Math Q-Q-C

Quote: "The trick they used was very simple; as warriors left to go to battle; they each put a rock in a pile. When they got home again, they each remove one. The numbers of rocks left equaled the number of men lost. The chief would then remove each rock in turn and pick up a stick for each rock he removed. He then would walk to the other tribe with his sticks and demand a buffalo in exchange for each one."

Question: Some questions that arose in my head is how did they manage to survive for so long without math? At first, I thought math was just a subject you learned in school and wasn’t valuable outside of school. However as I grew older, I learned that math is everywhere. So even back then, they would have needed to count the number of spears they would need before going to fight, so each warrior can be well equipped. Or with food, they needed to make sure that everyone had enough food to survive. So I was just wondering how they were so successful in living without any math involved.

Comment: I think this quote is interesting though because it sounds to us like laziness, but that was how they had to handle that situation. They didn’t have mathematicians living before them to solve all of our problems, and we just use their work. Therefore, they had to make do with what little knowledge that did have, and find a simpler way to compensate for their losses at war.

Sports Q-Q-C

Q-Q-C

Quote: “As much as our culture talks about individual effort and self improvement, deep down, he argues, we revere the naturals. We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary. Why not? To me that is so much more amazing.”

Question: Some questions that arose in my mind when I read this excerpt were why do people think this way? I know I use to think this way as well about the stars the live among us. These people for the most part have lived lives just like ours, so why do we think so highly of them? It is a question I often wonder about when I see people on the tv screen.

Comment: Whenever you hear people talk about their experience meeting “stars” they often talk about how they’re surprised that they’re a normal person just like us. As a matter of fact, they are. Of course there are certain people born into fame, and thus have never truly experienced a normal life, and I feel bad for those few. However, for those who we look up to, are normal people like us, who made the right choices in their life to become famous. So even though it’s great that they have made a difference in a lot of people’s life, we shouldn’t treat them as if they’re superheroes who aren’t from this world.

2nd Q-Q-C

Quote: “Supernovae occur when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time brighter than all the stars in its galaxy. “It’s like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once," says Evans. If a supernova explosion happened within five hundred light years of us, we would be goners, according to Evans- it would wreck the show," as he cheerfully puts it. But the universe is vast and supernovae are normally much too far away to harm us. In fact most are so unimaginably distant that their light reaches us as no more than the faintest twinkle.”

Question: My question about this excerpt is won’t our sun blow up as well? They say far into the future, when our sun is older, it will go through the supernova stage as well. However, this passage says for stars much BIGGER than our own. Another question I had is when did they learn about how these supernovas affect the galaxy? Seeing how we couldn’t be close to one to actually feel/see the impact.

Comment: I really enjoyed this excerpt because space and all of its wonders are amazing. I personally feel like this earth is huge, and we have so much to just discover on our planet. Now imagine this massive universe that we have only began to study. There is so much out there that we can learn about, and supernovas are just one of the many interesting phenomenon out there.

1st Q-Q-C

Quote: “Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuffin it-the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the aster­oid belt comets, and other miscellaneous drifting detritus-fills less than a trilJjonth of the available space. You also quickly realize that none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system were remotely drawn to scale.”

Question: My question is how do we know there is no life for trillions of miles? I’ve seen quite a few space/solar system documentaries, and they’re always saying how life could exist on our neighboring planets years ago. So how can we confirm that 100% that there is absolutely NO life besides on earth. There could be tiny cells on the planets that can survive extreme conditions, like the prokaryotic cells during the beginning stages of earth.

Comment: What really struck me about this passage is the truth of the matter. Like we’re not living in Star Wars galaxy, were we can just fly onto another planet full of other life forms. We’re actually kind of alone in this massive solar system, with nobody to share our intelligence and culture with. Of course there are pros to this, such as not getting taking over by aliens. However, in the end, we are still alone. So maybe in the future we would be able to advance our technology and travel farther and faster through space.