Monday, August 10, 2020

Law School Admissions

Law School Admissions By using satire to infiltrate the minds that would not be receptive to direct anti-war messages, we allow the anti-war messages to form in the readers’ own heads. We allow people to see past what the media and authority figures have trained them to believe and instead think for themselves in their own self-interest. These seditious thoughts that break the myth of glory, and prevent unnecessary sacrifice are of great value if we are to have a society comprised of critical thinkers. Such a society is necessary if the poor are to overcome the effects of media and politicians made up of and owned by the wealthy. Only through my own curiosity and self-motivated research have I learned to appreciate more than I had before. Surreal Numbers by Knuth helped me put what numbers are into more perspective. It is a rather slim book, yet because of its density it takes awhile to read in order to understand what it says. Somehow, I found the way this scenario was presented to be engaging and allowed me to be drawn into the story. Their first simple conclusion was that any number is the pair of sets to the left and right of that number. In Plato’s Meno (thanks for sending!), Socrates posed an ingenious question to his student about how to double the area of a square. The student intuited that one would simply double the side lengths of the square but in reality that would quadruple the area of the square. Socrates then leads the student though a series of understandable steps proving that in order to double the area of a square, one must construct a square with the side length of the diagonal of the original square. The prompt for this essay was “Discuss a book that has particular significance for you. For every book I read I find myself adding at least three more to my reading list, whether they inspired the author or were inspired by him. The most beautiful things in the world are ideas, constantly changing, altered by experience and learning. I am unable to say that any one book is important to me, all I can say is that Catch-22 is important to me today and hope to discover the book that will be important to me tomorrow. I invite St. John’s to help me find that book, and perhaps I will be able to help someone else find their’s. I find it very intriguing that with the right story and progression, anyone can be led to not only a deeper understanding of a subject but also a greater appreciation for one. Surreal Numbers follows a couple on vacation on an island. They find a rock with inscriptions written in Hebrew. After some rough translation and a lot of thought, they realize the slab talks about the logic process of classifying numbers. Neither of the two are mathematicians but they take upon the task and try to glean everything they can from the inscriptions. Specifically, let’s imagine that there were no elements in either the left or right set. Then the statement above about left elements and right elements would still be true as long as one of the sets has nothing. So you would start off with 0, and then you could get -1 and 1 by using 0 in the left or right set, and then it builds that way forever in both directions. We use these building blocks of math and numbers all of the time and yet we do not truly stop to think about what they are or why they work the way they do. I was one of those very people and I would be lying if I said that I fully appreciate math for what it is. The inscription stated that any element of the left set is not greater than or equal to an element of the right setâ€"a very simple idea upon which to build a number system. It proceeds logically, then showing the recursive nature of numbers and how they build upon previous numbers. The beauty of this notion of sets is this idea that 0 is the origin of numbers. What effect does it have on what you think or how you think? ” Every bit of art, knowledge, thought, and opinion has value and can change a person. If you really care about ideas, explaining why one is important is almost impossible because every idea intersects with and plays off of other ideas. Lewis, Rowling summons foreign phrases, literary devices, and language jokes, and transfigures them into clever names for her characters, objects, and places. The works of Tolkien and Lewis reflect their authors’ knowledge of philology, but can veer into pretentiousness. Rowling seems to want as many readers as possible to share in the fun -- slogging through ancient Gobbledegook epics is not required. As a result of reading this book and the Meno, I have a much different perspective on how knowledge comes into being and how it is communicated, or in the case of my public education, not communicated. War Satire as a sub-genre is of particular importance. The seriousness of war, literally life and death, makes it a subject people tend to develop core values around. Being overtly anti-war could cause you and your message to be immediately dismissed by those that view an anti-war stance as anti-troop or anti-patriotic. The poor pay the price while the rich reap the benefit.

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