Immigration
If only we could all escape to the perfect planet full of super intelligent people and everything you’d want from a planet. Not. I thought it was interesting how this story grabbed the readers attention by describing how people don’t come back from Kimon once they have arrived there. And how salaries are a hundred times better on Kimon rather than Earth. Even down to a breeze on Kimon smelling like perfume. This ideal planet has everything a person could want, like how the Bishop images the building like the Ritz. But, what I found interesting was the selective nature of who is allowed on Kimon. In order to be accepted, a specific IQ is required. This means that only the top percentile of the Earth’s population is invited to live on this super planet. This automatically makes Kimonian’s better than Earthlings. This reminded me of Anthropology when we talk about Colonialism and how certain societies feel like they are better than others. Anthropologists avoid skewing their data when they observe other societies but being unbiased outside resources. The Kimonians took an approach much like the colonial mentality, where they are better than everyone else.
Another part of this “Immigrant” story that caught my attention was the discussion of letters. I though that this was remarkable how it described the process on how letters are transported from Kimon to Earth. The tube landing on the desk of the mail clerk, just after he or she has finished a day of work. This reminded me of Santa Claus. Sounds like a great idea to have a fat man roll down a chimney to give presents to little kids just after they fall asleep. But seriously? I just thought that this was something more related to class….how letter writing became a form of new technology in its ability to travel from one planet to the next. Certainly we have discussed how e-mail and computers have changed the old fashioned pen & paper letter….but planet traveling tubes take it to a whole new level.
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On a completely unrelated topic, I wanted to discuss my final project a little bit. Yesterday and today I started liking a stop-motion film….just to see if I could do it before I began the real thing. Sure enough I made a few seconds clip of a dancing piece of clay. I’ve got some really good ideas on how I will bring the real-life Webkinz stuffed animal to life and compare it to the computer animated Webkinz on the computer. I’m hoping that the result will be a youtube video that ties ideas of the real world and the virtual world together. Now that I have the ideas in the works…I think its time to start to bring them to life.
