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When people think of the tower of Babel they normally think of the picture at the top of this page. But this painting was made by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who was born in 1525, in the southern Netherlands, meaning he would have had no idea of what it would have looked like, seeing as it was in the Iraq area and it was a very long time ago, other than when the Bible describes it it in Genesis 11, which seems pretty vague to me, meaning this painting is pretty unreliable on what it would have actually looked like. In ancient Sumar (current day Iraq) they had a type of religious temple that was called a ziggurat, which is in the bottom picture, and the ziggurat itself was a platform rising from the base, and these ziggurats were made to be gateways to the heavens that the gods could use to come down to the people and the priests could use to go up to the heavens to speak with the gods using the staircases on the ziggurats. In Sumar the ziggurats were known as having their tops or heads in the heavens, and in Genesis 11 it says “a tower with its top in the heavens,” which lines up suspiciously well. So the obvious hole in this theory is that it says a “tower” and not a “ziggurat”, but, in Hebrew they have no word for ziggurat specifically, but they have a very generic word that refers to any large and tall structure, so even though it translates to tower it does not necessarily mean a tower in our sense of the word. So it could be that some people from babel could have told the Hebrews about the ziggurats and they would’ve written it down as a large structure that reached the heavens, so when it was translated it was translated to the tower of babel instead of the ziggurat of babel.

My house is very cool. The yards that go with the house are also pretty nice. The front yard is not very big but it is still a nice size for a front yard. There are a lot of bushes and a couple trees in front of the front window, which makes it hard to see out of, but the trees are pretty. The side yard is mostly gravel and dirt on the end that is closest to the road, but as you get farther from the road the gravel disappears and is replaced by blackberry bushes that don’t produce any blackberries, meaning a lot of poky plants. The backyard is pretty big and has a lot of trees along the back, as well as some of our neighbors trees hanging over into our yard, giving the back area a foresty feel to it. There is also a brick patio in the the back yard that we have a nice table on that we eat dinner on during the summer. We also have a chicken coop in the yard that our chickens sleep in. The house itself is pretty big, seeing as it has four bedrooms, two living rooms, three bathrooms, and a kitchen. You can see the first living room when you walk in the front door, but if you keep going straight you’ll come to the kitchen, and if you then turn left you’ll come to the back door and second living room. If you keep going straight you’ll come to the first bathroom and the garage. Back at the front door however, if go left instead of straight you’ll go upstairs, with the first new room being the second bathroom. The next two rooms are my and my brothers rooms, and the last one being my parents. In their room they have the third bathroom. And that is what my house looks like.

There are a lot of Nazca lines. They are called Nazca lines because they where made by the Nazca people. But even though the Nazca people made most of them, and all the animal shaped ones, the Chavin and Paracas peoples also made some of them. There are around 1170 lines, 800 are straight lines, 300 are squares and other geometric and 70 are animals and plant pictures. The ground in the Nazca line area is covered pebbles that are iron oxide-coated, giving them deep a rust color that only reaches to around 12 inches deep, so the Nazca people dug down about 15 inches deep so that the much lighter tan colored dirt was visible, making an image best seen from the sky. There are a few puzzling questions about the Nazca lines, one of which is how they managed to dig that much, because some of the longest are 30 miles long, and seeing as the Nazca desert is one of the driest places on earth, and digging, especially 15 inch deep, 13 inch wide, and 30 mile long holes, is thirsty work. But the Nazca people did have llamas, and they used them as pack animals, so it is not to far of a jump to assume they attached a large metal blade to the back of the llamas, so that the llamas would carve out the lines instead of the humans doing it. Another question is how they managed to make such large designs on the ground, seeing as they wouldn’t be able to see what they were carving as they carved it. We only really saw them when planes and helicopters went over the area, and we are still finding more with drones. Well, there are foothills in the area that the Nazca could of built small towers on, so that the overseers could have stood on so as to see how the image looked. Another question is why they put so much time and energy into these designs. The designs could be offerings to their gods, who they thought looked like condors that lived in the mountains. That would explain why so many designs look like birds, but the others are less likely for this theory, but still plausible. Though, the names of some of them just do not fit the image. Like the Nazca Dog (bottom picture) looks nothing like a dog! Although, the spider and monkey are pretty good.

Last summer I did a lot of stuff. My family who lives in Colorado came down to visit us and we went to a lot of cool places. We went on the blue pool hike and went down to feel the water, which was both very blue and very cold. We also went to fall creek a couple of times to swim around, but because of the fires we weren’t allowed to swim in the big area, or jump off the bridge, which was disappointing. We also went to the Deschutes national forest lava lands and walked through the lava fields, which is a ton of igneous rock. But we couldn’t go on the volcano because the bus required a mask to ride, and the walk is much to long to go on foot. And the other main attraction was a lava tube, which is a tunnel formed by lava flowing by, which we couldn’t go to because they were only allowing one group of people in at a time, and by the time we got near the front of the line they were closing for the day. We also went to the coast, but it was super windy, with sand flying everywhere, and it was pretty cold, so we had to put on our jackets. I tasted the ocean, which is surprisingly salty, and I was not expecting it to be so salty. We went to Newport which is a really cool town, and ate at Moe’s, and I had some crab cakes. We also went to the new video game place at valley river center, Round 1. They had a ton of games there, my favorite being an arcade version of Luigi’s Mansion 2. I got a lot of points and was able to get some really cool prizes, like some sunglasses that have mirrors on the sides so that you can look behind you without appearing to.

There were two major ancient Greek people that we know about around 1250 B.C., the Mycenaean culture on the mainland Greece and the Minoans on the Island of Crete. The mainland culture, the Mycenaean’s, consisted of a few cities called Mycenae, Argos, and Athens. These Mycenaean cities used mostly two languages, Linear A and Linear B. We have translated Linear B but not Linear A. The Mycenaean’s architecture was mostly practical and defense oriented, not made to be particularly pretty. The Minoan culture was founded on the island of Crete, which is the biggest of the Balkan islands and the most southern island. It is only 160 miles long and 37 miles wide. Seeing as there were a lot more threats on the mainland and not many on the island the buildings and cities of Crete were made to be a lot prettier than the mainland temples. Crete is most well known for the legend of the Minotaur, a half man, half bull creature that ate people and was trapped in the Labyrinth where it would be fed Athenian people. Then, Theseus, an Athenian prince, killed the Minotaur. After this there is a gap in the history of Greece that lasts until 750 B.C., about 500 years, because of the fall of the Mycenaean culture and no one took any records of this time, giving it the name the Dark Ages. But then history starts back up as expected.

Spoiler alert for anyone planing to read “The Railway Children”. I overall liked the book “The Railway Children” but there was several things I did not like in the book. For example, Peters stupidity in chapter two , when he steals coal from the railway station and thinks that he is mining coal, even when he’s caught by the Station Master who straight out tells him he’s stealing, he still thinks he’s in trouble for mining the coal, not for stealing it. But I do like the three main characters ability make friends with nearly everyone they meet. But again with Peter, he is not as good at this as his sisters and tries to fight the bargeman in chapter eight when he tells them to stop fishing in the canal because it’s preserved. I do like Bobbies ability to sense what their mother is feeling even when she tries to hide it. Another thing I don’t like about Peter is how mean and short tempered he is with his younger sister Phyllis and with his older sister Roberta, though, with Roberta he is more tolerant.

If I lived at Babylon during the time of Nimrod and god had mixed up my language, and I was sorted into one of three groups by language, I would have probably have learned the other languages and continued to work on the tower of Babel. At that point god would have probably messed up the languages even more, making it so that every second person had their own language. Then, I would have tried to continue to live in Babylon by miming everything. The thought of leaving my home would never of occurred to me. If the languages had been so complex, however, that I couldn’t learn them and motions were so different among the people at Babylon that I couldn’t mime anything, I would have found any other people who spoke a close enough language and formed a small community in Babylon and worked on the tower with them. If I couldn’t find any other close languages I still wouldn’t move from Babylon, and instead I would work on the tower silently. Life would be a lot harder seeing as I would lose most of my friends and I would have a hard time buying things, but I could manage since the gold or whatever currency was in use at the time would still be worth whatever it was before.

I have read seven chapters of the book “The Railway Children”. There are fourteen total chapters in the book, but, the chapters are pretty long, making it a medium sized book. In this paper I’m going to be predicting the very end of the book, so if you plan on reading it you should stop reading this paper right now. So, in this book the three main characters are missing their father, who left unexpectedly and has not been seen for close to a year. In chapter five and seven they find a Russian author who was imprisoned by the Russian government for writing a book about poor people. He eventual managed to escape, and came to England because one of his friends told him that his wife and kid were somewhere in England. In the end the children find a guy who finds the mans family. I think that he will find the children’s father for them, as a way of thanking them. Earlier in the book the eldest child met two train drivers named Bill and Jim and they became good friends. So if their father is far away the children might be able to get Bill and Jim to let them on board the train and to drive them to their father. Another theory of mine is that Jim’s second cousin’s wife’s brother is their father, because their father was able to fix a toy train and so was Jim’s second cousin’s wife’s brother, even though most other people were not able to. If their father is Jim’s second cousin’s wife’s brother than he is even more likely to dive them there to him. He would also know where he is, without the Russian getting involved. I think that this theory is more likely than the first one but it might happen. There is another character that is likely to have something to do with them finding their father, seeing as he has helped them out before, but I do not know how he could fit into the story.

Patents are ideas that a person has paid the government to make fine or imprison anybody who makes or uses the patented idea without paying them to make or use it. Patents act like ideas are physical property that can be stolen from you, but ideas can’t be stolen from a person. They can be copied, or another person can have the idea, but if you tell someone your idea they aren’t stealing it, they’re not taking it from your brain and putting it into their brain, instead, you have the idea and they have the idea. But patents act like ideas can be stolen. For example: if you came up with an awesome invention and built it, then another person comes along and takes the invention, that would be stealing. But if they just look at your invention, go home and make the same invention, then the patent says that is stealing and that the government should throw you in jail for copying the idea. Patents are also bad for the economy because there will only be one producer who can charge a ton of money for the invention and you have to pay the ton of money since you can’t get it anywhere else. If you could get it somewhere else and they charge less money for it, everyone would buy from them, causing the first people to lower their prices, and so on. Patents in the US last for 20 years unless they are ended by the patent-filer. So patents make rich people who can spend more money on the legal cases to steal the patent richer, and poor inventors who can’t poorer.

My favorite part of English 5 has been reading the assignment books. There have been 12 books and since I like reading I have liked them a lot. My favorite book was Lad: A Dog because I like dogs. My favorite lessons were the ones talking about the Latin and Greek roots that you can still see in our language today like “Dem” means people, so you get words like democracy which means “government by the people”. I did not like the lessons on sentence patterns though, and I don’t see a time in which I would use them other than in the lessons. But overall I have enjoyed the Ron Paul curriculum English 5 course.