One of my bosses, who is already stretched far too thin, just informed us at our staff meeting that today she had to be the one to tell her mother-in-law that she was going to die of cancer in less than two months. Of course she cried really hard. She’s one of the strongest and most admirable people I know and I wish there was something I could do. I’ve considered cooking a dinner to send along for her family (that was a great help to our family when my dad was in the hospital) but I know I myself am spread too thin and I don’t know what special dietary concerns her family has.

 It’s unfortunate that she had to be the one to tell us, especially so new into the situation. When my grandma was dying and up until several months after she died, no matter how composed I was or how well I thought I could handle the situation, any time I had to tell someone (even without my mind registering what the words meant) I could not keep my composure. It’s a strange, unconcious thing. I’ll keep trying to think of ways to make her life easier, but unfortunately I can’t take over any aspect of her job and my doing anything differently for my job won’t make it better.

Acutally, the truth is that nothing will make it better.

You can’t just predict clustering. That’s the theme of Steven Johnson’s fifth chapter from the book Emergence.

 The first example: A man named Hillis created number organizing software that functioned bottom up. Eventually it hit a natural plateau, so he had to make "predator programs," to goad the other programs along and produce a better end result. The predators weeded out the weak programs so the strong couldn’t get lazy, but in the end Hillis could not even figure out how his own program was functioning (Johnson 170-173). What a perfect example of complexity! Hillis knew what went in, but by the time it was done being jumbled and jostled he couldn’t follow it. I wish he had explained his natural selection program more directly or in computer terms, however, since it’s hard to picture when he keeps talking about animals and broaching the subject like the software was alive. I believe animal behavior is more complexly driven and computer live can only mimic it. For example, I’m fairly certain the number ordering software was not actually afraid on the predators but it still ran? Why did it run away?

It’s funny how such amazing beauty comes from emergent software. I don’t even know how someone thought to apply such an interesting part of science to videogames. I also have to give credit to Johnson for having the idea to write about such an amazing world that few people know much about. In emergent videogames, reaching for a goal is part of the fun. Kids are taught to explore, learn complex systems, and tolerate being out of control. Art and literature play a large hand in guiding and controlling and deep down videogames are just as thoughtful as other disciplines. (Johnson 173-178). Emergent games are based on low-level rules used to grow and make something greater out of the sum of parts. It’s the balance of familiarity/ease and uniqueness/difficulty which makes the game both possible and interesting. For this reason, programmers in this field are nicknamed "control artists" (181-189).

 I can’t help but think how cool it will be when this sort of thing really takes off. Perhaps someday you won’t have any instructions for a game at all, but it will be so based on real life that you can spend your time living something like the plot of a movie! By then you won’t be using a controller, but actually living it and your body/neurons will trigger movement in your imaginary environment. Say, in a game of wizardry, you start off as yourself but slowly discover your powers, trying to pick them out, practice, and get better in your own way and own time. You’d have to do something more than just tapping buttons. It would be programmed so that while you are casually using techniques, you can trigger new ones but doing them in a special, unintentional (but inevitable), way. It would be much less systematic and rigid than games today. You could even do that thing so popular in movies where you’re in a very emotional situation under extreme stress and suddenly you do a sequence and bam! You unlock the most powerful skill you’ve ever had. Games give you the ability, programmers subtley influence your journey by programming in events that make you more likely to do a certain action, and suddenly you have the most amazing videogame you’ve ever played. Fortunately I think we’re headed this way, with the Nintendo Wii I’m seeing more and more commands based on things other than pushing buttons and the programming of games are getting more complex and lifelike instead of linear storylines.

 Oh no, I haven’t even started talking about chapter 6 yet. At least this means the book is interesting. I’ll try to keep it brief from here on out.

 Johnson calls our human ability to understand communication "mind reading." It sounds strange at first but essentially that’s what it is. We try to convey our thoughts to others and they try to receive them and do the same back to you. Of course it’s mind reading! Johnson proved that this ability is not related to general intelligence, but it is a special skills. Small children slowly acquire the projected knowledge of others as they age. Using apes, mind reading deficient animals, children, and autistic people, he showed that even some intelligent creatures are lacking it, meaning it is a separate function of our brains (Johnson 196-199).

 Naturally, the bigger our cities get, the bigger our ability to imagine the minds of others grows. Human beings keep adapting with every growth in civilization. Now we even have the internet, which requires a vast ability to create a mental image, so now we even make software to track our own minds! My favorite part about this topic is the clear link Johnson made between people and the computers they’ve created. The original programmers made computers out of visual, pattern-matching, associative metaphors (recycle bin for deleting, windows of viewing, etc) because that is how people think. We are spatial, associative, pattern-matching beings just like primates. If ants had made the first computers, they would have used pheromone interfaces (Johnson 204-207). What a great thought!

 I believe that idea is worthy of concluding this blog post.

Reading Emergence feels a little like a shot gun reading. I don’t know whether it’s because we’re reading so many pages a day or because it’s slow reading but I feel like we’re moving really fast and trying to squeeze a lot in. At first I was a little concerned because Steven Johnson started out droning in his intro about slime mold and people I don’t know. After about 16 pages he got all scientific-theory-ized and I kind of perked up a little.

 Slime mold is capable of banding together to form a super-organism, and not because one pacemaker slime mold says "Ready, set, go!" but because or positive feedback loops (Johnson 16). Oh science, you’re so charming. To think that not everything bases itself on command and obedience. My favorite part is that discovering things like this makes scientists think with a little more creativity. It makes me feel like I’m not so alone.

Emergence is essentially many ordinary entities progressing from team work, rather than a few smart ones leading the rest (Johnson 18). Behavior is only emergent when it is a system of multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local rules, and oblivious to higher level instructions. They must also produce a discernable macrobehavior (Johnson 19). I think where a lot of people get confused is where they label a complex, interacting behavior as emergent, but they neglect to notice that it’s taking higher level instructions. Like programming, for example. Many software programs for a computer are composed of lists of commands that don’t actually elicit bottom-up behavior, just well-orchestrated top-down.

 I’m sure this is the only theory in which citing ants is fun. I didn’t think it was fun at first, as Johnson went back to droning about ant colonies, but ants really are a good example. Ants get all of their information locally, they do what their neighbors do. If they see many ants doing the same job, they will eventually give up and do something else. In this way, all the chores in an ant community get done and they can predict the approximate size of the colony (Johnson 74-78).

 The successful functioning of ant civilization is based on 5 principles (Johnson 78):

1) More is different - many ants are needed so the proper information is relayed via local information systems. 

2) Ignorance is useful - if ants weren’t so dumb, things would get really complicated, really fast.

3) Encourage random encounters - if there is enough of something (or some type or worker ant) one is bound to stumble across it by chance.

4) Look for patterns in signs - ants have gradients of pheromone emission, making "how much" an important question in the ant world.

5) Pay attention to your neighbor - local info leads to global wisdom and develops a sort of logic. 

From page 132 to 139 these principles are applied on a large scale: human media. Johnson cites the Gennifer Flowers scandal and CNN’s new news segment selection process as the beginning of bottom-up news broadcasting. Television moved from audiences seeing what networks allowed them to see to networks scrambling to find out what audiences wanted to see.

 What interested me more was that people like Slashdot’s creator have the dedication to try to reorder systems as bottom-up. Unique problems come about in this way, such as communication errors and the inability to take in so much information at once. It’s not easy to transfer cues to the group, for example when a crank is pirating a message board, the other readers/writers cannot use their body language to cue the group to ignore him/her (Johnson 150). Therefore, does a site stay small and preserve original quality or does it grow and sacrifice interest? Slashdot created an ingenuitive new system of moderators weeding through information to make it unique, accessible, and tolerable. I don’t think I could have done that.

In a world of constant travel and eternally waiting in lines, it is essential for humanity to be able to recognize when they are being passive observers of their environments. There are so many opportunities to revert into oneself and consequently, many times to become unhappy and solitary. Therefore, it is vital that human beings draw meaning from their surroundings, lest they become shadows passing through, always in transit, never arriving at their destinations. Upon applying Marc Auge’s theories of places and non-places to Sofia Coppola’s movie Lost in Translation, one can identify active examples of this idea and the effects it has on people. The combination leaves an important message about network culture and the importance of bonding.

In the film Lost in Translation by Sofia Coppola, the two main characters, Charlotte and Bob, were lost in a network of non-places. Set in Tokyo, Japan, the characters were surrounded by signs they could not read, people they could not speak to, and places they could not understand. It was in this atmosphere that they realized their unhappiness. Regardless of how their lives were before Tokyo, the forced introspection left both characters to discover their personal lives lacking passion and substance and their personalities absent. Bob and Charlotte did not know where they were in life. That is, until they met. By the time their Tokyo travels came to an end, both characters were significantly more satisfied with themselves and found comfort in each other. They rediscovered that passion they had lost on their own and how to bring significance to their lives.

The settings from Bob and Charlotte’s foreign Japan fall under the categories Marc Auge wrote about in his composition, “From Places to Non-Places.” Auge described a place as being historical and relational, with personal significance for the people experiencing it. Places are highly concerned with identity and meaning. A non-place, by that definition, would then be devoid of significance where people do not connect or feel any attachment (Auge 77-78). Spaces such as airports, train terminals, and hotels are areas usually deemed as non-places, since the main focus is on transit, not communication, and people are allowed to remain in their own personal worlds. They tend not to interact or form any meaning for these spaces, only empty air without thought. Frequenting an area, however, tends to make it a place. A human being develops a relationship with the landscape, as it is given a story in response to the person’s life. A place has a history and its inhabitants know the past. Places focus on the static, whereas non-places focus on the temporary (Auge 101).

“‘Anthropological place’ is formed by individual identities, through complicities of language, local references, the unformulated rules of living know-how; non-place creates the shared identity of passengers, cutomers, or Sunday drivers.”

- Auge, “From Places to Non-Places,” page 101

Lost in Translation illustrated this concept in two different scenes featuring temples. Toward the beginning of the movie, before she met Bob, Charlotte ventured into Tokyo to tour a temple. The encounter did not have a large impact on her, so much so that she was surprised by it. Charlotte was so distressed that even while she was making a phone call back home to a half-attentive listener, she commented that she had visited a temple and felt nothing. This represented how, in her unhappiness, she had just been moving through life without forming attachments to any space, and it disturbed her once she was able to identify it.

It is strange, after all, that Charlotte should go to an area of so much history and meaning and not feel a connection to it. A shrine by definition is frequented by faithful Shinto practitioners. Religion is so ingrained in many lives, since it defines what people believe and how they interact with the world, that a religious institution is bound to be rich in significance and spiritual power. The temple was thousands of years old and yet Charlotte was not moved or inspired at all.

Near the end of the movie, however, after being enlightened by Bob, finding herself, and being lifted from her gloom, Charlotte returned to another temple. She was starting to identify with her environment and make connections to her life. Bob had inspired her not to be just a ghostly traveler through her environment, but to make connections to it. In this particular scene, she saw a new bride and groom walking across the temple grounds and paused. The scene took her breath away as she stared at them, truly feeling the connection to the surroundings and finally identifying a temple as a place of history and meaning. The audience could not witness what was going on inside of her head, but her body language showed that it was very important to her and made a huge impact. She then appears to feel a lot better about herself, as she exhibits confidence and laughter in the rest of the movie. These sets of scenes show that not only are places and non-places genuine constructions of human existence, but that they greatly depend on the relationships and connections people form within them.

When people are interacting with their environments, they are much happier. Sofia Coppola’s characters illustrate this, as their personal meaning expands with the significance they attribute to their surroundings. Hopefully this idea will spread into today’s gradually introverting culture so the world’s inhabitants can finally end up where they are going, instead of eternally traveling alone.

It always comes on instantaneously. It is most definitely mistake-Steph-for-a-goth-kid season.

I attended the Flash 1 workshop on monday through STS. Some problems in another class arose just before it started so I was just leaving the building 15 minutes before the program started. I was very concerned because few workshops fit my schedule after this one and I knew I had to go to one, but they say they will give away your space in the class 10 minutes before the start if you are not there. Panic…but then there were only 6 people in the room when I got there anyway.

They talked mostly about making shapes and the different ways you could move those shapes. I can see how, since Flash is split into 3 programs, you will start off pretty basic, but it did bother me that they didn’t tell us how to apply it to web design or anything else other than hitting ctrl-enter and viewing your movie.

I also learned that you cannot use fancy lines in your animations or they look weird, that adobe recently bought macromedia, and that flash animations can loop even while paused, depending on how you create the image. I made some moving shapes, like a badass square that shifted it’s bottom right vertex out like a slug and inched its way along (which I was told to delete). In my extra time at the end of the program, however, I managed to save the final exercise to my flash drive. It’s an orange car climbing 86 degree angles, fit to orientation the whole time, which makes it go all sorts of weird directions. I think it’s funny, so I’m going to see if Gordon (fiancé) will put it in my blog for me, since the process is kind of complicated.

Two hours is a long time. I can’t imagine doing "Flash in a day" or "Dreamweaver in a day." That would be the most grueling day of my life, not to mention I wouldn’t retain any of it.

This week’s set of readings was a bit of a trudger again. Yes, I made that word up.

City of Bits, Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and Non-places were not fun reads. I will admit, however, that City of Bits was somewhat intriguing, writing style aside. Yeah, it’s kind of obvious what the internet is doing to society, but it’s kind of fun to have it point out, too.

On page 110, Mitchell says computers are indestructable, if their connections are destroyed they can just reroute the information. In this age of copies and electronic files, you can never destroy the original because there are millions of identical clones all over cyberspace. While the copy idea is pretty good (and maybe a little scary) I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call a computer indestructable. I seem to see PCs destruct all the time and lose their information. In fact, it’s pretty easy to destroy a computer, all you need to do is put a couple of ladybugs inside it or spill some water. I think what Mitchell meant to say, though, was that the idea of a computer (and as a result, all computers) is (are) impossible to destroy.

The internet is a fuzzy clone of this world. This makes some sense, considering humans are unlikely to create something they’re not already familiar with. You make yourself a character, a home, and you interact with others. All online concepts have real-life counterparts. There are some barriers, after all, the framework is the same, but the difference is that you can control some things you ordinarilly wouldn’t be able to in real life, such as who you make yourself out to be. He who has the code, has the control (Mitchell 112). There are no exceptions to this rule, as machines don’t carry much sympathy.

Mitchell points out on page 116 that people are usually grouped by location in real life. You make friends because they’re convenient and you kind of like them. Online, however, you make friends out of common interests. I often think of this when hearing about websites like match.com and all those other online singles sites you hear about on tv and in the sidebars of your browser. While most of their "tried and true methods" are the same as people who claim to analyze personality based on handwriting (read: intentionally vague and lucky), it does stand to reason that ni a bigger pool of participants, not limited by physical proximity, you’re bound to find a reasonable match. Now I’ve gotten to a strange place I don’t want to dwell on anymore, so I’ll move on and leave the world of internet dating behind.

Rice went on again about advertising tie-ins and interlinking products to desirable traits and objects. I don’t think I can elaborate in ways I haven’t already.

Yeah, yeah, Jameson, I get it. Post-modernism is about popularity while modernism was about uniqueness. One thing I don’t understand, however, is when I get wordy and awkward in my writings, my teachers yell at me and tell me it’s poorly written. Why does Jameson get away with it? He must be smart and talented if we’re reading his work…or maybe he just has good ideas. Either way, it kind of bothers me that he’s allowed to be confusing but when I do it’s called bad rhetorical skills. I’m told, "You’ll never get an audience to finish reading this, let alone convince them of your point." Perhaps that alone makes it a good lesson in rhetoric and how it isn’t very consistent.

According to Auge (insert your own accent mark), there are a few different guys who have a few different definitions of a non-place. I don’t care about these guys, Auge (you know the drill). They mean nothing to me. Therefore I shall allow someone who finds them entertaining to write about them. I’m content with the idea that a non-place is not associated with an identity. It has no ties, no important memories, no meaning; it’s just a box for storage purposes alone, unanimated by space.

If you look outside, the fog makes it almost seems like the world is white with snow. How enticing…

It is now 1:30 AM and this will be the only class I did my homework/studying/catching up for. Sooo scared.

Some interesting points were brought up in "Identity Crisis." Turkle talked a lot about the personalities we form when we interact on the internet. Some are us, some are far from us, but they’re all created by us so they always reflect us. On page 258 she said that so long as we can keep track of these many, fluid personalities, we can really learn something about ourselves when using them. In class we took this concept further by saying that both on the internet and in real life we are defined by the people around us. They may be different in both places, but our audience still controls what behaviors we execute, what things we say or choose to keep to ourselves, and how we feel about different situations.

I don’t know how I feel about this. Everyone makes such a ruckus about people not being who they really are on the internet. The anonymity lends them so much confidence that they start trouble and do bad things, or they take on a persona completely different from their own. I think Turkle has a point though in saying that no matter what a person ends up like on the internet, they’re still learning from it and creating an extension of themselves. After all, you can’t make up what’s not already in your head. I also know that people get so consumed by the internet that they forget or stop caring about who they are in real life.  Does the learning experience outweigh such downfalls?

This takes us to an even bigger question, well illustrated by the show Futurama. In one episode, the character of Fry has a Lucy Liu robot created to date and naturally, being an attractive, famous actress clone, his time gets completely consumed by her (usually in a romantic way).  His friends show him videos about why it’s bad to date robots: they’re perfect and they never say no, so the real world stops mattering as people give in to their desires. They’re happy but the rest of the world and humanity itself can suffer. Being a comedy, the show doesn’t take the idea too seriously but it is making a statement about people devoting all their time to self-made worlds.

If you take this to a higher level in the future where people can start to control their environments, fabricate friends, and make entire lives for themselves, what comes from it? In such a place, all people are equal, everybody looks how they want in spite of how they were born, they live in the means they want, they find the mate they want, and they spend their time the way they want. At the same time, it’s not reality. The playing field may be level but we lose the interest of an imperfect world and the bad things in life that define the good. Is it wrong to live in a world you control and create on your own, even if you’re happy? That’s one question I can’t answer.

The other piece we read for last week, "Writing in a Culture of Simulation" by Carolyn Miller, was full of stuff I already kind of knew, so it’s hard to discern what actually warrants being mentioned in the blog. Miller analyzed artificial intelligence, how it is defined by the ability to persuade, be believable, and understand, and the repercussions of its invention. 

What I began to wonder was, if your credibility as a living being is defined by your ability to comprehend and persuade, while making this obvious to everyone else, does that make me more human than the girl I went to high school with who couldn’t get her ideas across, was a little dumb, and everyone knew she was fake? Did her artificial smile and kind words stand out, making her less human than I because no one believed she was genuine and they knew she was only skin deep, repeating what she knew had to be said? It’s an interesting concept, considering that’s how they analyze the humanity of a machine.

My sleep schedule? You really want to know?

Sunday/Monday, went to bed at 6:00 AM after working on an ETD 221 paper. Woke up at 9:00.

Monday/Tuesday, went to bed at 3:00 AM, woke up at 8:40.

Tuesday/Wednesday, went to bed at 4:00 AM, woke up at 10 AM after sleeping through first class.

Wednesday/Thursday, fell asleep sitting at 8:00 PM, woke up at 9:00, homework until building patrol from 11-midnight, fell asleep while writing from 1:10-2 AM, was awake for 3 seconds, fell asleep until 3 AM. Got up and finished a desperately needed extra credit paper. Went to bed at 5:30 AM, woke up at 9 AM.

Thursday/Friday…it’s 1:14 AM now, we’ll see. At least my only class on Fridays is English, so I can sleep in a little.

Friday/Saturday, I’m patrolling doors from 8 PM to midnight, hopefully I’ll be able to go to sleep immediately after, but probably not since it’ll probably be noisy and I’ll be on-call all night, ready and waiting to be woken up for an emergency.

Saturday/Sunday, I’m patrolling the doors from midnight until 4 AM, technically 3 AM by daylight savings time, but my body will still be used to it being an hour ahead.

Sunday/Monday, I’ll be running the second set of rounds, meaning I could be up until 3 AM and will be on call, and you can bet that punk kid from the fourth floor is going to call me at 4:30 AM to complain about a noise in the hall. 

Next week starts my second wave of midterms and projects…oh god. Nobody said it would be easy to watch 56 freshmen and try to get into the interior design professional program, but I didn’t think it would be this difficult to keep up. I’m stressed, have no time, and am low on sleep, but I also need the money.

I love Halloween and I’ll enjoy seeing the costumes. I’m both judging a costume contest and participating in one. At the same time, I don’t want to be kicking people out of the building and I’d like to catch up on some sleep. 

More of my time wasting…

Doesn’t it freak you out when people like this voice every character you’ve ever seen? 

I’ve never seen Dawn of the Dead 2004 before. I’ve been watching it for 45 minutes now. OH MY GOD.

I love/hate Halloween tv programming. I can watch it for hours and enjoy it tremendously, but 6 days later I’ve accomplished nothing and can’t leave my room without a weapon.