enj + foblander present:
Over the break I pirated Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro and cut my teeth on this little skate video. Using tools like those for a project like this is kind of like using a backhoe to scoop ice-cream, but why settle for anything less than the best?
It’s Jimmy and I skating on campus, with a cameo from a random guy I saw skating in China. Oh yeah, and there are robots.
Here we go again. I have decided to stop pursuing my Communications major in Mass Media Studies. Last semester I signed up for a double major in Math, and this coming semester will be my second without communications classes.
When I started school at FSU I was sure that I wanted to be a Computer Science major. I already had a couple years experience with Java programming and had spent plenty of hours doing less scientific things with computers such as hacking Diablo 2 and playing other games. After a few semesters of programming classes I decided that the CS curriculum was not for me. I was finding that the things I wanted to learn were much easier to pursue on Google and I was gaining real experience at work. I already knew my motivation was something besides working on computers, I wanted to do something with them. So I looked to a communications degree.
I took two semesters of Communications before I felt something missing. The two legality classes were interesting, since I am very interested in the law related to technology and freedom of speech. They gave me a general overview of the history of communications law, but they did not give me a much more indepth picture than I had already formed by reading wikipedia, eff and the blogs of several prominant bloggers. In one class I was provoked into thinking deeper about the concept of wikis and in particular wikipedia. The format of the class annoyed me at first, but I ended up liking the discussions. What I felt was missing was the puzzle. I have a hunger for puzzles, and I knew that Math would satiate that hunger. I think it has something to do with the consistancy and the absolute truths math provides. I have always loved math, and I have never truely applied myself to it. Finally I decided to do something about that and I signed up for a double major.
Studying communications isn’t about solving puzzles, it seemed to be more about identifying relationships between information and people, and how to measure those relationships. While I still find that to be an interesting subject, like Computer Science, I don’t want my schooling to get in the way of my education. I want more time to focus on math classes. I feel like math is a study where guidance helps me a lot. I believe the incremental style of accumulating knowledge in math, and how interrelated everything is lends itself well to academic study. While learning most everything requires practice, I think math lends itself better to being taught becasue relationships between concepts can be explained.
In Computer Science and Communications, I think the most useful concepts are acquired by real life experience. Furthermore, if one can express a concept in mathematical terms, implementing it on a computer is fairly mechanical. In my experience the hard part of programming (besides getting your platform to not frustrate you to no end) is conceptualizing the problem in terms that you can program. Since this conceptualization can and is usually mathematical in nature, math is then the hard part of programing. The implementation is just a google search away. In Communications most of the concepts I have run into are up for debate, supported or criticized by academic studies and hardly ever have a solid foundation in absolute truth. I should just say that Communications is an emperical field, that sounds less negative. While I find those concepts interesting, I found that I had already taken part in the debates, and I had plenty of resources to continue those debates on my own. It also really grinds my nerves to study empirical subjects for some reason (which is why I am able to loathe physics yet love math)
One subject I also enjoy studying immensely is Chinese. Language has increasingly become an interest of mine, and learning such a different language as Chinese has been a great challenge and lots of fun. I didn’t have a real reason to start studying it, except to be able to speak a little when I went on vacation with Jimmy to Taiwan. What started as a little intro has grown into a new major! Either this spring or the coming fall FSU is set to launch a Chinese major. Having completed over 20 hours of the language courses, and several hours of cultural courses, obtaining the major should not take too many more hours.
So now my two majors will be Mathematics and Chinese. People have mockingly called me a Renaissance man, but I don’t see it that way. As I said in the begining of this post: I don’t want to build computers, I want to use them. This interest has not changed since I started programming in middle school. Now it is embodied in my studies through math which lets me understand the best ways to solve problems, and chinese which gives me the very interesting problem of translation. While my emphasis on what I apply computers to tends to shift as I learn more, it invariably involves computers, math, and language (communication if you will).
This is a more mundane blog than my other one at enja. It will be more frequently updated. I think blogs have a quality to time relationship, where quality is the dependent variable and time is the independent variable. I normally don’t update my other blog often because it takes too long to write posts that I feel are of some level of quality, or at least depth. Think of this as a quicky.
I’ll start it by defining illathonian. It’s a silly word my friend in high school made up. Its just the philosophy of all things “ill”. I also like the sound of it, and its got my name as well. I am a disciple of the illathonian principle. Doesn’t it have a ring to it?
I started smoking again. Duh. Can’t quite everything at the same time I say, and seeing as I have to quit a girl, well I don’t need something like a nicotene fit to distract me. It’s all just excuse, I wonder when I will quit for real. It gets better each time, but there is something more deep rooted. Its not illathonian, well, because its not ill. It makes me ill.
-enj
I made another blog?
Are you for cereal? I found this hilarious and somewhat inspiring article that breaks down exactly why Chinese is hard.
While several things in the article are true, and funny because they are true I think the overall tone of desperation is for comedic effect. Chinese is hard, really hard, but its fun as hell. Maybe I’m just crazy for liking the challenge, but you can put together the pieces of the puzzle if you ask “why” enough. The radicals start making the characters look familiar, the sounds start becoming distinct, and the culture starts shining through. Im starting my third year, and I havn’t always been a good student, in fact I’ve never been truely studious. I just try to pay attention and I have had increasingly more fun speaking with Chinese people as my skill progresses. I mean, that’s what it’s really about for me anyway, just being able to talk to more people than I can now.
I have two issues with the article. The first one is serious about section 6. where the author talks about dictionaries. He never mentions electronic dictionaries. I payed about 50$ for a decent pocket sized electronic dictionary with a qwerty keyboard in china. All the menus are in chinese so I can’t use close to half of its functionality, but I’ll be damned if I ever use a paper dictionary again. When my skill progresses I’ll probably have to buy a traditional character one too, and eventually I’ll probably shop for a more sophisticated one. With these its much easier to look things up because you can choose between a couple different methods at the click of a button. Book dictionaries are much slower and have fewer options.
My second point is a small note on the cultural boundaries talked about in section 9. The author never mentions Friends, the hit american TV show. I am willing to bet that the average Chinese student of english knows at least twice as much about Friends as the average American that fits the target demographic for Friends. It’s sick how much they know. It is funny to be told you have a Chandler personality (or is it insulting?) out of the blue. My favorite was hearing “Sorry, I’m being a total Monica.”
I’m still waiting for the day that I am proficient enough to karoake Jay Chow…
This essay was conceived after reading about the recent AOL search data leak. A comment about the tragedy of people making light of such a privacy violation lead me to think deeper on the subject. The tragedy. The comedy.
If you ask any person if they care about privacy, they will respond positively. Yet why does it seem that society does not care about privacy? I submit that people are more willing to sacrifice other people’s privacy than they are to protect about their own, hence the aggregrate attitude towards privacy is one lacking any serious enforcement.
I can think of several possible reasons for this. The most important one being that privacy is a hard concept to define universally. My best definition of privacy is the control over one’s personal information. Information can be anything from a person’s naked self, to a person’s thoughts as well as a person’s actions. This control is often maintained by avoiding observation by others, yet sometimes it is simply the expectation that others will not observe.
If that is an acceptable definition of privacy, the control over one’s personal information, how does that fit into our society? Freedom is our society’s most cherished concept. Freedom can be defined as being free from the control of others. One of the most important freedoms we have is freedom of speech, which means we have the right to share information without being subjected to the control of others. This presents an obvious conflict with privacy when that information is personal.
The definition of privacy is further muddled by the fast pace at which technology is advancing. In the past privacy was possible because means of surveillance were very primitive. Here it is important to note that authority and where it lies has a large impact on the debate of privacy. In the past one’s privacy in regard to the public eye could only really be violated by somebody with social authority, because there was no means to prove otherwise. One’s privacy in their personal space could only be violated by a direct observer. Today technology has advanced to the point that one’s privacy in their own personal space can be violated remotely, and furthermore, they can be brought into the public eye without a social authority. Image, video and audio recording all allow for cheap and efficient observation. With the advent of the internet, privacy is decaying at an exponential rate.
The internet has decentralized information, and it continues to decentralize it at a more and more efficient rate. Recording equipment is incredibly cheap, and the means to spread recordings is almost instant. All it takes is bad intentions and a little bit of determination to violate a person’s privacy in ways most people find incredibly uncomfortable. Now we see firsthand how betraying search results can be, how loaded with personal information. We are sending this information voluntarily and it is certainly being collected.
So if all the means exist for a Big Brother situation, or worse, for every citizen to be a big brother, what do we do? How will giving people control over their own information help if they are giving it away? Besides search engines, using credit cards at chain stores tells volumes about a person. We want credit and we want search, we want cameras and we want camcorders, but we have no experience mandating behavior when it comes to these things. There are no laws on the books against aggregating voluntary information, no laws against making recording equipment, and we don’t even know if we want those laws. Laws fighting technology have a pattern of failing, the only hope seems to be mandating responsible use of those technologies.
However if we mandate responsible use of those technologies, we are conceding part of our privacy already. We are conceding control to the organization who holds the data, to the person who weilds the camcorder. Are we ready to do that? Do we already do that? Ask yourself how comfortable you are and realize that privacy cannot be taken for granted. Then ask yourself if its really all that bad.
I just posted a mini essay on slashdot in response to some poor fool’s post bashing wikipedia’s reliability. The poster argued on a false premise so I decided to inform them. What resulted was a rather lengthy prediction of the future and where “media” (as in all the sources of our information) is headed.
I’m really starting to appreciate YouTube.com! They are on the forefront in a cultural revolution that is shaking up the establishment. No longer do you have to have insane amounts of money or contacts to express yourself, in video no less! So I put both of my chinese videos on youtube, and they are no longer hosted here, it saves me money/bandwidth and I like the idea of being a part of youtube. here they are:
apparently this one is not subtitled in english, I can’t find the subtitled version right now, but I’ll change it when I can.
My neighbors Jimmy and I get a bite taken out of us by Vice Kennels’ Belgian Malinois. Classic Edition International provided the music. Word is bond son, wooo we gonna hit em this summer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D6MjyGIgnA
This is my (quite old) skate video with Ransom AKA IllaReg’s (quite new) music behind it. Enjoy!