Dennet writes, "what we are is very much a matter of what culture has made us" (Dennet 340).  I am interested in bridging the gap between cultural perceptions of humanity and scientific perceptions of humanity.  A big question since the dawn of civilization has been where do we come from and why are we here?  I don't understand why when science was created to explore all possibilities and find the answers to existence, its conclusions are so easily rejected.  Can we ignore the truth if we don't like it?  Can something still be possible if we cannot quite imagine it?  I can't begin to imagine billions of years of history and change, but just because it's scary and different and something I don't fully understand doesn't mean that it is not valid.

I think that on Wednesday discussion we missed to talk about relationship between the types of reading and the goal of reading it self .Why we do we read and how do we choose our way of reading?

In y'day's NYTimes, Ethnic Differences Emerge in Plastic Surgery: "the city’s many immigrants to get tucks and tweaks that are carefully tailored to their cultural preferences and ideals of beauty....the results can seem less like science than like stereotyping....A century ago...the bulk of those operations were targeted at assimilation issues....Today...many immigrants reshape themselves to their home culture’s trends and tastes."

Noise vs. Information is an interesting idea, because it ties neatly into the label discussions we've been having; if you don't have a label for something, you don't have a translator for it.  Does that make it just noise?  If we achieve Haraway's utopia, murdering the Goddesses and championing the Cyborgs, will our own identities become so much static?  Haraway says she would rather be a cyborg than a Goddess, but I'd pick the opposite.  These women have exact labels, which is a sight more than the rest of the undecided world.

 I was very intrigued by our last discussion on the role of Critical Thinking, as provoked by Katherine Halyes' essay, "How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine."  Overall, I agree with Hayles; I do not think that close reading is necessarily the best way of reading.  (As a side note, I really wished she had further defined the term "close reading."  Is she equating "close reading" to critical thought?  Or is close reading simply what it sounds like: reading slowly and paying close attention to all of the words?) While I think that there is a difference in the way that we read digitally and the way that we read physically, I do not believe that digital reading is necessarily a bad thing.

Comic strips are short narrative drawings displayed in a sequence. Although they are usually intended for entertainment and quick comedic relief, they often portray important messages concerning issues related to employment, religion, politics, or everyday social problems.

 Generalized descriptions of reading styles are kind of difficult to grasp... Hyper reading might be different from ‘close reading’ but the definition of ‘close reading’ itself is shaky. If it means reading every word, can you both hyper read and close read a very short text? And can the outcome of ‘critical thinking’ then the same for both methods? Assuming critical thinking to be the formation of some kind of opinion of the text, another layer of variation is added due to the reader’s subjectivity.

 I found this week’s classes to be particularly interesting. After reading both Katherine Rowe and Paul Grobstein’s essays I’ve found the concept of information to be more complex and abstract than I had originally thought. I found the notion of information’s transactional quality to be the most intriguing aspect as it introduced the necessity of a decoder in the processing of information. The idea that information requires a decoder reinforces its transactional nature.