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.

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.

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.

End of class this week! 2-6-09

I found it very interesting we actually had a huge ape come into our class and ask for some bananas! I would actually find it even funnier if the free hugs guy came into our class and gave the teacher a hug that would be pretty hilarious. Now as we are getting to about midterm in the class I am now sort of wondering what will be on the final? Would the bulk of the final be on all the books we are reading, or on something else? I am not quite too sure about it but I am sort of worried about it. Anyone else been thinking about it lately? Getting back to some of the topics in class I thought about how crazy that new thing invented by Microsoft was. This thing could take a whole bunch of pictures and combine them to make a 3-d representation of an object. Which did get me wondering and also a lot of the class, what would happen if maybe an image was distorted, or something was different in one of the images, would the computer just take the average of the images, or what would happen? Really it was funny going into Britney Spears and trying to imagine how that computer would render her. She has been hot, young, thin, normal, fat, really fat, pregnant, bald, natural, liposuctioned, had plastic surgery done, and pretty much everything, how would that instrument take Britney spears and sort of make a real life model of her? I guess it kind of makes me wonder, but I really do not want to see the outcome of it, because I'm guessing it could be really bad or just plain messed up. I think that machine would really enhance military, and give the military a good 3d outlook of an area just by pictures, which I believe probably, is already developed in the military in some form. If you actually added all the pictures taken in the world could you actually have a 3-d world set up? That really gets me wondering, and if you had a 3-D world could you when we get to this point in technology just upload everyone into that 3-D world? That really makes me wonder, maybe the next step in human evolution is to upload everyone into this so-called 3-D world, and give people like enhancements, like a game, and make them live out their lives normally, or maybe it could slow everything down, and make it seem like 1 minute is really like 100 years, and have people pretty much living forever. That is a pretty cool topic to think about, you could have people living for billions of years in their so-called world. Maybe that will be the future. That actually sounds pretty awesome if you ask me but I'm not sure. Is that actually what they did in the matrix? Or was it a virtual world inside a virtual world? I'm not really sure but what if you take people, put them inside this virtual world that makes 1 minute in real time seem like 100 years in virtual time and teach them a whole bunch of new things in this virtual world, and take them back out of the virtual world, they will come out with a large amount of knowledge acquired, lets say 100 years of knowledge in just one minute, and they would come back out as like a super smart human being, maybe that will be the future of education, who knows? What I can tell you is that would be pretty exciting being plugged into a machine for only 1 minute and have like 100 years of knowledge placed into me in that period of time. That why virtual reality sounds so interesting to me for some reason, and I bet that field is like going to explode here soon into a popular field of study. Anyways that machine is pretty tight and there could be enormous opportunities for us with technology. The truth is I believe people will probably end up evolving with machines because they are becoming a big part of our daily lives. Hopefully though as what was talked about in last lecture, they don't take us all over, and consider us the inferior race, having evolved from us. Going back to that not has anyone ever watched battlestar galactica, its pretty much the same thing we are talking about now with people vs. machines, and is a very exciting TV show that everyone should watch! Who knows what the future hold, hopefully it doesn’t become too unstable during my lifetime or that could be extremely bad.

Haiku about Obamas stimulus package

This stimulus bill
better get me some money
becuase I have none!

Lol Here is my Haiku on the obama stimulus package found at www.yahoo.com, the top searches there.