Not much happening today – I’m just stressed in general, knowing that there are many assignments and exams coming up. However, I would like to share 2 interesting things that I learned in my classes.
One – now is puffing season! This article from NPR explains “Why it’s perfectly normal to see baby puffins thrown off cliffs in Iceland each year” . TLTR? It’s because many puffins are stuck in human’s modern infrastructures, such as traffic lights, oil, and streets, they have a monogamy relationship with each other with a low frequency of laying eggs. So, by dropping them off from the high cliff, they are saving the astray ones and reviving their population.
Two – war is not necessarily a physical state; it’s a mood. In class, we watched a YouTube video of doomsday preppers and we all believed that their minds were constantly in a state of war. Hobbes explains that this happens when people mistrust each other (and the government) and they, therefore, rely on themselves for security. In his words, it was something along the line of people locking things up and staying put. At the end of the class, the professor called out a specific scene where the woman put down her beloved cat as an act of mercy. As he described it, her words and her actions were completely opposite, which was hard to see, but interesting to analyze (31:43).
Trang "Tee" Nguyen 