later" (Kurzweil 8).
This is an interesting quote from the book, because it is a real life example of how computer's development rapidly could advance past humans. Gary Kasparov is a chess grandmaster, a world chess champion, and ranked to be a living genius. A computer that he once scorned, beat him, one of humanity's best and brightest at chess. This begs the question: what will computers be able to do in the rapidly approaching future?
2. "The power of information technologies is growing exponentially at even a faster pace, now doubling about every year" (Kurzweil 25).
Following this statement, on the next few pages are multiple charts showing exactly how this happens. "Power" is defined as anything, such as bandwidth, processing power, etc. It is incredible that computers have been advancing so fast, and even more so that it is possible that this generation of people will have access to so much.
3. "Evolution applies positive feedback: the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. Evolution works through indirection: evolution created humans, humans created technology, humans are now working with increasingly advanced technology to create new generations of technology. By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond" (Kurzweil 40).
This quote shows Kurzweil's viewpoint on one of the aspects of the singularity, the aspect of machine intelligence. It shows how he believes in the positive feedback of evolution and how it has affected us and our technology. It is interesting to think that machines could potentially evolve to be exactly like us, or even better than us.

During this week we emailed multiple contacts for our project. I also continued to read the singularity, and am finding it slightly confusing, but very interesting. It's amazing how much progression we have made in just a few years. One of the contacts we emailed, Bruce, is a family friend, hopefully we can interview him.

This week we continued our language and hero studies, which all culminated the end of the week with out essay and Beowulf quiz. My essay was the sixth prompt, which meant that I wrote my essay about the modern definition of a hero. I said that heroes are simply embodiments of their cultures values, and wrote about it.

We mainly focused on beowulf this week, and finished the story. We also answered a lot of questions about the reading, and analyzed its definition of heroes, as well as watching a short clip of the movie and how the director portrayed grendel.

This week we learned about languages.
It was interesting to discover that there are so many endangered languages, many of which are in New York.
Also, we watched a great, informative and entertaining video about the root of English, and I learned that it is a combination of anglo saxon german, and french latin.