Ramneek's Blog

I fulfilled my promise. I read  How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming  by Mike Brown today to completion. This is the first book I've read completely since  The Godfather  by Mario Puzo, which was later turned into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. It's a pretty big leap going from a fiction book that talks about mobsters to a memoir of the man who advocated against Pluto being a planet. There are parallels between both, though, and the biggest one is that in some capacity, someone or something ceased to exist. In the case of  The Godfather , Virgil Sollozzo was killed by Michael Corleone because Sollozzo called an unsuccessful hit on Michael's father, and the boss of the Corleone Crime Family, Vito Corleone. In Mike Brown's memoir, Pluto's status as a planet is murdered by Mike Brown, albeit in a way less cold-blooded fashion than the murder of Sollozzo. I think reading both of these books taught me things that I never expected to learn.  From Brown's...

I want to be completely honest with anyone who reads this post so in complete honesty, I haven't finished the book. BUT, the prompt never said I had to finish the book. I checked and see if it said anything about finishing and it didn't so hopefully, I wasn't careless and skipped details. Anyways, I am about halfway through and Mike Brown, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is a hilarious writer. I often found myself chuckling whenever he talked about his planetary discoveries not panning out the way he had hoped.  I also enjoyed how he embedded his personal life into his work life. His days at the Palomar Observatory and time spent pouring over countless photos sparked an interest within me so much so that I ended up looking up how far the Palomar Observatory is. Though I can't do any astronomical research of my own, I did entertain the idea of going to a remote location to see the vast sky above at night. Reading this book reminded me of that time when my cousi...

  Toyota: A Company Whose Cars Can Withstand Rockets  It’s no surprise to anyone that Toyota makes reliable cars. Headquartered in Toyota City, Japan,  the manufacturer has built and maintained this reputation since the very beginning. From a trusty four-door Camry to the king of the hills, the Land Cruiser, Toyota keeps on making cars that can  brave any climate and continent on the planet.   The Land Cruiser is so durable, in fact, that Mark Wallace, the former U.S. ambassador to the  United Nations said “Regrettably, the Toyota Land Cruiser and Hilux have effectively become  almost part of the ISIS brand.” So, the question needs to be asked: What makes a Toyota so  reliable that it has become the go-to vehicle of paramilitary organizations, warlords, and suburban families across the world?  Some history  In the early 1920s, Sakichi Toyoda invented a loom machine called the Toyoda Model G. The  machine was the world’s first a...

I was initially confused about the book I wanted to read. I wanted to revisit some old autobiographies I had read for grade school that I never bothered to finish due to them being a summer reading assignment. The first one that came to my mind was the  Autobiography of Malcolm X . I was drawn to that book due to the philosophy of Malcolm X when it came to the civil rights movement and the Black Panther group. However, as I pursued the books that Professor Hansen mentioned in the assignment, I began to pivot. I was torn between  Growing a Farmer  by Kurt Timmermeister and  How I Killed Pluto  by Mike Brown. I was drawn to  Growing a Farmer  because of the show  Clarkson's Farm  on Amazon Prime. It's a show that documents the journey of a famous motorist, Jeremy Clarkson, who is managing a farm and I wanted to hear the story of another farmer. Although this appealed to me, I opted for  How I Killed Pluto  because I already knew the s...