Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Attempt at Writing Cool

This is going to be interesting…

Today in my genetics lecture, my professor mentioned that bananas are going to become extinct in less than 10 years. These beloved fruits are no longer resistant to several diseases and pathogens due to years of genetic engineering so that consumers can get bigger and sterile (seed-less) bananas to go with their ice cream. However, the rhetoric my genetics textbook uses suggests that fruits were originally genetically engineered to help world hunger. And that world hunger, in Faigley’s opinion, is caused by the fact that we are consuming our resources too quickly because of our technological-based, fast-paced lives. It is basically a never ending circle: we try to use new technologies to fix problems, but that just creates more problems, which we then try to fix. And uniform circular motion has constant velocity and centripetal acceleration… I tried to get physics in there, but it doesn’t really relate…

7 comments:

Sam said...

I am in a lot of science classes too and I think your connection from genetics of bananas to rhetoric is really impressive. I'm not sure if you are taking any other classes than those 3, but another idea you could think of is the coding language behind each course. In genetics you have the RNA's and DNA in the cell as "codes", and we've discussed in this class about HTML as the internet's coding language. I'm not sure how you could apply it past that, but just something to think about too.

Kurt said...

I think that you did a really good job. Your sentences flow really well. You did a lot better than I did. Good job.

Bobby said...

I'm impressed with the connection making. I especially liked the physics connection. A bit of a stretch, but that's what makes it good. What genetics class are you in? I think I remember my professor talking about the banana thing in 466.

Becky said...

Your post is really interesting! It encompasses so many different class subjects, but still has an overall sense of connection.

Jon said...

I am shocked that bananas are going to be gone. On a very basic level, we must be screwing up our environment pretty handily if we've been able to create a species of bananas that is set to die out.
Maybe too much genetic engineering (fruits et al) creates these problems.

Liz P. said...

I never really thought about the "code" connection but that is really good!

I'm in Genetics 466 right now.

Genetic engineering has done a lot of good but I think it was taken to far with the banana. Hopefully in the next couple of years scientists will be able to figure out how to use genetic engineering to save the banana. It is one of my favorite fruits!

Anonymous said...

I think there's something to codes and coding, and in particular how these terms emerge across disciplines. I'm reading Katherine Hayles's new book (not the one we're reading in class) where she makes a case for re/imagining writing as code, that is, as a form of inscription not unlike the way DNA and RNA inscribe/compose the body. Very cool stuff (well, at least I think so...)