Blog #1

While first reading The Human Factor by Kim Vicente and up to page 149 in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, I thought the two pieces had not a single thing in common. Although the two pieces of literature take on two completely different approaches, one being telling a story, and the other stating facts, they bring up some very similar points and beliefs.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, is a story describing a boy named Jonah’s adventure to get the inside story of a man named Dr. Hoenikker, the “father” of the atom bomb, in order to write his own book on the issue. Jonah starts by writing to the children of Dr. Hoenikker in which the youngest son, Newton first responds. Newton was only 6 at the time of when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima therefore unable to remember much of the information Jonah was looking for. What Jonah’s main concerns were, were knowing the experience that the family remembers from the time it happened, and what Dr. Hoenikker himself was doing at the time. After the death of Dr. Hoenikker, it is discovered that he had made a substance called ice-nine which was said to be small enough to fit under a finger nail, yet had a big enough effect to turn all and any type of body of water into rock-hard solid material. After later meeting the children of Dr Hoenikker, Jonah believes that each of them had a piece of this so called ice-nine and he was bound to figure out for his own curiosity if they did, while in the mean time gathering more information from them regarding the bombing of Hiroshima.

The Human Factor, on the other hand, was a piece of literature describing all the different things and ways of living technology has led us to today. The piece explained several things from work schedules, to how the article began with the blowing up of a nuclear machine. All points went back to how the human plays a big part in the performance of both machines, and humans themselves. The article stated that the performance pilots or flight attendants for example, if they don’t get a reasonable amount of sleep, would not be as well as if they had. They now make sure that pilots especially are required to fly no more than a certain amount of hours a week leaving them plenty of off time to receive a good nights sleep. If a pilot were to perform under their expected performance, they would obviously be putting the lives of everyone on the aircraft at danger. Therefore its not the performance of the plane itself that would be putting lives at danger, but the person operating the aircraft.

As the two pieces explain the different tasks that technology can help perform, The Human Factor seems to lead more toward how technology has affected situations negatively, whereas The Cat’s Cradle has so far shown not only the negative perspective, but a way in which ice-nine can have also a positive influence as well.