Reply to comment

I’ve always seen common people act as scientists in their everyday lives by performing small experiments: babies crying to see if someone responds or someone dressing a certain way to see if they attract attention. People conduct experiments after making some observations and see how that follows through, everyone has done it, so that part came as no surprise to me. However, I’ve never seen science has “loopy” and subjective until listening to Paul. It’s understandable that science is loopy and certain hypothesis and summaries are modified when given new information and it’s fascinating to know that there is no final answer or end to loopy science, there’s always new observations to turn to. Yet I’m still a little bothered by this, and you can blame it on my traditional thought on science. Because science deals with real world applications from stopping global warming to creating new technology to saving lives via medical procedures, I’m a little uncomfortable that there is no correct answer, objectiveness, or truth in this field. It’s an idea that I will have to get used to but it explains why sometimes science may not always work, and such an explanation is crucial to understanding the art of science.

As for the talk about poems…. I had forgotten that O Captain was written for Lincoln. While reading it, the last scene of “The Dead Poets Society” was replaying in my head where all the students in Robin Williams’ class stand on their desks and address him as their captain. The poem can be interpreted in many ways from a sailor addressing his captain to a citizen addressing his president to a student addressing his teacher. That’s what makes this poem great to me: The fact that it can be interpreted in numerous and various ways by numerous and various people. To me poetry doesn’t have a “right answer”, so just because the poem was written for Lincoln doesn’t mean that the reader can’t make his or her own interpretations out of it.

Over the weeks, I forgot how Obama has been compared to Lincoln in the past. Even I once used this comparison when the democratic nomination was up in the air for Clinton and Obama; I had gotten the idea from the recent issue of TIME magazine at the time. Both were inexperienced senators from Illinois who were going to step into their office with huge challenges. However the challenges are different. Lincoln had to tackle on the task of uniting a divided country and leading it through a bloody civil war. Obama’s tasks involve reviving the economy, reforming healthcare, dealing with the conflict in the middle east and in other areas of the world, and more. Because of the economy and other hardships in the country, I’ve said his presidency may be like FDR’s. Roosevelt came into office during the Great Depression and fixed the country in many ways. Even TIME magazine agreed with me on this when one of their front covers showed Obama dressed up as FDR (the idea was interesting, the picture a little weird). However when I really think about it, I don’t think Obama’s presidency can be compared to any other presidency in the past. His win itself poignant and historical itself, and his challenges involve big changes in our backyard and beyond that. To me, it seems more than what any other president has had to have done before and other sources have cited similar opinions. But in a way, I believe he’s a continuation of Lincoln in the sense that as a president, he wants the best for the country and he will do whatever he can to make sure that happens.