Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

First of all, I have decided that the count of the posts at the end of each online session should also include those of the student edition in total, of which, as of today, I’ve had 30 entries, none of which are the same content as with this log.

Next, I seem to have forgotten to talk about the Science Fiction Literature for the second day of the eighth week of classes. The second of five groups reported, supposedly on the short story “Cold-Blooded” by Margaret Atwood. But somehow they also covered the assignment of the succeeding group “Liar!” by Isaac Asimov.

Thus, even though they gave a very good analysis of the first short story, the logic stretches that they made to be able to come up with similarities between the two different types of stories was very forced.

The first story was about a race of moths (a matriarchal society, not surprising given the identity of the author) but not of the same level as ants or bees) corresponding with their superiors on their reactions to meeting the intelligent human species for the first time.

There were several funny bits in the story. For one, they said that the fact that the human females do not bite off the heads of the males after mating as a waste of protein, and that true to the prediction about roaches and other bugs after a nuclear holocaust, the moth people concluded that eventually, their relatives on Earth will dominate.

But somehow the group reporting observed that this is meant the visiting aliens was already more advanced in technological development than the humans, although no such description was put forward in the text.

And because of their need to find parallels in the two stories, they started treating the robot in the second story as an alien as well, instead of as a complex creation of the humans that somehow performed differently from was expected, which in this case is a robot that somehow is able to read minds.

At least one student though came up with the general similarity between the two stories as I did, which was that they are both about some intelligent beings trying to study something somewhat unfamiliar to them.

It was also too bad that somehow the class did not latch on immediately to the exercise I suggested of them coming up with their own list of possible reactions if other types of extra terrestrials with similarities to Earth animals encountered us, like octopi, moles, worms, bats and such. I would like to have seen how their minds worked in that regard.

I’ll have to put the brakes on session 678 right about here. The class is dismissed.