my book #2

          The book i choose is The Compass of Pleasure, which talks about how the brain works when you are doing something pleasurable. I am very happy with the book i have chosen, i am really enjoying reading my book. I find it very interesting and educational about why people do what they do, and why people become addicted to drugs and other such things. This book dives deep into the inner workings of an addicts brain and how they become addicted and how hard it is to stop, it doesn't just talk about being addicted to drugs but food, sex, and exercise. I am almost done with my book i have about twenty or pages left to read. This author has done an amazing job writing this book and putting it in terms everyone can understand. He has really intrigued me to want to learn more about the brain and how it works. I find it fascinating to learn about why people like the stuff that they like on the deepest scientific level that there is, and why and how some people become addicted to certain things, and why it is so hard for addicts to quit their addiction. To learn about why and how things make you happy, i think gives you a better shot at being happy throughout your life, because you know things that you can do to make yourself happier. I think everyone should read this book because i think it gives the reader a different perspective on life and it helps you to better understand as a person and why you do the things you do.

senior project #2

           My senior project is starting off kinda of slow, but recently I've done some work on it. I got my mentor a couple weeks ago, and luckily its one of my friends dads so it makes it a little bit easier to coordinate getting together and things like that. although i still need to do my mentor interview. My mentor is the fire chief of American Canyon, but he also works with a search and rescue team and he has been backpacking many times, which is helpful sense my senior project is on backpacking. My mentor has said that he has some ideas about where we are going to go backpacking and i have also been looking on my own about possible places that could work for us. My plan for our trip is that we go backpacking for around a week at least maybe more, because i want to get the full feeling of being on your own in the wilderness. The only problem with that is that we are still in school so i might have to miss a couple days of school. It is possible to go during winter break, but then we would have to go snow backpacking, which is a higher degree of difficulty and sense this is my first time going backpacking my mentor isn't sure if we should do that. However i would be happy to give it a shot. Another time that we could go is on spring break, but we kind of run into the same problem but not as severe, because there are still some places with snow.

senior project # 3

            my senior project is on backpacking. sense my last post on my senior blog not to much has changed. I still have not done my senior mentor interview. Although i do have i mentor, he is the fire chief of American Canyon and works with a rescue team. I'm am doing my senior project with a good friend of mine and he is the one who got the senior mentor because his parents and our mentor are family friends.. recently though i have thought about changing my senior mentor because it has been very hard to get in contact with him. I might change my senior mentor to one of my uncle's because i think it would be easier to get him to do an interview, and he is a person that is very experienced in the general area of backpacking. His job is he does equipment testing for north face, so as you could image he has quite a bit of experience in going backpacking, sense north face is a outdoor company that sells outdoor clothing, tents, and things along those lines. I have already talked to him about being my senior mentor and he was excited about it. He said that he would be happy to take me backpacking with him. I have decided what i am going to do my research paper on, i am going to do it on John Muir and the Sierra club which he created.

my book progress

For this book project the book I have chosen is “The Compass of Pleasure” by David J. Linden. This book covers many subjects but its main goal is to show the reader how pleasure is processed through the brain and how we react to feeling things that are pleasurable. This book gives you many things that a lot of people do because they like how it feels and talks about why we like them from a neurological standpoint. The subjects it covers that make people happy are fatty foods, sex, exercise, marijuana, generosity, alcohol, learning, and gambling. So far I’m about halfway through my book, and I find it extremely interesting. The book talks a lot about how there have been studies on rats and other animals, then it relates it back to us to explain how our brains work. For instance it explains how the brain of a drug addict becomes addict and once you are, how hard it is to stop, they studied rats that they made become addicted on a drug, to see which parts of the brain is active when they get a dose of a drug. It talks about how some drugs increase or decrease dopamine, which has been linked to feeling the emotion happiness. This book also talks about how society has a big influence on people doing drugs. It gives examples from the Romans to the Inca tribe in South American to present day America, to show that societies have always used drugs to alter their brain function, and how sometimes it’s for religious practice or used for medicine, and a drug can become a normal part of a culture. Sometimes this book can become hard to read because the author goes deep into the neuro-science of how the brain works, but I think the author does a good job dumbing it down for the average person to the point where you may not know exactly how the brain works but you get the big picture and you don’t feel like you have to stop reading because it’s to scientific for you.

senior project 2

My senior project is starting off kinda of slow, but recently I've done some work on it. I got my mentor a couple weeks ago, and luckily its one of my friends dads so it makes it a little bit easier to coordinate getting together and things like that. although i still need to do my mentor interview. My mentor is the fire chief of American Canyon, but he also works with a search and rescue team and he has been backpacking many times, which is helpful sense my senior project is on backpacking. My mentor has said that he has some ideas about where we are going to go backpacking and i have also been looking on my own about possible places that could work for us. My plan for our trip is that we go backpacking for around a week at least maybe more, because i want to get the full feeling of being on your own in the wilderness. The only problem with that is that we are still in school so i might have to miss a couple days of school. It is possible to go during winter break, but then we would have to go snow backpacking, which is a higher degree of difficulty and sense this is my first time going backpacking my mentor isn't sure if we should do that. However i would be happy to give it a shot. Another time that we could go is on spring break, but we kind of run into the same problem but not as severe, because there are still some places with snow. I think our best opportunity would be to go during spring break, because there is less snow and its a lot warmer

humans & animals

      

Dear Mr. Rifkin

         Humans and animals have a long history together. For a long time we have taking animals for granted and treated them poorly. With today's sciences we know that animals are very similar to us in a lot of ways. I agree with Rifkin that animals are very similar to us, even more than we thought, but not to the extent that Rifkin implies in his article.
        Mr.Rifkin uses a lot of studies that have been done to help prove his point and indeed their are a lot of studies to support that animals are very close to us. These studies have shown that animals can share the same feelings and emotions as humans, even ones like grief and happiness. For example pigs like and need attention. if they do not get enough attention or playtime then it "can result in deterioration of health." This is a fact of kids when they are growing up. It is mentally unhealthy for a kid to not get enough attention, and it is physical unhealthy for a growing kid to not have any play time, he'll become fat. It has been long believed that humans are the only one who have the ability to make tools, but this might not be so. A New Caledonia crow was given a straight and a hooked wire to get food out of a small tube. the crow choose the hooked one. Even more impressive is when they took away the hooked wire the crow bent the straight wire so it would hook into the food, so the crow could eat. Their are other traits that humans and animals share.
       I think these things prove that animals are very similar to humans and we should treat them better because of it.

senior project

I choose to do my senior project on backpacking. I’m doing my senior project with a very good friend of mine. Our original idea was to get dropped off in the middle of a forest and have to survive for a week, but we didn’t think that they would let us do that so we decided to try and tone it down a bit. Then we settled for backpacking. Our mentor is a rescue guide, and so far that’s all I really know about him because I haven’t meet him yet. My friend is the one who knows him. The reason I wanted to do this senior project is because I really like the outdoors. I like to go camping and hiking, but the one thing that I have never done is go backpacking. It’s something that I have always wanted to do, but never had the chance. I have yet to set up an interview with my mentor, but I will get on that soon enough. I also have not decided what I will do my research paper on, but I have talked with Mrs.Brittin about some very general ideas that could possibly be my research paper. It could be something along the lines of John Muir and all the great things he did for the environment.  He was the one you help to establish national parks in America, so that people couldn’t harm the environment. I’ll need a lot of backpacking equipment but luckily I have family that already has a lot of that sort of stuff, so I won’t need to spend a huge amount of money to buy what I need for my project. I am really looking forward and am excited about going on my backpacking trip. I think it will be a blast, and something I will never forget.

into the wild

In the book Into The Wild the author John Krakauer claims that his book is mainly about a son’s relationship with his father. I only partly agree with his statement. I think part of the reason Chris left his family was because he had issues with his father.  That is only a small part of why Chris ditched his normal life. I believe that Chris left because he wanted to find himself and the true meaning of life.

Chris didn’t want to have to please his mom and dad with good grades and stuff.  He wanted to be totally independent and not have his parents as a safety net to fall back on. He wanted to live his own life without any outside pressures or expectations of what he should or shouldn’t do with his life. During the first half of his life, and by that I mean before he became Alexander Supertramp, Chris was living his life for his parents; he did everything they wanted him to do. Anything that he did, he did to please his parents and make them proud. Every parents' dream is to see their kid grow up and watch them go to college and graduate.  After Chris had done that, he felt that he had accomplished what his parents wanted, and now it was finally time that he could go off and live his own life and do the things that he wanted to do without having to answer to anyone.

Ever since childhood Chris has had differences and problems between him and his father, but so does every little boy. Seriously, nobody gets along perfectly with their parents, it’d be weird if you did. Chris might have had more so than others, but his dad wasn’t a horrible man. He made his fair share of mistakes, but so does every father and every kid, and they both need to forgive each other. I wouldn’t have given Chris’s parents the Mom and Dad of the Year award, but I also wouldn’t give Chris the Child of the Year award either. His parents loved him and meant well with everything they did. Whether or not it was right or wrong is another question, but all one can ask of their parents is to love them, and Walt and Billie did that. I am just trying to normalize the clash between Chris and his father, because I think this book dramatizes the relationship between the father and son. Which isn’t to say that it wasn’t a factor in Chris’s life, but I think the book focused a little too much on that, when there were bigger motivators for Chris to do what he did. If daddy issues were the main reason Chris did what he did, then we would have a lot more kids following in Chris’s footsteps. The only effect the relationship between Chris and his parents had on Chris’s whole trip was the fact that he did not keep in contact with them. I believe that even if Chris had gotten along really well with his parents that he still would have done everything that he did, except while he was doing it I think he would have still talked to his parents as he moved about the country. It was inevitable that Chris was one day going to go off on a trip like this, and I don’t have a problem with that.  The only thing that I think he did wrong was not talk to his parents. Chris’s flaw was that he was too harsh a judge on his parents because they didn’t deserve to be kept in the dark about what Chris was doing.

pesonal choice blog 2

for my personal choice blog I've decided to do it on kayaking because it is something i like to do. there are many types of kayaking like white water or kayaking on the ocean. i have two kayak's at home but i don't get to use them as much as i would like unfortunately. both of the are ocean kayaks one is a big two person orange kayak and the other is a long skinny blue 1 person kayak. sense school started i havnt been able to go kayaking but i plan to after im done with football. over the summer i took the kayak out a lot on the ocean and on the lake.

fast food addicts

obesity

fat teens

I read Micheal's post which came from Fox News. this article gave a good example of what is happening in America. We have a obese society who loves anything cheap and fast whether its food or anything else. I like this article by fox news because their very up front, just by the title "fat teens sue McDonald's" they don't sugar coat it, which to many people try to do. also by this title who get the feeling that their not really on the side of the teens sense they call them fat instead of a more nice sounding word like overweight. this is really the only article I've read so far that has been in favour of McDonald's. in this case these are not kids their teens and teens are old and smart enough to know that if you eat McDonald's a lot your going to get fat. in today's world with some much information out there its impossible to not know that McDonald's is bad for you. these kids are beyond the point where their parent do everything for them so they have some personal responsibility and id be willing to bet that none of these teens exercise a lot if at all. its just common knowledge that if you eat McDonald's a lot and never work out your going to be fat and those are things that are under every ones control.

heres my link

America

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                          
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                          
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                          
                                                                                                                                                               

                                                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                                                              

the look

this is my essay about hiring hot people

About me

My name is Ryan  I am senior at napa high school. I have gone to napa high all for years and have loved every second of it.

going for the look

I think companies and mainly retail stores should be allowed to hire people they want based upon looks because even though people make it sound like these retail stores are evil monsters for doing this, doesn't every company hire their employees based on their looks to a degree. it just happens that looking hot in the retail business is much more important then if you were a doctor to say. when you really think about it everybody you hires anybody takes into question the persons look. someones look gives off a certain image to themselves and anybody hiring someone sees this and will have an opinion on it and no matter what a person says the vibe they got from the person they're going to hire will affect their decision to hire them or not. if you were going to hire some one to be your lawyer are you going to hire someone in a suit or somebody in a tank top and sandals, its a pretty easy choice, so would you hire somebody who is hot to sell your clothes or somebody who is ugly, again its pretty easy your going to pick the hot person because they will better represent your product, which is what employees are doing whether its in their job description or not or whether their in the retail business or any other type or business employees are always representing their product. if you want to stop retail stores from hiring people based on looks then you would have to change the way every single type of business hires their employees not just the retail stores. people hire other people by who they think can do the best job at what they do, in the retail industry its all about who can sell the most clothes and if looks give you an advantage than that's no different then getting hired because your the smartest person.