Thursday, February 26, 2009

Monkey Bridge Chapter 2

5 Comments
1] Mai's mother was in the hospital being treated.
2] Her mother kept calling out her father's name "Baba Quan" in her sleep.
3] Her mother had always been devoted to her grandfather.
4] Baba Quan was left behind in Vietnam when Mai and her mother escaped.
5] Her mother is partially paralyzed.

4 Questions
1] Why is her mother calling out "Baba Quan" in her sleep?
2] What happened to the rest of her family?
3] Why was she being strapped down?
4] What happened to her grandfather?

3 Vocabulary
1] Insignia: a badge or distinguishing mark of office or honor.
2] Narcotically: any of a class of substances that blunt the senses, as opium, morphine, belladonna, and alcohol, that in large quantities produce euphoria, stupor, or coma, that when used constantly can cause habituation or addiction, and that are used in medicine to relieve pain, cause sedation, and induce sleep.
3] Tourniquet: any device for arresting bleeding by forcibly compressing a blood vessel, as a bandage tightened by twisting.

2 Literary Terms
1] "With the random force ad strength of a trapped and frustrated eel." - Metaphor.
2] "She was squeezing a rubber toy shaped like a bowling pen." -Simile.

1 Overview sentence
Her mother is in the hospital bed being injected with a needle, and strapped down. She is apparently mentally unstable.

Monkey Bridge Chapter 1

5 Comments
1] White is the color of mourning, the standard color for ghosts, bones, and funerals. (In Vietnam)
2] The Character has reoccurring thoughts about the attacks when she was in Saigon, Vietnam.
3] She is in a hospital in the U.S.
4] Bobbie was her best f riend from high school.
5] She was staying at Arlington Hospital.

4 Questions
1] Where was her mother?
2] Does she know why she's in the hospital?
3] Was the events in her memories in Vietnam from the Vietnam War?
4] Where was her father?

3 Vocabulary
1] Percussive: of or pertaining to or characterized by percussion.
2] Languidly: lacking in vigor or vitality.
3] Immense: vast; huge; very great.

2 Literary Terms
1] "The bedsheet white of the hallway was an anxious white I knew by heart." - Personification.
2] "As if the tears were always ppooled in readiness beaneath my eyes." -Simile

1 Overview Sentence
1] In the beginning, Mai Nguyen talks about being in an American Hospital and about her mother who was burned severely on her face years ago while cooking.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Spook: Chapter 10

5 Comments
1] Mediumship is about proving that life after death is a fact.
2] Psychics and mediums prosper not because they're intentionally fraudulent, but because their subjects are uncritical.
3] The people who visit mediums and psychics are often strongly motivated or constitutionally inclined to believe that what is being said is relevant and meaningful with regard to them or a loved one.
4] The National Forest Service has a fine and terrible dark sense of humor.
5] Thousands of Americans and Europeans believe that tape reorders can capture the voices of people whose vocal cords long ago decomposed.

4 Questions
1] Can anyone become a medium?
2] What does trilobite mean?
3] Is it the client that makes the psychic?
4] When did the EVP start?

3 Vocabulary
1] Flummoxed: To confuse; perplex.
2] Obscured: (of meaning) not clear or plain; ambiguous, vague, or uncertain.
3] Evocative: Tending to evoke.

2 Literary Terms
1] "Watson's spiritualist beliefs colors his views of science.." -Metaphor.
2] "Tesla was a special case." -Metaphor.

1 Overview Sentence
Mediums and Psychics were used to prove if there was a life after death.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Spook: Chapter 9

5 Comments

1] X-Rays today are a humble diagnostic tool.
2] Hommeforce means Man force in French.
3] Schwartz's experimental data have led him to the conclusion that there are people - rare and gifted mediums - who can communicate with people who have died.
4] John Edwards was one of Schwartz's "dream team" of mediums tested in the Afterlife Experiments work.
5] Thouless died in 1984, and the Thouless Project, headed up by emeritus University of Virginia professor Ian Stevenson, was born.

4 Questions
1] What was the Thouless Project?
2] How do you know if you're a medium or not?
3] How do you know if a discarante was really coming through, and not some product of a mediums imagination or subconscious?
4] How do you read a encoded message

3 Vocabulary
1] Succulent: full of juice; juicy.
2] Discarnate: without a physical body; incorporeal.
3] Paranormal: of or pertaining to the claimed occurrence of an event or perception without scientific explanation, as psychokinesis, extrasensory perception, or other purportedly supernatural phenomena.

2 Literary Terms
1] "For a man who takes an extraordinary amount of professional guff, he is resiliently good-natured, a Pooh Bear among the skeptic society Eeyores." -Metaphor.
2] "Spirits walk, but some ride about in chariots.." -Metaphor.

1 Overview Sentence
Mediums were rare to find and they could communicate with the dead.

Spook: Chapter 8

5 Comments
1] Macdougall said that all substances except "the ether of space" give some refraction of light, the soul was therefore made of ether.
2] It was thought to be the nescessary medium for the transmission of electromagnetic waves.
3] Ether was invisible and undetectable, and it permeated all forms of matter, from man to ottoman.
4] Ether was also assumed to be weightless.
5] Macdougall envisioned a giant "earth-accompanying globe of ether .. above the storm zone."

4 Questions
1] How did Macdougall die?
2] What kind of cancer did he have?
3] Did his wife take on his study after his death?
4] Who was Carrington?

3 Vocabulary
1] Aforementioned: Cited or mentioned previously or earlier.
2] Skepticism: Skeptical attitude or temper; doubt.
3] Requisite: required or necessary for a particular purpose, position, etc.; indispensable.

2 Literary Terms
1] "The book contains a half dozen photographs of the dashing Carrington, his Gregory Peckish hair swept back from his forehead and a scowl of concentration on his face.." -Metaphor.
2] "Carrington never built his monkey box.." -Metaphor.

1 Overview Sentence
In this chapter, the scientists studided about ether and how it was magical.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Spook: Chapter 7

5 Comments

1] Nahum trolls for funding at physics departments and institutes.
2] Decay heat is not ordered information.
3] Energy is freely malleable in terms of the physical form it might take and it is not necessarily the case that any one of them would be 'preferred'.
4] Macdougall concluded that the soul's index of refraction is zero.
5] In pre-Einstein days, ether was an accepted concept in physics.

4 Questions

1] Why can't souls use doors like the rest of us?
2] Does free-floating consciousness energy exist?
3] What is ether?
4] Was the soul "weightless"?



3 Vocabulary

1] Paramecium: any ciliated freshwater protozoan of the genus Paramencium, having an oval body and a long deep oral groove.
2] Picogram: one trillionth of a gram.
3] Thermodynamics: the science concerned with the relations between heat and mechanical energy or work, and the conversion of one into the other: modern thermodynamics deals with the properties of systems for the description of which temperature is a necessary coordinate.

2 Literary Terms
1] "a fart of energy in some god-knows-where-or-what dimension?" -Metaphor.
2] "It's that minus-all-the-trappins bit that gets me." - Metaphor.

1 Overview Sentence
In this chapter, scientists like Nahum and Macdougall tries to weigh the soul and experiments with the consciousness of a soul.

Spook: Chapter 6

5 Comments
1] The smallest infant to survive at birth weighted ten ounces and had a volume of three-tenths of a quart.
2] All the sheep Hollander tested showed a temporary weight gain at death.
3] Gerry Nahum is a professor at the Duke University School of Medicine who works in an atmospheric old builing called Baker House.
4] Theorists like Nahum think of the consciousness as information content.
5] Information to a quantum physicist has an acception energy equivalent.

4 Questions
1] How do you measure the volume of a premature baby?
2] How do you weigh a soul?
3] How many bits are there in a consciousness?
4] When we look at a consciousness, what is embodied in it?

3 Vocabulary
1] Homeopathist: a person who practices or favors in homeopathy.
2] Rendered: to submit or present, as for consideration, approval or payment.
3] Chastised: to discipline, especially by corporal punishment.

2 Literary Terms
1] "It's a long book, but lightweight, as light as a soul, for it exists only in cyberspace.." -Simile.
2] "I think that at the moment of death that little window opens up." -Metaphor.

1 Overview Sentence
Many scientists have tried to figure out how many bits are in a consciousness and how to weigh it.

Spook: Chapter 5

5 Comments
1] In 1996, McGill University professor of neurosurgery Rolando Del Maestro curated an exhibition called "Leonardo da Vinci: The Search for the Soul."
2] Gall was led astray in part by his unconventional methodology.
3] Gall amassed a collection of 221 skulls, which traveled with him on his lecture circuit, exasperating porters and alarming nosy bellhops.
4] For four years of his life, Duncan Macdougall had been hatching a plan to prove the existence of the human soul.
5] Macdougall enlisted the help of two fellow physicians; Drs. Sproull and Grant.

4 Questions
1] What was the Carthaginian War about?
2] What are consumptives?
3] Was it legal to use living humans as experiments?
4] Who is Sanctorius?

3 Vocabulary
1] Amalgam: an alloy of mercury with another metal or metals.
2] Instilled: to introduce by gradual, persistent efforts; implant.
3] Conception: the act of conceiving; the state of being conceived.

2 Literary Terms
1] "Soul Weighing." -Metaphor.
2] "Perhaps some seizure-flung drool escaped the confines of the flask." -Metaphor.

1 Overview Sentence
Macdougall enlisted the help of two other physicians who helped him do a research on finding the soul in a living being.

Spook: Chapter 4

5 Comments
1] No one-at least on a scientific basis-knows for sure when the soul, the spirit, the self, instilled, or installed, or whatever process it uses to get itself in there.
2] Descartes is one of the few early philosopher/scientists to have physically searched for the soul, actaully opened up bodies and looked for it.
3] Descartes eventually nominated the pea-sized pineal gland.
4] Descartes dreamed up an elaborate model of the nervous system with strings and valves and tiny bellows.
5] The luz is shaped like a chickpea and is located at the top of the spine.

4 Questions
1] When does the soul enter the new body?
2] If the soul had arrived at conception, what would happen then?
3] What is a midrash?
4] Why was Herophilus looking around for a soul in a dead man?

3 Vocabulary
1] Contend: to struggle in opposition.
2] Supplanting: to usurp the place of, especially through intrigue or underhanded tactics.
3] Primitive: being the first or earliest or the kind or in existence, especially in an early age of the world.

2 Literary Terms
1] "The very first person to poke around for a soul in a human cadaver was the third century B.C. physician Herophilus, of Alexandria." -Metaphor.
2] "As such, he bagged a lot of anatomical discoveries." -Metaphor.

1 Overview Sentence
Scientists were trying to find if they could find a soul, so they opened up dead bodies to look for them.