This week's readings left me a fair bit confused. In all honesty I didn't dig quite as deeply as I would have liked to in this week's readings. A lot of the content in the Foucault in particular went over my head. In future weeks I will endeavor to make a more concerted effort to truly understand the text. I apologize. The discussion we had last helped me to get a better picture of what was going on. I had read the instruction guide to the Foucault reading before I had the actual 'Human Sciences' paper, and I found it somewhat useful, but also somewhat confusing. For example, I found a part of the history described in the 'structure' section to be very interesting. In it describes a notion that at one point it was believed that biology would eventually become so advanced that every plant could be characterized through math. Each element, abnormality, and structure of a plant could be broken down and described through assigning values to each element. I had no idea this notion could even be considered much less as far back as it was being in the reading. Of course, this then leads into the discussion of the orders of biology and the characteristics of species and other such divisions. In terms of the actual reading, I found myself lost even with the supplementary reading. I was able to gather that he believed the 'human sciences' to be biology, economics, and linguistics but the points he was making were confusing. It seems like he was arguing that because they are 'human' fields they cannot be objective in their findings because humans are not objective. Within the broader context of this class I think it helped further reinforce the idea of connections we've been exploring. As human sciences these fields quantify aspects of humanity that can used in connection with 'natural' sciences for bigger and better things. The Cousins and Hussain reading helped to somewhat cement the non-objective nature of the human sciences introduced in the original Foucault reading. In terms of the Coen reading it really just built on one of the central cruxes we've been learning so far in this class: climate science is not a new field of research. In this sense climate science, and by extension climate history, spans back much farther than two hundred years. It was also interesting seeing names I was familiar with from my other studies in engineering appear in this reading. I first heard of Joseph Fourier during my linear physical systems analysis course. His work in Fourier series helps us to model the responses to a complex waveform input in linear systems by approximating the shapes of the output waveform. I had no idea he was also involved in climate science and was even the origin of the idea of the greenhouse gas effect. In a similar way, the Wennerlind and Johnson reading also traced a path through climate history. The individuals we discussed in the lecture developed further my understanding of climate determinism and the notion of justifying famines and other disasters simply because they were 'certain' to happen based on the weather or temperature of the region. This weeks readings, while confusing, were deeply interesting and I wish I had taken more time to read them more thoroughly. I plan to take another look at them this weekend and get a better sense of ideas I didn't understand.