Breakfast Of Champions Essays - Kilgore Trout,

Breakfast Of Champions Book Report on Breakfast of Champions By Marcel Burney When one hears the phrase Breakfast of Champions, he envisions a grinning picture of Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan slam dunking, or Dale Earnhardt in a racecar on a box of Wheaties, a popular breakfast cereal. A few avid Saturday Night Live fans might recall a skit performed by James Belushi. In the skit, Belushis Breakfast of Champions was beer, cigarettes, and donuts. Neither of these examples are the subject of Kurt Vonneguts Breakfast of Champions or Good Bye Blue Morning. A Breakfast of Champions is actually a martini. Breakfast of Champions is a work of fiction with semi-autobiographical allusions. The main characters of the book are Kilgore Trout, Dwayne Hoover, and Philboyd Sludge. Kilgore Trout installs aluminum combination storm windows and screens and writes science fiction novels and short stories. He has no ambition to be a famous writer, so he sends his works to pornographic magazine companies to be published. The names and characters of his works are often changed in the process, and he is rarely paid for his efforts. Dwayne Hoover owns a successful Pontiac dealership. He slowly loses his sanity as the plot unfolds. Philboyd Sludge creates these characters and appears in the story to watch the characters as the story progresses. Breakfast of Champions depicts the story of Kilgores travel to Midland City to speak at a festival of arts. Kilgore, at first, rejects the invitation, but he decides to go because he wants to be a representative of all the thousands of artists who devoted their entire lives to a search for truth and beautyand didnt find doodley-squat (37). He intends to hitchhike to Midland City and appear at the arts festival as a nasty old man. Along the way, he is robbed. He continues hitchhiking and is picked up various truckers. He walks to his hotel after being caught in a traffic jam a mile away. Kilgores arrives at the hotel. He prepares to make a grand entrance as a red-eyed, filthy old creature but is thwarted when the desk clerk recognizes him. Kilgore cleans-up and travels down to the cocktail lounge, where he would soon meet Dwayne Hoover. Kilgores luminescent shirt under the ultraviolet lights attracts Hoover to his table. Hoover demands for Kilgore to give him the message. Hoover snatches Now It Can Be Told, one of Kilgores novels, from the table. The book says that there is only one being with free will, everyone else is a robot (253). The book drives Hoover insane. He believes he is the only one with free will. He begins attacking people in the lounge. He bites off Kilgores middle finger. Hoover leaves the hotel and attacks the people he meets outside until he is placed in a mental hospital. After Kilgore leaves the hospital, he meets Philboyd Sludge, who reveals that he is Kilgores creator. Philboyd then frees him. Vonnegut makes several social commentaries throughout the novel. The most noticeable are color and freedom. He describes Christopher Columbus as a white sea pirate who discovers a land already settled by the copper-colored Native Americans (11). The sea pirates created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else (10). However, the sea pirates created a government that owned slaves, which were black. The system of slavery and oppression of Native Americans totally contradicted the foundation of America. Philboyd freed Kilgore at the end of the novel, which was similar to the emancipation of the slaves. I enjoyed reading Vonneguts Breakfast of Champions. The book provided a fresh insight on society, even though it was written in 1973. I enjoyed the chaos that Kilgore created along his travel to Midland City. His influenced people to rename mirrors to leaks, which implied that mirrors were leaks to other universes. Kilgore also convinced the police department and newspaper to believe that a purely fictional gang, the Pluto Gang, attacked and robbed him. An article was published in the paper, which caused parents to warn their children to watch out for the Pluto Gang. Vonnegut describes society fairly accurately. The book made me look at history and society in a new light. Book Reports

Scientific and Social Definitions of Race

Scientific and Social Definitions of Race Its a common belief that race can be broken down into three categories: Negroid, Mongoloid and Caucasoid. But according to science, thats not so. While the American concept of race took off in the late 1600s and persists even today, researchers now argue that there’s no scientific basis for race. So, what exactly is race, and what are its origins? The Difficulty of Grouping People Into Races According to John H. Relethford, author of The Fundamentals of Biological Anthropology, race â€Å"is a group of populations that share some biological characteristics†¦.These populations differ from other groups of populations according to these characteristics.† Scientists can divide some organisms into racial categories easier than others, such as those which remain isolated from one another in different environments. In contrast, the race concept doesn’t work so well with humans. That’s because not only do humans live in a wide range of environments, they also travel back and forth between them. As a result, there’s a high degree of gene flow among people groups that make it hard to organize them into discrete categories. Skin color remains a primary trait Westerners use to place people into racial groups. However, someone of African descent may be the same skin shade as someone of Asian descent. Someone of Asian descent may be the same shade as someone of European descent. Where does one race end and another begin? In addition to skin color, features such as hair texture and face shape have been used to classify people into races. But many people groups cannot be categorized as Caucasoid, Negroid or Mongoloid, the defunct terms used for the so-called three races. Take Native Australians, for instance. Although typically dark-skinned, they tend to have curly hair which is often light colored. â€Å"On the basis of skin color, we might be tempted to label these people as African, but on the basis of hair and facial shape they might be classified as European,† Relethford writes. â€Å"One approach has been to create a fourth category, the ‘Australoid.’† Why else is grouping people by race difficult? The concept of race posits that more genetic variation exists interracially than intra-racially  when the opposite is true. Only about 10 percent of variation in humans exists between the so-called races. So, how did the concept of race take off in the West, particularly in the United States? The Origins of Race in America The America of the early 17th century was in many ways more progressive in its treatment of blacks than the country would be for decades to come. In the early 1600s, African Americans could trade, take part in court cases and acquire land. Slavery based on race did not yet exist. â€Å"There was really no such thing as race then,† explained anthropologist Audrey Smedley, author of Race in North America: Origins of a Worldview, in a 2003 PBS interview. â€Å"Although ‘race’ was used as a categorizing term in the English language, like ‘type’ or ‘sort’ or ‘kind, it did not refer to human beings as groups.† While race-based slavery wasn’t a practice, indentured servitude was. Such servants tended to be overwhelmingly European. Altogether, more Irish people lived in servitude in America than Africans. Plus, when African and European servants lived together, their difference in skin color did not surface as a barrier. â€Å"They played together, they drank together, they slept together†¦The first mulatto child was born in 1620 (one year after the arrival of the first Africans),† Smedley noted. On many occasions, members of the servant class- European, African and mixed-race- rebelled against the ruling landowners. Fearful that a united servant population would usurp their power, the landowners distinguished Africans from other servants, passing laws that stripped those of African or Native American  descent of rights. During this period, the number of servants from Europe declined, and the number of servants from Africa rose. Africans were skilled in trades such as farming, building, and metalwork that made them desired servants. Before long, Africans were viewed exclusively as slaves and, as a result, sub-human. As for Native Americans, they were regarded with great curiosity by the Europeans, who surmised that they descended from the lost tribes of Israel, explained historian Theda Perdue, author of Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South, in a PBS interview. This belief meant that Native Americans were essentially the same as Europeans. They’d simply adopted a different way of life because they’d been separated from Europeans, Perdue posits. â€Å"People in the 17th century†¦were more likely to distinguish between Christians and heathens than they were between people of color and people who were white†¦,† Perdue said. Christian conversion could make American Indians fully human, they thought. But as Europeans strove to convert and assimilate Natives, all the while seizing their land, efforts were underway to provide a scientific rationale for Africans’ alleged inferiority to Europeans. In the 1800s, Dr. Samuel Morton argued that physical differences between races could be measured, most notably by brain size. Morton’s successor in this field, Louis Agassiz, began â€Å"arguing that blacks are not only inferior but they’re a separate species altogether,† Smedley said. Wrapping Up Thanks to scientific advances, we can now say definitively that individuals such as Morton and Aggasiz are wrong. Race is fluid and thus difficult to pinpoint scientifically. â€Å"Race is a concept of human minds, not of nature,† Relethford writes. Unfortunately, this view hasn’t completely caught on outside of scientific circles. Still, there are signs times have changed. In 2000, the U.S. Census allowed Americans to identify as multiracial for the first time. With this shift, the nation allowed its citizens to blur the lines between the so-called races, paving the way for a future when such classifications no longer exist.​

Manufacturing process for (intermediate modulus) IM Carbon fibre Coursework

Manufacturing process for (intermediate modulus) IM Carbon fibre reinforced composites - Coursework Example In certain procedures, the plastic is combined with some chemicals and forced through minute jets into an element bath or stimulate chamber where the plastic congeals and hardens into fibers. This is alike to the procedure applied to give polyacrylic textile fibers. Alternatively, the plastic combination is heated and propelled via minute jets into a chamber where the solvents vaporize, and remains a solid fiber (Mazumdar, 2002). The spinning stage is significant since the internal atomic arrangement of the fiber is made during this procedure. The fibers then are cleaned and strained to the preferred fiber breadth. The straining aids align the particles within the fiber and delivers the root for the creation of the firmly bonded carbon crystals after carbonization. Before carbonizing the fibers, they are chemically changed to transform their linear atomic bonding to a further thermally steady stepladder bonding. This is fulfilled by heating them in air to around 390-590Â ° F for between 120 minutes. This grounds the fibers to take oxygen particles from the air and reposition their nuclear bonding arrangement. The steadying chemical reactions are composite and include numerous steps, several of which happen concurrently (Morgan, 2005)... They too produce their particular heat, which ought to be controlled to evade overheating the fibers. Commercially, the steadiness procedure uses a variation of apparatus and systems. In some courses, the fibers are drained via a sequence of heated chambers. In others, the fibers are passed over rollers at high temperatures and through beds of unattached materials seized in suspension by a movement of hot air. Some methods use heated air combined with some gases which chemically hasten the stabilization. After the stabilization, the fibers are then heated to a temperature of around 1,830-5,500Â ° F for a number of minutes in a furnace full of a gas combination that does not comprise oxygen. The absence of oxygen avoids