Power and Context

In the short essay “Power of Context” the author Malcolm Gladwell did a good job in showing how people will act differently in curtain environments. It is really true that if the building you are in or the classroom that you have to go to will make you not want to go to it just because of how it looks. I thought it was interesting how he talked about the crime rates declining in New York City just because of a subway car being cleaned and not full of graffiti. It is kind of weird to think that just by changing something as insignificant as graffiti will have an effect on something as big as the crime rate.
I used to think that crime was an unusual thing that never happened here in Montana. Then I took a trip to Phoenix Arizona one summer to visit my aunt. While I was there I saw how crime is a really big issue in larger cities. We were just sitting out in her yard on evening, and in the hour that we were out there I probably heard eight gun shots go off that weren’t close to us but they were towards the main part of the city. At first I didn’t think anything of it because here in Montana when you here a shot go off it’s usually somebody hunting in a nearby farm. Then it hit me that the shots I was hearing weren’t hunting shots. And it really shocked me.

When the author talked about the experiments of when the university took the volunteers to do a study, if made me think of how these people would change do to the kind of people they were around. This I thought was a bit much of an experiment to find out how they reacted, but it proved that in prisons some people are probably good and just act nasty do to the bad guys that are around them.

I would have to agree with one of the statements that the author said and it is” A crime is relatively rare and aberrant event. For a crime to be committed something extra has to happen to tip a troubled person into towards violence, these tipping points could be as simple as graffiti.” I think that if a person is really mad about something that has happened to them, that they are already on the verge of freaking out and if something simple that would normally not make anyone mad would cause this person to go off the hook.

In the essay, I thought it did a good job in having curtain examples of how people will act differently in curtain places and situations. Just by changing the appearance of a building or whatever will have some sort of affect on the entire picture no matter big of an issue it is.

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