2040 Is Not Very Far Off

As mentioned in a previous posts, overly sensational titles bug me. That's exactly what this article has, and that's what drew my attention to it. "You won't need a driver's license by 2040." I was half-expecting to read an article about microchipping people or something else to render the license obsolete as a means of providing identification, but... yeah. I was off on that guess, but the resulting article ended up being far more interesting.

The focus of this article is on the idea of self-driving cars and how they're finally starting to become a realistic technological possibility. The most interesting idea that it considered, which had never occurred to me, was the idea of how this could reduce traffic. If we could convert to driverless cars, suddenly the entire idea of an asshole driver disappears. Instead of having to determine the most efficient route to a location given traffic, you can have your car controlled by a centralized hub that could route traffic to be much more evenly distributed than usual.

While the idea of taking one's own hands off the wheel may be unnerving, I think that the possible impact this could have on transportation would be completely worth it.

Coming soon, to a DVD player near you...

Movies are an awkward medium for entertainment, in my experience. You have only a couple hours to introduce characters, get people invested in them, setup a compelling plot, and wrap all of that up in a satisfactory manner. I'm not really sure how people do it, honestly. With that, I'm going to start getting into a handful of the more notable movies that I've seen. I'm gonna go ahead and throw in trailers for each of these recommendations, because you know, why not, but I don't think any of them actually do their respective movies justice.

...Okay, I know what you're thinking. Trashy romantic comedy. Well, yeah, a little bit, but Down With Love is a bafflingly engaging movie experience. Everyone I know that's seen it has walked away from it feeling completely and utterly confused at what just happened, but in a good way. Without giving away too much, this movie does a pretty good job of playing with your expectations in a way that isn't exactly groundbreaking, but it has a unique charm to it that I'm not sure many other movies that have come out in the past several years have.

I love horror movies. Well, no, that's not true. I love certain horror movies. A lot of them (The Final Destination series comes to mind) are mostly because they fall into that so bad it's good genre. The Scream franchise is something different, though. A lot like Down With Love, really, it's very self-aware and falls into that stealth parody genre. It highlights terrible horror movie tropes and then immediately turns around and enacts them. With the exception of the third one, which was cheap trash put out to cash in on a brand name, every entry in this series has managed to present an interesting spin on whatever the current trend in horror movies might be. Anyway, all of that aside, I'm highlighting the fourth movie because 1) a lot of people aren't even aware that it exists, making it excellent to recommend to people and 2) it shockingly manages to capture the same kind of energy as the original in a completely different context.

I have a soft spot for musicals. Rent is probably one of the best movie adaptations of a musical that I've seen, and it tells a fairly-predictable, but heartwarming story of a group of starving artists (and Joanne) in the early 90s. There's a DVD out there that has the final Broadway performance on it, and if you come across it, I highly recommend it over the movie. I don't think I know anyone that doesn't cry every single time they see it, and I know a lot of people that have seen it several times.

Okay, okay, okay. Just one more chick flick, I promise. He's Just Not That Into You manages to successfully weave together completely random and over-the-top relationship advice with a love dodecahedron. Unlike your typical romantic comedy, it doesn't necessarily end well for everyone involved, but it's probably one of the most satisfying experiences that you can have in this genre. Plus, as you've probably gathered, you know that I love incomplete deconstructions.

Finally, I present what is probably the most terrifying movie on this list. The Rugrats Movie. It was a pretty intense experience as a small child when it came out, and after watching it a few weeks ago with my sisters, I realized that it was even more terrifying when you took the time to think about what was actually happening in it as an adult. You have a group of toddlers lost in the woods, and some pretty downright evil behavior on some of their parts regarding Dil. A particular scene that sticks out to me is when Tommy is preparing to maliciously pour a container of banana flavored baby food onto his new brother in the hope that he'll be kidnapped by a group of (likely diseased) circus monkeys. And this shit is supposed to be for kids.

Anyway, I hope that at least one of the movies on this list has sparked your interest. If you've seen them all already, then go watch one of them again! You probably need a break from all that work if you're a student that's just recently started back to school.

Plus, Everybody Should Watch Extra Credits

For this week, I decided to pick a bit of news that isn't so much an article as much as it is a video. See, I went on an archive binge of Extra Credits, and then it had a lot of crappy updates that lacked real content, and I lost interest, so I've started yet another archive binge. If you have no idea what Extra Credits is, I fully recommend checking it out. It's almost always just interesting things about developing video games as a form of media and exploring the potential that they have for telling a fantastic story.

This episode, however, focuses more on discussing an issue that society is going to face pretty soon much more universally: spectrum crunch. The video explains it much more thoroughly than I can, but to sum up, we are running out of bandwidth in the air for transmitting data across large distances. At the rate we're going, we'll likely run out of space by 2014. This will be disastrous, and it's already leading to increases in costs for cell phone and internet access.

The most apparent way to fix this issue, at least temporarily, is for television networks to stop broadcasting over-the-air. For some incredibly rural areas though, this is the only real way that they can get live news and such, and some people might argue that eliminating their access to television is not the solution.

That being said, this is not an issue that's going to go away anytime soon, and it'll only get worse until more people are aware of it and trying to actually fix it. If I had more time, I would do a little more research to post about all of the potential solutions that have been proposed. Unfortunately though, I have classes and such to get to, so hopefully this video is enough of a starting point to encourage getting educated on this impending doom.

Education for all!

As I may have mentioned before, my plan for my life is to become a teacher. I'm a firm believer in the idea that everyone has the capacity to try and at least somewhat succeed in school, and that regardless of career path, everyone should strive to be a life-long learner. That being said, my opinions on this week's topic may seem a bit predictable.

As Laura mentioned, Germany allows for (more or less) higher education paid for by the government/taxes. I think this is one of the best ideas that anyone has ever had. The biggest issue standing between people that want to contribute to society through some means that requires an education is the fact that most people can't afford to take four years to just take classes and focus on them. Most people that go to college in the US have to either a) get their financially well-off parents to foot the bill, b) take out a metric fuckton of student loans that they will likely never be able to fully pay off, c) somehow end up with scholarships to pay for everything, or d) work the entire time they're in school in a way that'll drastically slow down the pace that they can progress at.

Honestly, the fact that society expects everybody to have a degree before they can work any kind of job is more than a bit of a problem. But let's imagine for a second that we could eliminate that issue and provide government-paid higher education. The people that don't need to go on with their education to get into the field that they want to get into wouldn't bother with it if they didn't feel like it was necessary. Suddenly, that massive clog in the system is gone, and the people left at colleges are the people that really want to be there.

I think it would do our country a lot of good to allow people to continue their education without it being a financial concern. Just because it isn't necessary for their job, that doesn't mean that it can't be a contributing factor to being a well-rounded person. I might be veering into territory that's much too idealistic, but as everyone here knows, getting a college education is about more than career training. It's about being better prepared to interact with the real world. It's about absorbing as much new information as you can. It's about exposing yourself to different ideas that make you question the way you look at the world and really consider whether or not your way of thinking is right.

And isn't that what we all really want our society to be like?

Could Not Reading This Post Cause Cancer?

Probably not. As long as providing news has been a way for people to make money, the desire for increasingly sensational stories that'll attract attention has led to the proliferation of ridiculous claims and massive misinterpretation of relatively mundane facts. Case in point: an article that claims that eating the yolk of an egg is as dangerous as smoking.

This article was presented on the first day of my Statistics class this semester as an example of how facts can be skewed to an absurd degree by the media for the sake of creating a story from nothing. The original research that this article is based on concluded that people at risk of heart disease should probably avoid egg yolks. This was violently twisted by the author of this article to mean, "EGG YOLK WILL CAUSE CORONARY HEART DISEASE. BEWARE."

This highlights a major problem with our society: people will assume that a source is reliable just because of support from a major news outlet, especially if its a topic that they're not personally educated on. That being said, while it's your responsibility as an individual to look into the information that you're taking in, the people putting it out these kinds of articles should be held accountable as well. Providing people with this kind of misleading trash and calling it news is morally reprehensible, and it's rather depressing that people still think this is okay to do.

This has really been more of a commentary on the media at large than a specific current event, but I hope that it encourages a more critical look at the world. Tomorrow, John'll be posting with news that could potentially save your life. Be sure not to miss it.

And now for something completely different...

Hey everyone! So, as promised on Sunday, I'm back to post something exciting. Today, I'm gonna share something that should appeal to anyone reading that enjoys puzzles, logic, programming, and/or math.

Project Euler.

This website provides hundreds of challenging problems that require a basic understanding math and a thorough understanding of basic logic. Some basic programming skill is generally necessary to compute the solution, but seldom anything advanced or complex, but the real challenge is in determining the proper algorithm for finding the answer to a problem like "Add all the natural numbers below one thousand that are multiples of 3 or 5."

Personally, I find that messing around with this is a great way to relieve stress, and I think that anyone that's ever enjoyed any of the things I listed at the beginning would have a real shot at enjoying this too.

I Wish I Read More

I've had a lot of time to think this week, and the part of it that wasn't spent playing Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep was largely devoted to trying to think of a handful of good books to blog about. This has been a rather difficult task, largely because I rarely take the time to read. It's terrible, and I'm planning to fix that in the coming months.

and it's a story that might bore you but you don't have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden...

In the entire time that I've been in college, I've only read one book purely for pleasure and not because it was required for school. That being said, the first book I'm going to discuss is The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. This book explores the not-so-romantic entanglements of a web of college students in the late 80s. The story is presented with chapters narrated by pretty much every named character, primarily focusing on Sean, a drug dealer with an "I don't give a shit" attitude toward life that's falling for Lauren, an art student pining after a boy she fell in love with that's off in Europe that also used to date Paul, a bisexual drama student that looks down on almost everyone around him that may or may not be in a relationship with... Sean. It may sound like the setup for a bad game of Fiasco, but the unusual rambling trains of thought and multiple unreliable narrators weave an interesting tale that somehow ends up conveying a pretty meaningful message. Don't watch the movie though. It's exactly as shitty as this description would have you think the book would be, and its only redeeming quality is Ian Somerhalder.

Moon. Glorious moon. Full, fat, reddish moon, the night as light as day, the moonlight flooding down across the land and bringing joy, joy, joy.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay is the first in a series of books that sparked the show on Showtime that you're probably more familiar with. The book follows Dexter Morgan, a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Police Department by day and a vigilante serial killer that hunts down killers that have gotten away with their crimes, as he tries to determine the identity of the Tamiami Butcher (or, for viewers of the show, the Ice Truck Killer). The writing isn't great, but it's a quick and worthwhile read. The second book in the series is as well, and is a lot less predictable for people that have seen the show, though I've heard terrible things about the third and beyond.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

Ahh, Harry Potter. As others have said this week, the world that J.K. Rowling has crafted with this series is so vast and memorable that it'd be hard not to find yourself in love with it. This blurb is less about encouraging reading that, and more about Pottermore. For anyone that lives under a rock, Pottermore is a site that was launched last July that contains a lot of fun flash games relating to the various books in the series, but much more importantly, it allows you to get a deeper look at the world that the series takes place in. The various sections are filled with detailed notes from J.K. Rowling about various aspects of the world that simply never found its way into the books. Plus, you can be sorted into the appropriate house and be assigned a wand. Who wouldn't get excited about that?

To whoever might find this, my name is Chris Lynch, and I'm pretty sure I'm dying. In fact, if you are reading this, then I'm probably already dead. Not that anyone will be around to read this... from what I've seen, I'd guess this is the end of everything.

This last recommendation is probably the least substantial on this list, but it's worth the entire half hour it'll take you to read it. Zombie Haiku by Ryan Mecum is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. It tells the story of a poet that is going about his day to day life when he becomes a victim of a zombie apocalypse, and then he continues writing about his journey as a zombie to his eventual death... in haiku. It's a fun little book that provides a nice little bit of entertainment on a rainy afternoon.

Hopefully you've seen at least a handful of things this week that have aroused your interest enough to get you heading to the nearest bookstore. I'm about to read The Stolen Throne by David Gaider, a book set in the Dragon Age setting that serves as something of a prequel to the series of games, and then I'm probably going to be off to Bookmans to find a few of the books that have been recommended this week. Have a great weekend, and good luck to everyone heading back to school this week.

Blood and Dude Sex

First off, I'd like to say that I'm incredibly excited to say that this is the one hundredth post to this blog, and it seems like a fitting time for implementing a new format. To kick off the first of our Current Events weeks, I'm going to talk about an issue that sort of ties into last week's topic of discrimination that I couldn't figure out how to bring up in my post, so I'm gonna ramble a bit about it here: blood donation and the non-heterosexual male.

For those of you that don't know, one of the FDA's current policies (originally enacted in 1985, back before we really understood what AIDS was or how it spread) for donated blood is that if you are a male that has had sexual contact with another male even once since 1977, you are not allowed to donate blood. If you are a female that has had sexual contact with a male that has had sexual contact with another male even once since 1977, you are not allowed to donate blood for one year after last exposure. This issue is one that carries a lot of weight for me on a personal level, so perhaps I should start with explaining my background with it.

I've been donating blood with a semi-large group of my friends fairly regularly since December 2009. Usually the majority of us are able to give, but there's almost always at least one of us that can't. Ever since they eliminated the maximum pulse requirement, that one person has never been me. I'm also one of the least prone in our group to serious problems with feeling ill afterward. My blood type is O+, which means that my red cells can go to anyone that has an Rh positive blood type. All things considered, I'm a pretty great blood donor.

I'm also bisexual. I've yet to ever be  in a sexual relationship with another guy (for reasons that are not to be discussed on this blog), but if I were in that position... I'm not really sure what I'd do. Actually, I know exactly what I'd do. I'd lie to the blood donor center. I'd also invite my theoretical boyfriend to come give blood with me the next time I went.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that MSMs aren't at a somewhat higher risk than straight guys for contracting HIV. That being said, I'm pretty sure that the difference between being a slut that'll fuck anything with a pulse and opposite-sex sex organs and having sex only in the context of a committed relationship is far more significant for determining risk than sexual orientation.

I can understand why the fear of AIDS and lack of understanding led to the creation of this ban on MSM blood donors, but the fact that it exists in this day and age is utterly ridiculous. I have a lot of facts from the American Red Cross about blood donation and why we need more people doing it, but the most striking is that under 38% of the population is eligible to give blood, and the fact of the matter is that most people simply don't.

I think that Spain and Italy have the right idea on this. As stated in the article, their policies prevent donation if you've had more than one sex partner in the past six months, regardless of sexual orientation. This makes much more sense, and with how much more reliable HIV tests are today, there's no real reason to discriminate based on sexual orientation. Giving up the opportunity for perfectly healthy blood because of a homophobic policy is just... absurd.

As a final note, I wholeheartedly encourage everybody reading to head over to their nearest blood donor center and go through the screening process to try to give blood. I can't stand needles, and this kept me from trying to give blood for a while, but upon finally being convinced that it was worth trying once, I found that it wasn't that bad. You don't have to look at the needle when it goes in, it doesn't hurt, it's over before you know it, there are rarely any adverse effects unless you fail to follow the instructions given, and you get free cookies and juice.

...Seriously, who doesn't love free cookies and juice?

Equal Opportunity is Awesome

Like Kathleen, I should preface this by stating a few things about my background. I'm white. I was born into an upper middle class lifestyle. I'm male. I've had a lot of opportunities for success in my life, and I feel like I've made an effort to take full advantage of them.

I'm going to primarily focus on the issue of gender, because I have incredibly strong (some may even call them extreme) opinions on issues of gender equality. Those of you that read my personal blog have already heard a lot of what I'm about to say before, but hopefully this'll be a little more focused and organized.

A while back, there was a wonderful constitutional amendment that nearly got passed. By that, I mean that the only thing left was for three states to ratify it, and it would've been official. It was called the Equal Rights Amendment, and this is how it went:


Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.


I don't know about you, but this sounds like a pretty kickass idea to me. I mean, what could go wrong? It couldn't be much more explicit in saying, "Discrimination based on gender is bad. Stop that." Why would people choose not to ratify it?

The answer to that is rather heartbreaking: people didn't actually want equal rights based on gender at the time, just protection for women. The possible implications of this amendment seemed absolutely absurd at the time. Women being drafted? Men being treated as equals in issues of custody of children and alimony? Worst of all, same sex couples being allowed to get married?

...Yeah, I kind of think that's all a load of shit. Wanting to not lose your special privileges is a terrible reason to fight against the equality that you claim to want so badly. Honestly, this is why most feminists today just kind of piss me off. I love the idea of equal rights, but equal doesn't mean, "Women should have all of the same rights as men... plus special rights that only women should get."

My issue with most forms of anti-discrimination laws is that they don't really seek to solve the problem as much as provide a quick and dirty patch to try to make the injustices on either side cancel out. This is a poor strategy, and I really think that the best idea for handling that is to try to start everyone off with a blank slate as much as possible. Maybe it's just because I've been fairly privileged, but I honestly believe that we all make our own successes and failures. Maybe those things come a little more easily in certain circumstances, but I really feel like the ultimate result is largely affected by our own actions.

However, one of the most tragically omnipresent issues for any minority group still existing today is the issue of hate crimes. People are terrible. People have a tendency to harbor discomfort toward that which is different, and because of this, people have the potential to be full of irrational hatred toward a group or idea. Because of this unfortunate piece of human nature, hate crime laws are still necessary. Special measures do need to be taken to prevent harassment based on race, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, social standing, and more. It's a sad truth, and I hope that we as a society can overcome it someday, but until that day, we need laws to protect these groups.

The most important point that I think I can make is that we really just need to do about discrimination is to figure out how to handle it on a personal level. If you find yourself discriminating irrationally based on one of the above factors, you need to make an effort to change your ways. If you see your friends or family doing it, you should try to educate them and get them to change their ways. If you find yourself becoming a victim, come out of it stronger by defending yourself and demanding equality. Most importantly though, you need to understand that you're not perfect, and you need to not be a self-righteous or self-important asshole. As long as you follow these general guidelines, you're doing your part in a fight that will hopefully be irrelevant in the future.

If I Ever Get Alzheimer's, Shoot Me In The Face

To start off, thanks to John for covering for me yesterday. I had my wisdom teeth removed on Monday, and I've been kind of out of it ever since. Not 100% sure how much sense I'll be making, but I haven't taken any painkillers since late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning, so I'm gonna give this my best shot.

The legality of this issue is a messy one, though really, I don't know if it should be. As Kelsey mentioned, there are a couple of states that allow it, and the conditions on it are pretty restrictive. Multiple doctors need to sign a form saying that you only have a few months to live, and then that's it. It seems like a pretty decent set of restrictions, after all, we can't have people running around getting poison from the doctor whenever they want. This seemed like an acceptable idea, and I actually wrote a research paper in favor of it in high school. However, as time as passed, other situations that it doesn't quite cover have left me less and less comfortable with it.

Most immediately, the issue of terminal illnesses that won't kill you immediately. As the title of this post suggests, the idea of dementia terrifies me. The idea of going on living as this empty shell of who I used to be is just... it's terrifying. I would hate to go on with life that way. It just sounds unbearable.

This may sound heartless, but I don't think that Do Not Resuscitate orders and refusing treatment are that different from straight up going the assisted suicide route. The only difference is that it's passive instead of active as a choice.

What it comes down to is that if somebody is ready to die, then they should have the legal right to do so. The mechanism used to enact that choice isn't nearly as relevant. Forcing people to go on beyond the point where they've ceased to really be people against their wishes isn't right, and I think the law needs to allow this option. I'm not really sure of the best way to adjust the existing law in states that allow it. Perhaps opening the option up to anyone with a terminal illness regardless of how long they have to live, but requiring them to sit on the decision for a certain number of months before they can actually do it? I don't know.

Well, that ended up being rather depressing. We'll be returning to our normal post schedule tomorrow with Pendleton, and again, thank you to John for posting early.

TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life

I put a lot more thought into television than is really healthy. I'm pretty sure that most of the reasons that people bitch about television as an inferior medium for telling a story are full of shit, and it has just as much potential as literature or film, if not more. The entire idea of watching characters evolve over an extended period of time and seeing how the world, both in and out of universe, affects how that happens.

As many people have mentioned, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a pretty fantastic example of what a television show should do. I would say Joss Whedon in general is pretty good at that, but honestly... I dunno. Angel kind of sucked, and I'm not all that familiar with his other work. Honestly, I think that I'd probably hate Firefly if I watched it for the same reasons that I don't like Doctor Who or Mass Effect or Monty Python. I'm also pretty sure that I'm going to get shot for most of what I'm saying in this paragraph, so back to Buffy. It did a lot of things that most shows just don't do well. Long-running plots (*cough* Angel), consistent and meaningful character development (*cough* Glee), and even the musical episode was pretty damn fantastic. As other people have mentioned, it was able to seamlessly go between serious and comical, and that's just something that is hard to pull off.

One show that I've been knitting to lately has been Grey's Anatomy. I went into it not really knowing what to expect, and after getting through the first seven and a half seasons, I think I really like it. In one episode, someone brings a gun to the hospital and begins a killing spree. Despite knowing exactly who would die and who would survive, it kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. I was emotionally involved in the episode, and I think this is a huge factor in what makes a show good. Too many shows today try to get by on shocking twists as a substitute for actual momentum, and that's terrible. If a show is going to throw curveballs at you, they should serve a meaningful purpose. They should not be cheap, and they should make you feel something.

Another show I've been watching has been Glee, and if you haven't watched it, dear god, don't. It's a terrible and addicting show that's actually as awful as it sounds. I only still watch it because I'm too invested to get out, but I can't think of many episodes that ended in something other than wanting to punch Ryan Murphy in the face. This show has done things that I consider offensive on multiple occasions, and I really don't think I have any positive things to say about the show aside from the music occasionally being really good... I'm not really sure what the point of this was.

Special mention goes to Friends, which I have seen all the way through multiple times. It's kind of my go to example for what a sitcom should do. It also has a lot of issues that I'm very critical of in other shows, but I can overlook them for the most part because it has that special place in my heart. I really like it, and I'm not sure that I can provide much reason beyond that.

All of this being said, I'm looking for new shows to start watching as I'm running out of Grey's Anatomy. Any suggestions?

Intelligent Design is Not Science

For anyone that might have missed my post from Personal Religious History week, go check that out before reading further. It may help with providing a bit of context for my opinions here.

Science is a pretty great thing. Advances in our understanding of the universe and how it works are pretty fantastic, and I think that's just because it allows us to reassess the situation based on new information, and generally, if the assumptions we've made are correct, then it'll work. If they don't work, then we have to rethink our views and find a way to adapt.

This is just how life works. With that, I find it kind of bizarre that so many people can be resistant to that idea when it comes to apparent conflicts between religious texts and science. The idea of, "Well, the Bible says that the world's only existed for about 6000 years, and science says it's been billions of years, so clearly someone has to be wrong."

Though, this might just because of the way that I think of the relevance of religious texts. They're not so much about the details, because let's face it, it's entirely plausible that the details were lost in translation or were never recorded correctly in the first place or were exaggerated to make the impact clearer and... religious texts and ideas aren't perfect, and I think that if they conflict with reason and the overall message that the religion is trying to convey, then there's a problem and you should rethink your interpretation of the text.

The fact that I'm rather irreligious may make it seem like my insinuation that these texts could be flawed is occurring way too lightly, but I really don't think that's true. If I believed in a particular religion, I could believe that someone that believed the same general things thousands of years ago could have made an incorrect assumption or written something down that made sense at the time and doesn't anymore.

To sum up, I think my point is that if your religion tells you to love everyone and be forgiving, then you should let people have dude sex and not protest at the funerals of soldiers. That is all.

Does Anybody Actually Like Visual Art?

Art is a tricky thing. Our goal this week was to figure out what it is, and of course, I cheated. My first instinct was to go to dictionary.com and start looking for my favorite definition, which is pretty much how high school debate works. Everything it gave me was... kind of useless. It was all too vague. There had to be a good definition somewhere that I could base my post on.

Actually, who am I kidding? If art wasn't such a ridiculously vague idea, we wouldn't need a week's worth of posts to discuss what it is. So much for that approach.

I think that there are too many unnecessary connotations tied to the idea of art. Almost everybody so far has gone straight to visual art as a focus for their discussion, and that makes sense, because in elementary school they send us to art class and we play with crayons for an hour and that's art. There are those guys a long time ago that painted or drew or carved some pretty cool things that are supposed to carry a lot of meaning, and I'm sure that they do, but it doesn't really evoke any kind of emotional response from me, most of the time.

A lot of the definitions that I looked at dealt with the idea of beauty and ideals, and the first thing that came to mind was this.

Math is beautiful. I can already hear people groaning, but those people are wrong. Mathematics is the most basic and pure entity in the entire universe, and there's not really any way around that. In the immortal words of Vi Hart, "Simple rules, complex consequences." It's practically a requirement for high school algebra students to just take a few minutes to play with the different kinds of functions that they can put into their graphing calculators, just to see what kinds of things they can make. My desktop background right now is a rendering of the Mandelbrot set from Wikipedia. Why? Because math is beautiful. I could go on about this for a while, but let's get back to figuring out what art is.

Another huge idea behind art that isn't really addressed by the simple beauty definition is the idea of expression. The way I see the world, art needs to be able to convey some kind of emotional meaning. It needs to forge a connection between the artist and the audience. It needs to give some kind of deeper look at the nature of either of those parties, or perhaps just the world at large. It just needs to say something, and this is where modern art fails miserably.

I'm not a person that really thinks about art all that often, but when I do, I think the key factor that I judge it on is what it makes me feel and how intensely it evokes that feeling. John'll have a new topic for us tomorrow. Have an awesome week, and try not to spend too much time counting the spirals on all of the plants you encounter.

Though, I Really Want To Take Psychology

This post will not really be based on any scientific fact or knowledge, largely because I'm neither a biologist nor a psychologist nor a sociologist nor... I'm a mathematician, and how people work isn't exactly my area of expertise. That being said, I'm going to try to bring whatever I can to this topic, and that's a discussion of how much I think (based solely on my own conjecture) one can affect the other and whether or not they're both really important.

Having a genetic predisposition toward some kind of trait seems about as solid as the wording implies. You're going to have a lot of feelings steering you toward one track, but there could be other factors in your environment that may push you toward something else entirely. I think that these factors are the ones that end up mattering. Every time I've met a set of twins, they've been very distinct people, and that's because of the variation in their experiences. I haven't done extensive research into twin studies, so I won't get into that here, but my guess would be that anything indicating a trend would do so with a fairly weak correlation. I mean, by weak, I really just mean no more than 85%, but still.

When it comes down to it, while the distinction between whether nature or nurture determines a particular factor is relevant in understanding how a person got to be who they are, I'm not sure that it's a meaningful distinction in trying to understand who they are. I've heard people that try to imply that traits determined by nurture can't be innate and unchanging features of a person, and this just seems a little... blatantly incorrect. Most of these arguments have been in the context of sexual orientation, so I'm not really sure about how well it applies in other specific aspects, but I do believe that it's possible for characteristics of a person to be unchanging and determined by nurture rather than nature. This isn't to say that all major aspects of a person work that way, just that it's possible for some.

I'm not entirely sure that I actually said anything, but hopefully it'll kick off the discussion for this week in a way that'll lead to other interesting ideas from people that might be more informed on the issue.

Now And Then I Think Of All The Times You Screwed Me Over

I should preface this by saying that I'm a pretty particular person. Even a brief summary of the biggest things that bug me would take thousands of words to scratch the surface of, and I'm aware of the fact that I'm a bit unreasonable. That being said, I'm going to address what I think is the biggest and most appropriate of my pet peeves: screwing other people over by being lazy.

I'm not the best student. It's not all that uncommon for me to just blow off assignments because of stress or fail to study for a test because I'm worried about other things or to settle for a B when I could work a bit harder and pull off an A. I'm prone to doing things that only affect me in a half-assed manner. That's a personal flaw, and it's one that I can accept for myself.

What I can't tolerate is when people take that kind of attitude with any kind of work or project that affects other people. I had a lab group for first semester biology last year that did this. We would set deadlines for everyone to submit their portions, and no one else would adhere to them. I'd always be the one to compile the work, and there were multiple occasions where other people completely failed to prepare their sections, and I would have to redo them at the last minute. The result was usually a shoddy report that we ended up with grades in the 70s for. I got an 88.5% in that class, and about 80% of the grade was group work. I know that I would've had an A in that class if it weren't for that group, because I nailed everything that I did on my own.

I can't understand why anyone would ever screw other people over that badly. Even if the task at hand isn't particularly important to me, if it affects other people at all, then you can bet that I will put 110% in on it. If you agree to do a task that other people are depending on you for, then you should fucking do it. It's not complicated. It's just common courtesy. If you want to be the kind of person that does shoddy work, that's fine. If you're the only person being affected by your poor choices, then that's your business, but don't make that someone else's problem.

Wow, that was a lot more intense and rage-y than a breather week should be. Can't wait to see what John has to say tomorrow. Also, for anyone that didn't notice, we have a new regular contributor this week! Randi's gonna be an occasional contributor now, and the fantastic Laura has taken over for her.

For the Good of All of Us

Disclaimer: I know little to nothing about the criminal justice system beyond common knowledge type things. If there are any gross inaccuracies or oversimplifications or whatnot, I can try to address them in comments, but otherwise, I'm just gonna go at it with my very limited knowledge base.

Anyway, the way that I see it, this topic really comes down to one string of questions that gets at a single relevant point: what's the purpose of the criminal justice system, and by extension, government as a whole?

This is a philosophical question that has plagued those in charge of public policy forever, and I don't think we have anything remotely resembling a universally agreed upon answer. However, this is an opinion based blog, so I can use my own opinion as a basis for discussion, so here it is: the purpose of the criminal justice system is to prevent crime. This seems pretty simplistic as a definition, but it really pulls attention to the key point in the struggle between the goals of rehabilitation and punishment, which is really, as Kathleen said, that it just depends on the case.

If someone gets a DUI or steals a million dollars from the government, then they might not actually be a horrible person, just a stupid person that made a stupid choice. Punishing these people is kind of useless. That won't prevent crimes, it'll just make them pissed off at the government. The proper response is to take measures to ensure that they won't commit crimes again, and that requires more than just throwing them in jail or taking away their license for a few years. Basically, in most cases, I believe that rehabilitation should be the primary goal.

However, and I'm going to make a rather huge assumption here that not everyone will agree with, there's still the problem of the fact that Evil (a term that I use specifically in reference to the DnD alignment) does exist in the world. Some people exist that are not going to be rehabilitated, and they're going to continue to cause death and destruction and what-have-you. This is not okay for the rights of the law-abiding citizens. Unfortunately, for these people, I think the only currently plausible option is punishment. It's a sad idea, but the truth of the matter is really that sometimes it's the only option.

Well, that felt a little psychotic toward the end. I'm not sure that I actually made a clear point, so here's one now. Rehabilitation should be the primary goal, and if that doesn't work, then the government needs to do whatever is necessary to protect the rest of its citizens. John'll weigh in tomorrow. Until next week, make good choices, and don't embezzle tax money.

I Wish I'd Taken Chemistry in High School

The way that online classes are typically handled is... well, abysmal at best. Requiring a discussion post and replying to X number of classmates on each topic isn't going to get you anywhere near simulating an actual classroom environment. Personally, I think that the problems with the format lie in the fact that most instructors don't really know what to do with it, so they try to approximate a traditional classroom to the best of their ability.

An excellent example of online classes being executed poorly would be... well, every online class that I've ever taken. Most recently, I took a Teaching English Language Learners class online. It followed the same model that every online class I'd taken before then. Read a set of class notes each week, read an article or two, write a reflection, comment on three other people by the end of the week. There were also a few projects thrown in here and there, but this was the bulk of the class. Then the midterm came, and I failed it rather miserably. Why? Because this was not an effective method of learning. There was no actual teaching occurring, and it was too easy to just skate by without actually retaining any information.

However, I don't think that all hope is lost for the prospects of online education. There are a few factors that need to be properly addressed before it can be a valid method, though.

1) Subjects. Online education is just flat out inappropriate for some subjects. The most immediate example that comes to mind would be languages. Some subjects just need that face to face interaction and communication with an entire class that you could simulate with video chatting, but at that point, why bother?

2) Content delivery. Most online classes that I've seen provide content in a way that's simple for the teacher to produce, simple for the student to access, and just... too ineffective. Simple word documents aren't good enough. Content needs to be delivered in an effective manner that can address multiple learning styles, and it needs to do it in a way that only online education can do. Personally, I like the idea of interactive flash-game-type-contraptions that show how things work with a written and spoken explanation, along with questions as students work through it, with explanations for what they may have done wrong provided if they get the wrong answer.

However, the best uses of online education come not through fully online classes, but classes taught in person that are heavily supplemented through online tools. Now, any college student today has used Blackboard or Desire2Learn, and most instructors usually post grades and the occasional handout from class, but what I'm talking about is when it serves a purpose that either can't be served in person or can be served so much more effectively online.

The most prominent example is submitting assignments. Submitting papers and such through an online service of some sort eliminates most of the issues with losing homework between printing it and getting it to class, and it allows the instructor to provide feedback and engage in discussion over the assignment outside of regular class time.

Another example that works particularly well is posting notes online. Now, a lot of people are opposed to this because it encourages laziness, but providing the slides and allowing students to print them and take notes on important points from the lecture is kind of the best thing ever for a student. It allows for having all of the straightforward bits already available and encourages actually paying attention in class instead of just trying to rapidly copy down every word from the slides.

All things considered, online education will never completely replace traditional classes, but it will play a huge role going forward. The availability of online classes for those with limited schedules will increase, and as time passes, the methods of running these classes will become more effective through trial and error, and online components will become necessary at all levels to supplement the traditional classroom environment, all in the name of making the content more accessible to as many people as possible. John will be offering his views tomorrow, and then Pendleton will be wrapping up the week on Saturday.

Blood, Blood, Gallons of the Stuff

In trying to figure out how to approach this topic, I thought about to what extent I might feel desensitized to violence. For this, the most immediate medium that came to mind was television, largely because Netflix was one of the greatest things to happen for my spring semester. Right up there with knitting, which is also sometimes rather violent.

First, there's Law and Order SVU. For those of you that live under a rock and have never seen it, go check it out immediately. It's pretty great. That being said, the cases can get a lot more brutal than most of the crime shows out there. Despite this, the show doesn't leave me cringing in horror when I watch it. I'm fascinated by the way that the characters handle the atrocities being committed, and the degree of terror innate in the rapes, murders, etc. featured in the show doesn't end up factoring into it as much.

Grey's Anatomy, on the other hand, has entirely the opposite effect on me. I always find the scenes of the surgeries to be highly unnerving, and most of the time I just flatout avoid looking at the screen during these sequences. The sight of human skin being cut open and the organs being prodded at leaves me feeling rather grossed out, even though what's going on is 1) noticeably fake and 2) not really violent, just graphic. Watching all of the organs being moved around and the blood spurting is just... jfsdfkjdsfds. It freaks me out.

I think that this is the distinction that affects how I handle violence in media. It might just be that I'm a very visual person, but the description of something horrifying doesn't really affect me that much, while the sight of something much more mundane does. When it comes down to it, this kind of attitude toward violence is probably responsible for things like the glorification of wars that Kathleen mentioned yesterday. It's easy to talk about violence and not be affected, but the minute that photos or videos of what actually going on hit the public eye, perception of the events changes.

In a way, I actually think that making more visually violent acts appear in the media, we can more deeply link the ideas of violent acts with the reality of what they are. By being exposed to it, we're not becoming desensitized; really, the opposite is occurring. Or maybe I'm just being ridiculous and overlooking psychotic homicidal children that are being created by violent video games and television. I kind of doubt that, but you never know. The moral guardians might be onto something, but I doubt it.

Anyway, I hope you've taken something away from that, or maybe have something to add. I completely encourage commenting to start a more in-depth discussion on this subject, and that really applies to all of our topics. John will be back tomorrow to wrap this week up, and I have it on good authority that there may be an additional post on this topic coming. Until next week, have a happy June.

All They Want is Energy

Music. I love music. My taste in music is a little odd. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to characterize it. I usually just tell people that I listen to "a little bit of everything", but that's a blatant lie. I'm ridiculously picky about my music, but for a long time, I wasn't entirely sure what the deciding factor was in whether or not I would like something, and then it hit me: sincerity and/or energy. Wow, that sounds pretentious. Let me start with an example.

As anyone that I've talked to in the past few months will tell you, as a result of The Voice (freaking Jermaine Paul), I've been going through a bit of an Automatic Loveletter phase. This song isn't really representative of them at all, but it gets at the reason that I love them in a very pure manner. In every objective manner, this song is terrible. The lyrics are incoherent, the music is generic, and her voice is very technically bad here. That being said, there's so much power here, and you can practically taste the passion. There's a rawness there that I can't really explain, and that's what makes this song one of the most played songs in my iTunes library.

Ke$ha. A lot of people have reservations about this crap, and I understand why you might, but I'm here to tell you that those are stupid. The objections that people generally have are that she's indicative of everything that's wrong with pop culture today. Those people need to understand that that is the point. Ke$ha's entire purpose with her "music" is to be irreverent and fun and to not take anything seriously, and damnit, she does that better than anyone that's ever claimed to do such a thing, musically. That being said, she makes the list of things that I love because her songs epitomize that kind of unadulterated ridiculousness that you just don't see enough of.

What kind of blog post about music would this be if I didn't mention musicals for at least a brief moment? I really don't know how this ties into any of what I've been talking about, but having these songs with characters telling a story is just one of the most fun applications of music that there is, and I love it. Especially the fairly trashy ones. Chicago, Rent, Mamma Mia!, Wicked... The list goes on. I picked this song to represent this overarching category because... well, it's fun.

Ahh, P!nk. She is a tough bitch, and you don't fuck with her. She's kind of a badass, and despite the apparently contradictions in the message she puts out there with her music (see: 'Cuz I Can and Stupid Girls), there's one common denominator: she does not give a shit about what you think, and she's going to do whatever the fuck she wants. Love it or hate it, you have to respect that.

Last but not least, Paramore. This song is... this song. I love this song. You may recognize a line from it as the title of this blog, and that's because I fucking love this song and this album. Really, so do most of the people here. Brand New Eyes is definitely my favorite album of all time. Why? Well, it came at a point in my life where it was particularly poignant. The band that I was in was falling apart, and I was working through trying to be friends with my psycho bitch ex, and there was other stuff going on that I'm not going to get into here, and it sounds really stupid, but this album really helped with that.

Anyway, I'm not sure that I actually made a point with any of that. To sum up, a song needs to address some kind of realistic emotion in a way that's sincere in order to appeal to me. Hopefully there was at least one thing here that you hadn't heard before that you like. This week's been fun, and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I have.

Too Idealistic? Maybe.

Approaching this topic is surprisingly difficult for me, for two main reasons. The first, though less relevant, is that being the person to really kick off this week's discussion is a little inherently challenging. The second is that, with education being my intended career path, this topic is one where I really don't know where to begin because I have so much to say, and parsing it down to something that would be interesting to read is a little overwhelming.

That being said, I'm going to try to address something that's not really a reform driven by public policy as much as it is driven by teachers simply doing their jobs more effectively.

Now, my sister's 3rd grade teacher sounds like one of the most terrible instructors to ever be allowed in a classroom. She is terrible at classroom management, she teaches topics in a disjointed manner, and she throws tests over material that she skipped over at them on a semi-regular basis without any warning. To top it all off, she's close to retirement and makes a point of saying how much she hates teaching and is ready to be done with it.

A less extreme example of a bad teacher, though still a seriously flawed one, is the teacher that a friend one of my teaching classes worked with this semester at a middle school. We had an observation task centered around motivation to learn, and at the end we had to interview the teachers. When asked about what we, as teachers, could do to address students that simply aren't motivated, her response was that there's nothing we can do.

In both of these examples, there's a critical flaw: attitude. Teachers cannot have this negative attitude toward their students. It sounds a bit clichéd, but teachers need to have faith in the ability of every single student to succeed, and their job is to do everything they can to make sure that their students walk away with the necessary content knowledge and belief in their own ability to succeed in future classes. I know that not every student that I have in the future will end up successful, but goddamnit, I will do everything in my power to help them get there.

That being said, attitude clearly isn't the only thing that needs to change. Elaborating on a point that I made before, content knowledge is a necessary thing to give students. The remainder of my discussion is going to be heavily oriented toward math classrooms, though honestly, I believe that the ideas at hand can be adapted to other classrooms to address similar issues in those fields.

I'm going to start with a sweeping generalization that is going to highly offend at least one reader: elementary school (and usually middle school) teachers suck at math. They don't understand how it works or why it matters. There are dozens of anecdotes out there about basic algebra tests being administered to them with abysmal results.

This is why so many people loathe math, even though it's the most beautiful and pure of the core academic subjects. They're being introduced to it by teachers that don't have the conceptual understanding that is needed to do well in high school and beyond. Instead of being taught to see patterns in how things work, students are thrown massive tables of numbers to memorize, a daunting task which turns most people off to the subject entirely. Occasionally, a student may actually be interested and ask a question like, "What if I want to subtract a bigger number from a smaller number?" to which a teacher will probably say, "YOU CAN'T DO THAT." This is terrible and not how math works. To quote Vi Hart (whose videos on YouTube you should check out immediately if you've never seen them):

The true mathematician takes 'You can't do that!' as a challenge. If you someone tells you that you can't subtract a bigger number from a smaller number, just invent negative numbers! If someone tells you that you can’t multiply a number by itself to get a negative number, then invent imaginary numbers. If someone tells you you can’t multiply two non-zero numbers together to get zero or raise one non-zero number to another and get zero, you should probably say, ‘I’ll do both at once! And in eight dimensions!’ And if you ignore them telling you that numbers aren’t eight-dimensional and that inventing fake numbers is a useless waste of time and actually figure it out, next thing you know you’ve got split-octonions, which besides being super awesome just happen to be the perfect way to describe the wave equation of electrons and stuff.

The more appropriate answer to the student's question would be, "Well, you can only do that with negative numbers, and those are a little too complicated for us right now, so we're going to stick with the numbers we're used to for now." It may not be the answer that the student wants, but it will help them to feel less lied to later on when they're told that negative numbers are real and have these strange multiplication properties that seem like more ridiculous arbitrary rules.

Instruction should focus on trying to develop a conceptual understanding of material rather than a procedural one. This more deeply instills a sense of understanding in students than simply throwing rules at them and saying, "THIS IS HOW THINGS WORK." It makes them feel like the subject is less stupid and arbitrary, and the fact that you're probably not speaking in all caps makes them respect the class far more.

To get to the underlying point I'm trying to make, teachers need to not suck. They need to be able to do their jobs well. Allowing crap like the teachers I mentioned earlier to continue existing in the schools is an abomination. I think that these issues could probably start to be addressed by US society treating teaching like a legitimate profession and giving teachers slightly more than minimum wage as a salary, but until that happens, the burden is really on teachers in the system to actually give a damn about what they're doing and try to fully understand the material they're teaching and why they're teaching it.

But most importantly, they need to never give up on their students.