SplAtteR

When I first saw the Extraterrestrial Life RSS feed in Scientific America, I thought it would be cool, interesting, and something a little out of the ordinary.  I was expecting stories about sightings of aliens and how there could be life on Mars.  Well, when i started reading some of the articles, that’s not exactly what I found.  One of the first articles I read was titled I See Doomed People.  It introduced me to M. Night Shyamalan’s new move The Happening and gave an interview with Shyamalan.  The movie has to do with extraterrestrial life, which I guess is a good connection to the title of the feed, just not what I expected.  Another article I read was Were Meteorites the Origin of Life on Earth?  By reading this article, I learned that scientist found chemical building blocks, similar to the ones in our genetic material, in a meteor that hit Earth in the 1960s.  This brought up the possibility that meteors long ago may have helped create life on Earth, however, many scientist are sceptical about this.  With limited information, I’m not sure what I think about a meteor helping to create my ancestors, but it was definitely something interesting to read about. 

Food is one thing every living organism has in common.  We all have to eat food to survive whether we like it or not.  When I saw the Food RSS Feed in the Washington Times, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Would I find recipes, new restaurants, or just interesting stories?  It turns out that I found each of these three things in the feed.  In the article Finding a cake up to tea, the author gives the recipe for a royal almond torte and chocolate butter-cream frosting.  I’m getting hungry already.  Now if you’re a chocolate lover, this next article is the one you should be reading.  New heaven for chocoholics introduces a new restaurant called Co Co. Sala where the food of focus is chocolate!  Now my taste buds are really watering.  Personally, I thought the article Science supersizes crops was pretty interesting.  It discussed how scientist are experimentally making crops that are more resistant to weed and insect killers.  Recently I saw a greenhouse in Disney World that was conducting experiments very similar to the ones in the article.  They had giant lemons and tomato trees growing.   It was really cool to see those and the many other scientifically altered plants. 

When I read this assignment, my first thought was “What’s an RSS feed, and what in the world am i supposed to do?”  Well, i found out that an RSS feed is something you can subscribe to from a popular news website, such as the Los Angeles Times.  I started looking threw all their RSS feeds and subscribed to a couple, but the one that really caught my eye was Movie Reviews.  I love watching movies so this is a feed that interests me.  Most of the reviews are at a reasonable length, which is good because i don’t want to start day dreaming while I’m reading.  Some reviews described the actually movie better than others.  One such review written by Jan Stuart was on ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’.  This review immediately drew my attention because of the movie’s star actor, Brendan Fraser.  I recently saw him promoting his new Mummy movie in Orlando.  Stuart did a good job describing the movie without giving away to much of the story.  I definitely want to go see it now.  Another movie I thought I wanted to see was ‘Mamma Mia’, but after the review it got from Kenneth Turan, I’m not so sure.  He was harsh on this play turned movie, but it’s good to know there’s a person who’s not just feeding you a line to get you to go out and spend money. 

            Blogs take up just a small section of the World Wide Web.  For a person’s blog to be noticed out of the many other blogs out there, it must be attractive in looks and style, it must be organized well, and it must have articles with eye catching titles.  Luckily for me, I found three blogs that fit this description: Chasing My Voice, Have At It, and iThink. 

  (more…)