Blog For Week 12-14-15: The Six by Mark Alpert

Prompts used: 
• Write an obituary for the protagonist or antagonist.
 • Discuss why you like or dislike what you are reading.
  
      The book I recently finished was The Six by Mark Alpert. It follows a group of six terminally ill teens who get all their memories transferred into robots as a result of this project called the Pioneer Project. This whole mess was created by a rogue A.I. called Sigma (∑) trying to nuke us. Long story short, I have to write an obituary. Spoilers ahead, read at your own risk!
R.I.P.
Sigma
2020-2020
      Our dear nuclear A.I. friend Sigma was possibly destroyed yesterday when he transferred himself to a nuclear missile and detonated somewhere over Russia. He is not survived by anyone as far as we know, as he deleted all his rivals. The funeral service will be held at 192.168.1.1. Rest in Programming.
     I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Why? First off, the main character is extremely relevant to me, as I have a friend with muscular dystrophy. Adam, our main character, has muscular dystrophy as well. I also like technology in books. The gold nanoprobes and X-ray lasers are not only critical to the plot, they're pretty excellent bits of technology, which makes for good reading. Finally, there's the whole teens-get-superpowers cliche. While it is exactly that, The Six does it better than anything else, ever.
I will also include a picture of a Pioneer robot.  

My drawing of a Pioneer Robot.

Blog for Week 11/30/15: Outliers by Malcom Gladwell

      The book that will be the main focus of this blog is called Outliers, a nonfiction book by Malcolm Gladwell. Rather scripted introductions aside, onto the summary!
     Outliers is about success. However, instead of being just a book of success stories, it focuses on why these people were so successful. Is it more than hard work? Yes, in fact! Loads of different factors that you might not have thought of as significant contribute towards success in weird ways. This also indirectly shows the path to success in many fields, by looking back at it throughout history.
      One interesting passage I found was this: "To become a chess grandmaster also takes about ten years. And what's ten years? Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness." This is interesting because I'd have thought you'd needed just natural talent to become a grandmaster of anything. Now I know better. I mean, I never would've guessed ten thousand. I wonder if this ten thousand hour rule works with science. 
      A rather interesting thing I learned was that IQ doesn't completely affect success. I mean, you would think that the more IQ you have, the better you're going to end up, right? Well, only up to a point. Once you hit that point though, anything more doesn't really matter. What you really need, as shown in the book, is savvy. Street smarts are crucial to navigating the world and using it to achieve your end goal. If you can't bend the world around you to help you achieve, you will not succeed.

Commented on:

Anthony

Andrew
Yazmin