Category: Research

    The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, bringing an official end to the conflict between Germany and the Allies. Unfortunately, by forcing Germany to shoulder most, if not all, of the blame for the war, the War Guilt Clause (Article 231) placed a heavy burden upon the German people.  The Treaty of Versailles had the opportunity to be a new beginning for all involved parties, regardless of where they stood during the war, and instead was used as the means by which the Allied Powers exacted revenge on Germany. This compulsion to act out of anger and selfishness, not compassion and mutual beneficialism, became a direct cause of another conflict only twenty years down the road.

The treaty was supposed to be a step towards a lasting peace, at least according to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. His plans “called for an immediate end to the war, the establishment of an international peacekeeping organization, international disarmament, open diplomacy, the explicit disavowal of war, and independence for formerly colonial territories.” (Khan Academy) This, though I cannot speak to how well or for how long it would have worked, would have been, at the very least, an attempt to pick themselves up, put the past behind them, and work together for a better future.

Britain and France did not approve of this approach. There were multiple reasons for this, but the foremost was that they were angry. Where America had been fighting “Over There” (song composed by George M. Cohan in 1917) and for less than a year, the French and British had been fighting close to home, if not in their own territory, for four years. They had lost men, supplies, buildings, and land, and they wanted Germany to pay for it. Germany was forced to give up its territories, drastically downsize its military, and, quite literally, pay the expenses. The total bill of reparations came out to a whopping $60 billion dollars, what would be over $760 billion today. A decade later this sum would be reduced to something slightly more reasonable, $30 billion dollars, but the damage was already done.

With reparations to pay and not nearly enough money to pay them with, the German government, then changed to the Weimar Republic, started printing deutschmarks (their currency at the time). Unfortunately, this had a reverse effect as the nation went into a state of hyperinflation and the value of the deutschmark plummeted, bringing the Weimar economy with it. To quote the History.com article on the Weimar Republic, “An underground bartering economy was established to help people meet their basic needs.” That alone should indicate how bad things were.

Regardless of Germany’s past actions, this should have been the point where the international community stepped in and did something to help. There is no excuse for willfully neglecting the welfare of an entire civilian population, yet the Allies did so for a whole generation. Even when they did act — which, admittedly, they did — their focus was on the reparations and resuming the payments, not on the suffering of the German people.

Between their loss in the war, their economic collapse, and the seeming indifference of their neighbors to their suffering, it should not be surprising that in their anger and desperation the German people turned to extremism, looking for new leadership and a semblance of hope. As Sarah Pruitt wrote, “Due to lasting resentment of the Versailles Treaty, the National Socialist (Nazi) Party and other radical right-wing parties were able to gain support… by promising to overturn its harsh provisions and make Germany into a major European power once again.”

As I hope I have made clear, the Treaty of Versailles, by its focus on revenge rather than rationality, was a direct cause of both Hitler’s rise to power and the Second World War, and while the treaty itself was necessary, many of its contents, particularly Article 231, the War Guilt Clause, were inevitably detrimental to not only Germany, but the whole of the international community.

Yes, this is a paper on space debris. No, the research is not mine, the writing is. Effectively, I was given a project on transitions with a bunch of bullet points and I had to connect it all into something coherent with enough flow to not scramble brains. I won’t show you what the original material looked like, but I promise the finished product is a lot better. And hey, it’s kind of an interesting topic, so here it is.

There is a lot of space debris floating around the earth. In fact, experts are monitoring about 200,000 pieces of the orbiting space junk, and they believe that there are more than a million out there. This space “junk” consists of burned-out rocket parts, pieces of spacecraft, and parts of defunct communication and weather satellites, the combination of which certainly makes the million-piece estimate feasible.
While some of these pieces break orbit and enter the atmosphere, not many of them actually make it all the way to the ground. Some have, but most of them  landed in the oceans or in remote areas of the earth. While a few people have been hit by space debris, it’s an incredibly rare occurrence, and therefore not a significant cause for concern.
What is a significant cause for concern is the damage that space debris can do — in space. There is a very serious risk that orbiting satellites and spacecraft could be hit by space debris, and this could badly damage the functional equipment. One of the more important — and more concerning — orbiting objects at risk is the International Space Station, as both a large piece of equipment and one with people in it.
There’s only so much that we can do to avoid these collisions, but we are trying. If sensitive satellites or spacecraft are on a collision course with space debris, engineers try to maneuver them so they can avoid impact. Possibly more importantly, experts are devising guidelines for those launching new space vehicles, like using orbits that avoid existing space debris. These guidelines would also make those launching new spacecraft responsible for safely disposing of their equipment after the completion of their missions, hopefully decreasing the accumulation of space debris and making space a little bit safer.

Occasionally, I go poking through old papers of mine to reminisce, and, just possibly, find something worth sharing. This one is an excellent example: a summary of the Peshtigo Fire that I wrote in fourth grade. Since I don’t think I say it in the report, it should be noted that Peshtigo is a town in Wisconsin. As I explain in the paper, the Peshtigo Fire has been largely forgotten — in fact, up until digging this up, I had forgotten about it, too! Historically, it’s lack of coverage is because it happened in a similar timeframe to the Great Chicago Fire, which was smaller, but in a more known area. Why I forgot about it, I have no idea. As for the rest of the information, I’ll leave that to my nine-year old self.

The Peshtigo Fire was caused by drought and harsh winds. The winds caught onto the fires the lumberjacks set to burn fallen branches. Due to the wind and the many little fires, a firestorm broke out. Firestorms are rare fires that form their own explosive gases. Also, due to the trees in the area, the fire had many flammables to fuel itself with. When the fire stopped, the forest near Peshtigo was a sea of scorched wood and ashes more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Unfortunately, this fire has been nearly forgotten, replaced by the significantly smaller Great Chicago Fire. On the same day the same winds stirred fires at both Port Huron at the tip of Lake Huron, and the cities of Holland and Manistee across Lake Michigan. It is a shame that only the Great Chicago Fire is remembered of all the significant fires that day.

Yes, the cat, not the car. Cats are very near and dear to me, as I may have mentioned in a previous post, but so are jaguars in specific. One of my favorite places to go is Guatemala, visiting the relatives I have there (I’ve mentioned that some time, I’m sure). Jaguars, being important to Mayan culture, a characterization that artist friends of ours used for my parents and I, and a cat, are a species that I feel connected to. As such, when I had a Biology project involving choosing a species to write about, you can guess what I chose! And here it is:

The jaguar is a prime example of a species being perfectly adapted to its environment. Its distinctively short legs, powerful jaws, thick skull, and its affinity for water all help it to maximize its efficiency in its native environment of remote Central and South America.

In the heavily forested areas in which jaguars live, camouflage is well-put to use and chasing prey can be difficult due to the myriad obstacles. With conditions as such, jaguars adapted to a stalk-and-ambush style of hunting prey that minimized effort while not lowering the amount of food intake. For this reason, jaguars have a short, stocky limb structure, which allows them greater success at climbing, crawling, and swimming, which are directly helpful in the above mentioned hunting style. For instance, they have been known to climb trees to ambush their prey.

When they reach their prey, they try not to leave room for a hassle, going in for a killer bite through the skull. They can do this thanks to their powerful jaws. In comparison to other types of cats, jaguars have slightly stronger jaw muscles and slightly shorter jaws, allowing for more leverage on the bite. The result is a bite which, relative to the animal’s size, is the strongest of any big cat.

Jaguars also have thick skulls, which, besides supporting their killer jaws, may be to protect them in the event of a fight. While jaguars have no natural predators, some of their prey can be just as dangerous. Besides many of their prey potentially outweighing them by up to six times, they’re also known to go after caimans as one of their many food sources. And while jaguars may prefer to kill by biting through the skull, they likely also prefer not to be bitten through theirs.

If it was being attacked by most any other type of cat, the caiman would probably be fine just to retreat into the water, but not with jaguars. This is another trait of jaguars’ that sets them apart from other types of cats – they don’t mind water. In fact, they’re excellent swimmers, a trait they likely adapted due to South America’s wide network of rivers, teeming with potential meals, such as fish, turtles, and, as mentioned above, caimans. Swimming is also a convenient trait should the jaguar have reason to cross a river, as a much easier way across than going around or trying to find a dry path over.

Jaguars are truly remarkable creatures, beautifully adapted to the habitat they live in. Their specialized limb structures, jaws, skulls, and swimming capability allow them to better hunt their prey without expending superfluous energy. Even if on an efficiency scale alone, these beautiful, well-adapted cats are to be admired.

So in our English class we’re covering Greek mythology right now, and we were each supposed to choose one of the major gods and goddesses (sorry Asclepius and Triptolemus, my two first possible thoughts, and also Hestia, my third, who, despite having been one of the Olympians before giving up her seat to Dionysus, apparently doesn’t count as a major goddess either). Lacking my first few preferences, I turned to the Olympians that hadn’t been chosen by other groups yet and scanned through them. Being a Percy Jackson fan, I knew a decent amount about each of them already, but ended up choosing Hermes since he was the one about which I easily knew the least.

So I looked and said, “Huh, Hermes, he’s cool, god of thieves, messengers, those winged sandals, that caduceus people always associate with medical stuff even though that should be Asclepius’s single snake staff, not Hermes’ double… oh yeah and he’s probably the god of a couple of other small things too. Sounds like a fun project.”

Well, it turns out the Hermes is the god of a ton of things. Besides being the god of thieves and messengers (as the Messenger of the Gods), he’s also the god of commerce and trade, eloquence, travelers, roadways, merchants, sports and athletes, gymnastics, border crossings, boundaries and transitions, herdsmen/shepherds, land travel, orators and wit, literature and poets, art, invention, luck, and sometimes also fertility. Beyond that, he’s the intercessor between mortals and the divine, and the Divine Herald – basically he guides the souls of the dead to their final place, the one role in which he is not jovial and sly, but solemn, because, come on, dead people are depressing. His symbols, beyond the ones I already listed, include the lyre, which he invented to appease Apollo after he stole his sacred cows, the rooster, no idea why, and the tortoise, which seems counterintuitive since Hermes is supposed to be “as fleet as thought,” but hey, since when do the gods make sense? Oh, yeah, he’s also the only person besides Hades and Persephone who is allowed to leave the Underworld without consequences.

Rumor has it Hermes also appears in more of the myths than any of the other gods. Basically, the point is that this guy is crazy busy and way cooler than I thought he’d be to research.

Sticking with last week’s theme of the Holocaust, here’s the other article I wrote for that project:

We’ve all heard about the Holocaust, a systematic mass slaughter conducted by the Nazis in Germany before and during the second World War that left approximately 17 million supposedly inferior humans dead. This atrocity was so lacking in some way to aptly describe its magnitude, it warranted the creation of its own word, “genocide,” which refers to the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.

The Holocaust was not actually the first genocide, but it was the first to fall so significantly into the public eye and likely the largest. Similar horrors have been happening for centuries, with examples as far back as the Greeks and Romans, and in Biblical reference to the relentless and unjust persecution of the Jewish people. More recent examples include the contemporary Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides during and after World War I carried out by the Ottoman government in an attempt to remove those ethnic groups from their population. They had approximately 1.5 million, 150,000 to 300,000, and between 450,000 and 750,000 casualties, respectively, most of them civilians and rightfully Ottoman citizens. Still, none of these even neared the atrocious death count of the Holocaust that brought such an issue to the world stage.

Since the discovery of this massacre, several similar genocides have occurred in various places across the world. There was the Cambodian genocide of 1975, which lasted over 3 and a half years and killed between 1.671 and 1.871 million, which was 21-24% of Cambodia’s population at the time. Another example is the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, which left between half a million to a million dead, a devastating death toll even before considering that it occured over only a hundred days, or just little over three months.

You’d think that, after such a horrendous act as the Holocaust, humanity would have learned its lesson. So why hasn’t it?

Unfortunately, it likely has. The lesson is just not what we would have hoped. Instead of discouraging such a thing from ever happening again, the Holocaust set a precedent, showing that it was and is humanly possible to systematically dispose of people you oppose or consider inferior. It also suggests that the international community is not likely to interfere so long as the details of the situation are kept out of the public spotlight, or worse, that the international community simply won’t care, a combination of which seem to have been the case during the Holocaust.

The other incidents reinforce this message. In each of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides, which I’m overarchingly going to refer to as the Ottoman genocides for simplicity, and in the Rwandan genocide, while the rest of the world was at least somewhat aware of what was happening, they made no impactful move to stop it. In the Cambodian genocide, at least, they had some excuse, since they didn’t really have much intel on what was happening, but that too sends a dangerous message.

While this may seem downcasting and pessimistic, it is important to note that just because humanity has learned the wrong lesson does not mean that it cannot learn the right one. Perhaps, if those whose hatred, anger and fear may lead them to commit these atrocities have not been discouraged from such actions by examples like those I’ve shared with you today, but instead empowered, then it now falls on the rest of us to learn our lesson from history. To learn that we cannot be complicit in these actions, even if only by inaction, and that it is our obligation to learn and see all that we can, and where we see these wrongs, resist them. If the rest of the world hadn’t sat back and let these horrible things happen then they may not have, and it is my hope that in the future they won’t, because we will learn from our prior mistakes and not repeat them, but instead stand and fight these injustices.

To quote the Bataillon de Chasseurs Ardennais motto: “Résiste et Mords!” (“Resist and Bite!”)

Now that I’ve run out of old poetry, I figured I’d continue on the World War II/Holocaust chain of thought from about a month ago, when I brought up my granddad’s account of the Blitz. This time, it’s an article I wrote for school about the medical experiments conducted at the camps.

We are taught that the concentration camps were used to kill the Nazi’s victims and enemies. They also served to incarcerate people whom the Nazis believed were a security threat and to exploit forced labor. The lesser known use of these camps, however, was medical experimentation.

    With theoretically “inferior” subjects in the camps, doctors could experiment without worrying about the patient’s wellbeing. They were, for all attempts and purposes, disposable, allowing the medical personnel to operate at risk to the subject’s life without qualms. As a result, many of those who were experimented on during this time did not survive the tests, or were severely injured in the process.

    They did a combination of experiments based in curiosity, efficiency tests, and attempts at finding cures and solutions to problems without risking the lives of their own in the process. The term “curiosity” here sounds innocent; believe me, it was not. They put twins through inhumane tests, compared how different ethnicities withstood various diseases, and collected heterochromatic eyes. They tested efficiency of their various methods of murdering people and of sterilization.

    As for the other tests, they did everything from infecting patients with deadly diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and more, and then trying to cure them, to bone grafting attempts, to exposing them to chemical weaponry in hope of finding antidotes, to forcing them to drink seawater (attempting to make it drinkable) to freezing them (finding a treatment for hypothermia) to killing them with simulated high altitudes (what altitude is safe for pilots to parachute from?).

    It is unknown exactly how many people were experimented on in the camps. There is a minimum of 15,754 documented victims, but it is likely that there were many more, considering the Nazis’ notoriety for leaving these kind of statistics undocumented.

My grandad grew up in England and was there for World War II. After showing me The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the first time, Mom emailed him to ask for some information on the bombings. This was his reply.

“Here are some comments on German bombing during World War II.

“Where I lived in the north of England, we had no serious bombing. There were plenty of bigger targets, much closer to Germany or the French airports from which they sent their planes. One night a plane dropped a lot of fire bombs, but they all fell in the playing field of a girls’ high school about four blocks from our home. We suspect that a plane returning from a raid on Newcastle, a much bigger town to our north, wanted to get rid of its load.

“London was the biggest target, and from the beginning of September 1940, an average of 200 planes a night bombed London every night for two months. Bombing continued after that but not so regularly and on a smaller scale.

“Many children were evacuated to small towns and villages in the west of England, which were safe because there was no point in bombing them. A lot of these children did not see their parents for three or four years!

“Since most of the bombing was at night, many people slept in bomb shelters, and also in the stations of the London Underground railway after it closed down for the night.

“I moved to London five years after the war, and I lived and worked in the East End, which was the area most heavily damaged. I worked near the docks, which were an obvious target. In that area whole blocks of houses had been wiped off the map, and when they rebuilt after the war, they sometimes relocated the streets and gave them new names. Other streets of brick houses would have many gaps, with perhaps half the houses gone.

“The German plan was simply to try to make London uninhabitable, but they did not succeed. It was a matter of luck what was hit and what wasn’t. The House of Commons was badly damaged, but Westminster Abbey, just across the street, was untouched. Fire bombs fell on the roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the firewatchers were able to put them out before they did much damage.

“Air attacks on London declined when the Germans invaded Russia and were also heavily involved in fighting in North Africa. But in June, 1944, just after the allied invasion in the north of France, a new kind of attack came. The Germans launched flying bombs (the V1), which were pilotless and had jet engines set to fly just the distance to reach the London area and then turn off and fall to the ground. Over the next few months they sent several thousand of them, and there was no telling where they would land. My older brother was a member of an anti-aircraft battery stationed on the south-east coast, whose job was to try to shoot them down before they crossed the coast.

“Three months later they began sending asupersonic rockets (the V2), which flew in a very high arch and arrived without warning. Again, since the aiming could only be approximate, the target was London. Their range was about 200 miles. They sent about 1,300 in the seven months from then until March 1945, when we were able to eliminate the last launching sites.”