Surface and Substance

In the reading “Surface and Substance,” Virginia Postrel show several examples of how people will decide on what product to buy, by how it looks rather than how it performs. I think that this is very true. To me if a new product is displayed better and is full of colors it instantly attracts me to it. This is what the producer of the goods is good at doing.

If the producer of the goods thinks that instead of using all their money on the design of a product to make it more efficient, that they will take some of the money and use it to package the product and get commercial going about the new product to make more sells on it in return then they will do that. But in doing this than the truth of how efficient the new product is will soon be discovered when it only lasts a few weeks before wearing out.

When I was looking to buy my first car an example of this happened to me. I found a very nice looking truck that was a shinny grey color and had a new set of rims on it. The person who was selling the car said that it had a new paint job and was ready to go. So my dad and I took it out on a test drive. We found that the oil gage light was on indicating that the oil level was low. So we pulled over and took a closer look at the truck. We found that it had oil all over the engine. It had a few other things that looked like they were in tough shape as well. Then we looked and saw that the transmission had an oil leak as well. So after seeing this I decided that the truck would just be a pain in the butt and wouldn’t be very reliable. The guy who was selling it though that if he put a nice paint job on it and some new wheels that it would hide the real problems that the truck had.

I think that because of everyone paying money for the nicest clothing designs and the high dollar houses are trying to be seen. These people will do anything to look as though they are living a happy life. But in reality they are in massive debt and they can’t get out of it. This is one reason why I think our economy is doing so badly. But other people such as myself, sometimes don’t realize that we will buy the shinny wrapped gum over the dull packaged gum. When really the dull packaged gum is the better choice to make. So if we start to look beneath the surface of things and start to see the truth of things we will make better decisions in the end.

http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/aesthetics/bldef_aestheticvalue.htm

The Wreck of Time

The Wreck of Time kind of opened my eyes as to how many humans have lived and died before me. It just astounded me that so many have died in just a few minutes. On the other hand though, the author said that there is 110 million more birth than there are deaths. This stat really shows how our species is getting larger in size. So really when a huge tragedy does happen it only slows down our growth for a bit.

Another note I realized was how old the Earth really is. I found that the it is about 40 billion years old. If you think about it, our time here on the earth is really small compared to how old the Earth really is. It kind of seems as though life is pointless. If some humans spend their entire life working, by filing paperwork or sitting on a computer all day long then it seems like these people are wasting their short life on nothing.

There were a lot of statistics on how many people died on curtain days, and how many people were killed by this and that. And what happened to ancient cities that once long ago were filled with people that all did their little duties in life. And how many people were killed by simple diseases that today seem silly to have died from. It just shows how the human race has evolved into what we are today. If it wasn’t for these tragedies then we wouldn’t have ever learned how to defeat them. The author was wondering if we are the last generation of our kind and that with one push of a button we could all be dead. But to me I think that we are just the beginning of our kind. We will sometime in the future use up all the natural resources here on Earth. But by the time that happens, we will probably be able to travel to these other galaxies that can only be seen by telescope. We will continue to evolve and get smarter. If you think about it in the past one hundred years we have developed a way to travel better, we now all have cell phones, we can get access to the World Wide Web from almost anywhere, where we used to not even know that a computer could tell us what the weather will be like in a week. These are just some of the things we have made that are going to lead to more creative things that will help us survive.

http://wilderdom.com/vignettes/WorldFacts.html

How old earth is----http://www.lavistachurchofchrist.org/LVanswers/2004-12-28.htm

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081107051213AAwc3WO

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_people_are_born_every_minute_in_the_world