Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Friday, March 13, 2009
Final Blog!!!
So the class Nanotexts is over and I am very sad! The class was pretty fun, and a break from all my other really hard science class. Although there was a lot of reading and I wouldn’t consider this class easy at all, it was very time consuming! Well I just finished the book Queen City Jazz and it was awesome! I have to say that was quite an incredible book, it had many plots and subplots that made me keep guessing what would happen next! The book was actually about a girl named verity, she was living in a closed off community called The Shakers. They believed men and women shouldn’t have sex, or use technology, and live off the earth. Verity lived in the community with her friend Blaze, her dog Cairo, her friend/elder John, and the elder Russ. These were pretty much the main characters in the beginning of the book. This all takes place way in the future. Verity and Blaze end up using some ancient technology, and John catches Blaze using it and eventually shoots at Blaze and Cairo. Verity knows she much go to Cincinnati to find some way to save Blaze & Cairo. She finds out that Cincinnati is a place of mystery and the people are trapped in some never-ending loop in Cincinnati caused by Durancy, the man who created nanorobots, and who was heartbroken because he lost his love Rose. He created the city and something went terribly wrong when he tried to revive his mother. He got caught in an endless loop and the people in Cincinnati were too! The larger point and picture of this book, is when we use technology for our own gain, at what point does technology control us? The people in Cincinnati were trapped in an endless loop and could not escape. Technology was in control of them and using them as pawns to repeat the same story over and over again. Verity broke the cycle to break the cycle she needed to use another form of technology which was nan-viruses to help get the people out of the city and give them hope and desire to go to New Orleans. In doing this she put them under the control of more technology which just made them want to go to New Orleans. Which brings up another question, how much control should we give technology in our everyday lives? These people were in control of their machines at first, but after awhile everything spun out of control. Luckily Rose had a failsafe to save them all. The people had little insets that fit behind the ears, which made them able to view maps, look at memories, and smell various metapheromonal smells that each person had. The nanobots also made them stronger, faster, and better able to learn things. The benefits were clearly able to be seen, but if this technology got into the wrong hands, or somehow malfunctioned, it would cause horrible problems for humanity, which was exactly what happened in the book. I really like this book, although it was a long read, it was really the brain food I needed!
Well moving on from the book, this week in class was very interesting. We talked about sperm recipes, which is just about the grossest thing I have ever heard of! Although it was funny to see that they had many types of food, drinks and desserts that used sperm in the recipe. I want to know who actually eats this stuff!? I would never touch it! We also did evaluations of the and teacher, and I hope Tony does not get laid off in these budget cuts, so I gave him a good markings. Actually I’ve had some really good teachers in this quarter of western, and hope none of them get laid off in these budget cuts, because a lot of them really believe in what they do and do a very good job in teaching. I’ve had one teacher in my history class who seems to want to make a difference in the world by the students he teaches, making sure they know the good and mostly the bad that went on in America and how we can learn from it. Earlier that week in class we watched a Donald Duck Video about Mathematics, and it talked about Mathematics being the key to the future. Really mathematics is, I also believe chemistry and physics hold a great portion in that future too, without physics, math, or chemistry we would never have created the atomic bomb, and it took the sum of all those parts to create it. Even though it was a deadly weapon we got something good out of it, which was nuclear power, which is a great source of energy being used nowadays. This maybe the future of energy as we become more reliant on power as a world.
Well moving on from the book, this week in class was very interesting. We talked about sperm recipes, which is just about the grossest thing I have ever heard of! Although it was funny to see that they had many types of food, drinks and desserts that used sperm in the recipe. I want to know who actually eats this stuff!? I would never touch it! We also did evaluations of the and teacher, and I hope Tony does not get laid off in these budget cuts, so I gave him a good markings. Actually I’ve had some really good teachers in this quarter of western, and hope none of them get laid off in these budget cuts, because a lot of them really believe in what they do and do a very good job in teaching. I’ve had one teacher in my history class who seems to want to make a difference in the world by the students he teaches, making sure they know the good and mostly the bad that went on in America and how we can learn from it. Earlier that week in class we watched a Donald Duck Video about Mathematics, and it talked about Mathematics being the key to the future. Really mathematics is, I also believe chemistry and physics hold a great portion in that future too, without physics, math, or chemistry we would never have created the atomic bomb, and it took the sum of all those parts to create it. Even though it was a deadly weapon we got something good out of it, which was nuclear power, which is a great source of energy being used nowadays. This maybe the future of energy as we become more reliant on power as a world.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Blog for the first week of march!
So this week was a very crappy for me! I have been sick all week and have not been sleeping well so my sleep has been in my classes including this class, and my other classes, so I haven’t been able to take many notes in class, but I do have some. We talked about Post-Singular, and how technology is so integrated in their everyday lives, even more so then us. We rely on technology a lot for everything and its becoming more integrated in our lives. In this book though technology is part of people, people use technology to get high, to learn, and to live. Which is a where our society may be heading if you ask me, but it may be a little closer than we like to believe. We also looked at Shelly’s book, were she had the a word of her book tattooed on people, and it can only be put together if the people got together and pieced the puzzle together. Really her book could never be put together back to its originally format and parts will always remain a mystery, only known to Shelly, because she has the copy. We also looked at how technology affects the body, and had a discussion about that. I thought about it later after class and technology affects the body drastically. Let’s say someone got their arm bitten off by a shark, the surgeon would try and reconstruct the limb to fit into a prosthetic, that prosthetic was created using modern technology. Also we could look at factory emissions and people’s allergies. I am a big allergy sufferer and have to take 2 medicines a day to combat allergies, and even after those medicines I am not allergy free, but they do help. When there is low air quality in the area, or poor air quality I always take a double dose of allergy medicine because I know my allergies will get bad that day, our modern technology like cars and factories has affected my body by amplifying my bad allergies causing me to have bad headaches, red eyes, and affecting my ability to sleep, that in my opinion is one way technology affects our bodies. Also technology affects our bodies in a positive way, I was born with bad astigmatism and I am almost legally blind, to fix this problem I am going to get laser eye surgery this summer, which will remove my dependency on contacts and glasses, which will be amazing! Technology has come a long way, and can actually improve our bodies too. The next day in class we talked about the capitalism model and how companies give things away for free and then charge. This got me thinking about the two big and successful companies that spurted up in my time, Comcast and Verizon. Verizon Wireless I remember came out with the free phone, if you buy a plan and sign a 2 year contract, what they forgot to mention is that phone would become obsolete in 6 months, then you would have to buy a new phone for full retail price with new features, and they neglected to tell you that these new features would cost money to use, great! I believe Verizon has a very smart marketing campaign. Also they provide good customer service and eliminate their competition, then have crappy customer service to cut costs, horrible. Now lets shift our view to Comcast. They get you on this teaser rate for digital cable for only 19.99 a month for 6 months, which is almost free. Then I get a bill in the mail after 6 months for 80 bucks for basic digital cable and I’m like wow, they really got me! This model works very well I’m glad we learned about this in class. Then we also got into the topic of corporate advertisement, and asked would you pay 7-12% less in tuition to see ads everywhere? My answer is yes, I see them everywhere all the time on TV, on the internet, and just ignore them and don’t worry too much about them, it wouldn’t matter too much to me if I saw them all around campus, it would just be another thing for me to ignore, as I already do, and I would pay 7-12% less in tuition, that would be awesome for me I would not car at all. Where I would draw the line though is when a teacher’s curriculum is based on advertisements, and if a teacher assigns a book to read because the book company paid them money too and not because it is a great and meaningful literary novel. Or a curriculum chooses a textbook over another textbook that is written way better because the company paid them to use their textbook, when advertising starts to interfere with the curriculum is where I would draw the line that it is too much.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Blog for week of 1-22-1-28
Ok so here are some of the discussions we had on February 24th 2009.
First of all we watched a movie about how the government was educating people on malaria, and how to prevent the spread of it. I found it very funny that they suggested putting oil in water. Ok that good in theory, it kills the mosquitoes and stuff like that, but they forgot to mention that oil in water kills off many other things. These things would include fish, wildlife, pretty much anything that comes into contact with the water with oil in it. Oil is very toxic, and whatever scientists decided to do this did not d field tests to see what else oil in water would affect. I believe the mindset of people who were combating malaria, and had to deal with it were thinking so much about killing the parasite that they weren't paying attention to the repercussions this could have on other organisms in the community. Also Mosquitoes were described as killers, when in reality they aren't. The real killers are the parasites that live in mosquitoes, mosquitoes are pretty much doing what they are biologically programmed to do, and that is to survive. Which I thought was a bad interpretation of mosquitoes and the malaria parasite. Also we watched a movie about soviets and farming. During the mid 1900's the soviets were involved in a war. They depended on their agriculture for money and food for troops, so the soviets made a bunch of pro-farming videos and decided to make it look fun. They had music playing and the farmers were looking like they were having a good time. In reality farming especially for the worker is hard, and is very tough. Many people wanted to avoid farming but got stuck in it because that was one of the few ways to make a decent living. Also we looked at a news story about a poor little girl who was playing a game console and developed bad sores. It turned out she wanted to play so bad even though she had painful sores on her hands, are people starting to get that addicted to video games? It seems so, I remember when I used to play Halo 2 a lot, I remember I would play for almost 8 hours straight, it was addicting!
Moving on to February 26TH....
We started off a great discussion entailing, what are the basic themes behind rules. Rules can be interpreted many different ways, I believe language is the key to determining rules, and different cultures with different languages, and core values may see a rule very different then what you or I would see a rule. One thing is true we do have a certain core-value of rules that we all maintain. We all follow these rules and values, and we hardly ever stray from them. If we do stray from these rules or values we experience stress, because our core values or rules don't reflect our actions, to make up for this we try and justify a rule or action, maybe saying "Well everyone else is doing it", or something to that affect, so our core values still reflect our actions, but the exception is justified. Rules are also meant to be changed as society changes, or evolve, like a good example would be gay marriage, or civil rights, or women's liberation, are good examples. Also we talked about the meaning of filth and summarizing it, I belive one of the major themes in filth is pretty much anyone can be a hero. We also talked about one of them, which is love for a cat, I sort of feel sorry for the guy, because he just loves a cat and doesn't have a girlfriend lol! Really he was an ordinary guy though, and it turns out he is actually a secret agent too, and is a hero to many people. This is pretty amazing!
Another thing we talked about does condensing your writing into something smaller make you a better writer? I believe it does, as long as you can display your main themes and motifs in your writing while making it smaller, and not distorting it. An example of distorting it would be previews of a movie. We can take top gun and write a really good preview, but we can also distort the preview by making a top gun recut of the movie portraying a gay love story. After saying that, making things smaller is good, as long as you are not distorting or losing the major underlying theme of a writing, or book.
First of all we watched a movie about how the government was educating people on malaria, and how to prevent the spread of it. I found it very funny that they suggested putting oil in water. Ok that good in theory, it kills the mosquitoes and stuff like that, but they forgot to mention that oil in water kills off many other things. These things would include fish, wildlife, pretty much anything that comes into contact with the water with oil in it. Oil is very toxic, and whatever scientists decided to do this did not d field tests to see what else oil in water would affect. I believe the mindset of people who were combating malaria, and had to deal with it were thinking so much about killing the parasite that they weren't paying attention to the repercussions this could have on other organisms in the community. Also Mosquitoes were described as killers, when in reality they aren't. The real killers are the parasites that live in mosquitoes, mosquitoes are pretty much doing what they are biologically programmed to do, and that is to survive. Which I thought was a bad interpretation of mosquitoes and the malaria parasite. Also we watched a movie about soviets and farming. During the mid 1900's the soviets were involved in a war. They depended on their agriculture for money and food for troops, so the soviets made a bunch of pro-farming videos and decided to make it look fun. They had music playing and the farmers were looking like they were having a good time. In reality farming especially for the worker is hard, and is very tough. Many people wanted to avoid farming but got stuck in it because that was one of the few ways to make a decent living. Also we looked at a news story about a poor little girl who was playing a game console and developed bad sores. It turned out she wanted to play so bad even though she had painful sores on her hands, are people starting to get that addicted to video games? It seems so, I remember when I used to play Halo 2 a lot, I remember I would play for almost 8 hours straight, it was addicting!
Moving on to February 26TH....
We started off a great discussion entailing, what are the basic themes behind rules. Rules can be interpreted many different ways, I believe language is the key to determining rules, and different cultures with different languages, and core values may see a rule very different then what you or I would see a rule. One thing is true we do have a certain core-value of rules that we all maintain. We all follow these rules and values, and we hardly ever stray from them. If we do stray from these rules or values we experience stress, because our core values or rules don't reflect our actions, to make up for this we try and justify a rule or action, maybe saying "Well everyone else is doing it", or something to that affect, so our core values still reflect our actions, but the exception is justified. Rules are also meant to be changed as society changes, or evolve, like a good example would be gay marriage, or civil rights, or women's liberation, are good examples. Also we talked about the meaning of filth and summarizing it, I belive one of the major themes in filth is pretty much anyone can be a hero. We also talked about one of them, which is love for a cat, I sort of feel sorry for the guy, because he just loves a cat and doesn't have a girlfriend lol! Really he was an ordinary guy though, and it turns out he is actually a secret agent too, and is a hero to many people. This is pretty amazing!
Another thing we talked about does condensing your writing into something smaller make you a better writer? I believe it does, as long as you can display your main themes and motifs in your writing while making it smaller, and not distorting it. An example of distorting it would be previews of a movie. We can take top gun and write a really good preview, but we can also distort the preview by making a top gun recut of the movie portraying a gay love story. After saying that, making things smaller is good, as long as you are not distorting or losing the major underlying theme of a writing, or book.
Monday, February 23, 2009
blog 1-15 - 1-21
So to kick off the week in our class we watched a video called "Immersion" from the new york times. This video was a recording, edited, showing reactions children have when playing video games. I found the video to be funny but also slightly disturbing about the reactions kids had when playing video games. I found the video to be slightly biased, because you can take a recording or just about anything and turn it into whatever you want by editing the video in a certain way. An example could be of the movie we watched in class called "Top Gun Recut", The movie had nothing to do with a gay romance between Val Kilmner and Tom Cruise, but just by editing the movie, creating your own preview, you can make it seem like the movie is about a gay love story. So if the New York Times was trying to created a film clip about how video games drain kids of emotions, or make them violent, that clip is not really good evidence. Now I don't believe that was the main purpose of the video, but definitely there were some overtones of it, while not being obvious at all. Also one big thing about the game is it seemed like it only showed first-person shooters, which I thought was a little biased, because those games get pretty bad, and people get into the game a lot.
After that we watched the ExistenZ movie. which is about people who can plug into a Virtual reality machine and play a game that is very popular, in this fantasy world. The movie is very interesting, because that reality may not be too far off. Although I doubt we will actually have to get plugged into anything (Hopefully), I bet the gaming industry in the future will be creating some new virtual reality game that will be the new craze. I really can't wait, but after watching parts of this movie, I'm not too sure lol!
The next day in class we actually watched a really cool video called Ted, and he gave his input on what is wrong with the economy, how it can be fixed, and what we need to be putting more research into. I thought this guy new exactly what he was talking about, and I wondered, maybe the government is looking at slutions to fix the economy that really doesn't fix the underlying problem. That pretty much is, banks were loaning out too much money and giving the money too everyone. this resulted in more bad loans which now has just crippled our economy. Really the Bush administration was encouraging mass amounts of spending of money that people really didn't have. By the time it caught up to the American people, we were screwed, and the banks took the fall. The truth is people should only spend the money they have and not have an entitlement on something. People just went out of control with the low interests and the tax incentives that they overspent, which is going to cripple our economy for the next 2 years at least. Ted was really onto something, to fix the problems we are having banks need to cut who they are loaning to, and the federal government may be the only entity that can do this. We want to spend, but there is not enough money to spend. Also he went on and talked about evolution, and how we as a people may evolve with our machines. We use them everyday, and they are becoming more in tune with us. We may one day become machines, that could be our next step in evolution, if you think about it. Everything we do is done with machines, and they are working more closely to us now then ever before, and its just going to get closer. For instance people are now using machines to help deaf people hear, this is called cochlear implants. Pretty soon, it will get to the point were regular people use those implants to hear better. Same with visual implants, someday people will use those to be able to see, then one day to see better. Pretty soon a "Super Human" Will have implants to be able to have super hearing, and super seeing abilites, and it may end up being a war, people against enhanced people, who knows. It is scary to think about. Just by being in this class I have learned a lot about looking at patterns in technology and trying to see what may come in the future. What will happend when we move on? There is no way to know, but I can imagine that 20 years from now people, and the world may be drastically different from what it is now.
After that we watched the ExistenZ movie. which is about people who can plug into a Virtual reality machine and play a game that is very popular, in this fantasy world. The movie is very interesting, because that reality may not be too far off. Although I doubt we will actually have to get plugged into anything (Hopefully), I bet the gaming industry in the future will be creating some new virtual reality game that will be the new craze. I really can't wait, but after watching parts of this movie, I'm not too sure lol!
The next day in class we actually watched a really cool video called Ted, and he gave his input on what is wrong with the economy, how it can be fixed, and what we need to be putting more research into. I thought this guy new exactly what he was talking about, and I wondered, maybe the government is looking at slutions to fix the economy that really doesn't fix the underlying problem. That pretty much is, banks were loaning out too much money and giving the money too everyone. this resulted in more bad loans which now has just crippled our economy. Really the Bush administration was encouraging mass amounts of spending of money that people really didn't have. By the time it caught up to the American people, we were screwed, and the banks took the fall. The truth is people should only spend the money they have and not have an entitlement on something. People just went out of control with the low interests and the tax incentives that they overspent, which is going to cripple our economy for the next 2 years at least. Ted was really onto something, to fix the problems we are having banks need to cut who they are loaning to, and the federal government may be the only entity that can do this. We want to spend, but there is not enough money to spend. Also he went on and talked about evolution, and how we as a people may evolve with our machines. We use them everyday, and they are becoming more in tune with us. We may one day become machines, that could be our next step in evolution, if you think about it. Everything we do is done with machines, and they are working more closely to us now then ever before, and its just going to get closer. For instance people are now using machines to help deaf people hear, this is called cochlear implants. Pretty soon, it will get to the point were regular people use those implants to hear better. Same with visual implants, someday people will use those to be able to see, then one day to see better. Pretty soon a "Super Human" Will have implants to be able to have super hearing, and super seeing abilites, and it may end up being a war, people against enhanced people, who knows. It is scary to think about. Just by being in this class I have learned a lot about looking at patterns in technology and trying to see what may come in the future. What will happend when we move on? There is no way to know, but I can imagine that 20 years from now people, and the world may be drastically different from what it is now.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Blog for week of 1-8 to 1-14
So the week of class started very interestingly, we got to watch a movie about two robots making out, and I was pretty shocked at what I saw! It was pretty weird, but I just thought it was funny and thought wow, this is a really amazing class, in how many classes do you get to watch robots making out on you tube. Maybe that's what robots will do in the future who knows haha! Then we move on to the discussion of when science becomes the service of law. I thought it was very interesting, and realized that it happens already. I mean science is used in the law all the time. A good example would be forensics, which uses science to prove if criminals committed a crime. So science is used as a service of the law a lot. Also DNA analysis, any DNA taken from a crime scene can be analyzed, and used to determine if someone committed a crime with a 99% accuracy. The accuracy does go down if you are comparing brothers, or fathers and sons, because they have really similar DNA. So I believe when science becomes a service of the law, the law is greatly enhanced. Look at the Kevlar vests that cops use. These have helped save many cops lives, and are totally useful for cops everywhere. Another great advance is the use of Stun guns, it took science to create them, and it has stopped many needless deaths to happen. Also the use of radars, which were created by science, has helped police track speeders, which I don't really like, but it has helped generate massive amounts of profits for many cites, and counties in the form of money from speeding tickets. Also the different weapons, the crowd suppressants used by cops, and many others were all great feats of science that has helped enhance law enforcement greatly! Now moving on to the light bright case which was a huge discussion in class, I was thinking, "Does the city really have to waste money prosecuting these two guys who obviously did not intend on a terrorist threat or anything like that. I mean really, what dumbass would waste money to get a huge bomb squad and deploy hundreds of city police and officials, and waste half a million dollars, when anyone can obviously see that those things were light brights put up by a couple of stupid guys. I sometimes wonder how much tax dollars are wasted by officials doing extremely stupid things like that. No wonder our taxes are so high, some places have retards in a high up city office who can't tell the difference between a light bright kids toy and a bomb, I mean come on guys, give me a break. This happened in 2007 and we are way passed the 01 terrorist bombings, which I believe if these were hung up in like early 2002 then I probably would say they should be prosecuted just because of the mentality of the times, and the mindsets of most Americans at the time. Still we are way past that and I sometimes don't believe how stupid officials can be. The next time in class we started off the day about a tutorial about how to pick up people on fickr, I thought that was hilarious. I feel sorry for the people who actually do pick up people on flickr haha. I don't even know what the site is about but I think its funny. Its funny because you can't really get the real message of a movie without watching the whole thing, or seeing the "big picture". If you show people only parts of a movie, you can warp the main message or theme of the movie to almost anything you want. Which I believe can also be translated into real life, and believe we should all look at the big picture, instead of briefly skimming over something, and try to find main themes, and underlying motifs around anything we see, which can be a book, or real life situations and learn from them. There are always two different sides of a story and two different perspectives someone could have about a topic. Someone could always come up with a reason for doing something wrong, such as stealing, or even murder, and justify it from their perspective, so they don't feel guilt about doing it. So really in their reality what they were doing was really just "right" to them, but to us it could be completely different.
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