SUMMARY

HOME THEY BROUGHT HER WARRIOR DEAD

The poem refers the suppressed grief of a woman when his husband is brought died at home, he was a warrior. She was shocked and she couldn’t show any emotion.

The maidens thought that she would have to cry otherwise she would die of grief. First they began to praise the warrior calling him a true fried and noble foe, but she did not react. Then the maids lifted the cloth covering his face but she also continued in the same state of shock.

Finally an old nurse takes her son and puts him in her lap and she began to cry and said her son “sweet my child, I live for thee” showing how much she loved her husband and how much she loves his son.

TO THE QUEEN

The poem seems to be like an allocution to the land of England and the importance of loyalty to the Queen whose defense has cost so many lives, prayers, all coming from the living love of the British people through generations ( “loyal to their crown are loyal to their own far sons, who love our ocean-empire with her boundless homes for ever – broadening England”).

Later on the poet seems to refer to a kind of struggle within each man’s soul, between the ideal and the real man. He finally expresses his reject to anti values such as cowardice ( “the child of lust for gold”), for example.

 

AN  ECOLOGY OF HOUSES

The exact image about nature probably varies from person to person. Some of them bring to mind a landscape without being adulterated by human presence. The image doesn’t include people in either make-shift encampment or permanent residence. Nature, it is thought, is not our houses, nor does it exist in our backyards. 

We have inherited an image of nature invented by 19^th century American romantics, after Native Americans were forcefully removed from the landscape and put onto reservation. This is one way in which nature has been constructed in our imagination. However, nature is and always has been everywhere humans have ever lived or at least partially constructed by human activity. This process has and has had implications for human evolution by altering the process of natural selection; this process is called ecological niche construction.

The principal cause of the changing landscape in the United States has been suburban sprawl, i.e. the construction of strip malls, roads, especially housing along the outskirts of cities.

In 1950 many cities lost residents, they moved to the newly constructed houses outside of the city. Land that was previously used for farming or was covered with forest was converted to residential neighborhoods, which had a principal impact on the local and global environment.

Global environment:  this expansion contributed to global warming due to increase emissions from cars being the primary mode of transportation outside of urban areas, increasing energy consumption for the heating and cooling of suburban houses.

Local environment: consequence of resource extraction (oil drilling, natural gas, coal mining) the water is contaminated. Beside sprawl is directly linked to water depletion.

Actually we are facing enormous environmental problems therefore the construction should not only be for short term economic growth, we simultaneously construct and are constructed by the environment and we envelop and are enveloped by it.

TECHNOLOGY / ROBOTS

 

This article refers at the Biologist Robert Full’s lab in the University of California, Berkeley, where he has different animals such as crabs, centipedes, geckos. These animals serve as inspirations for his colleagues and him in building robots that are fast, steady and agile.

Full analyzed the lizards to designing a resistant robot, he observed African agama lizards which have ability to stick a perfect landing after vaulting through the air and they keep their balance during flight moving their tails up and down to counteract the motion of their bodies, then he thought how he could apply that technique to search and rescue robots in precarious terrain. In this way Full and his team built a four wheeled, foot long vehicle with a stiff tail section and it  was named  “Tailbot”

The analysis of the lizards also led him into unfamiliar territory: paleontology. Full made a mathematical model of how the velociraptor moved, based on its bone structure and he discovered that the raptors were probably as good or better than lizards, but he can never confirm his theory.

He able to assess the motion of the computer-generated raptors in the film Jurassic Park. He says that it moves its tail perfectly.