love, read, write

Article: “Built In Bias”
Article-Author: "Brooke Gladstone
Magazine: Muse
Issue: April 2012

This article is about psychology and our decisions and personalities.

It starts out with the butterflies. It’s not the brain sending messages to your gut that you’re nervous and that you should now feel all fluffy, but actually the other way around.

For instance, warmth makes us feel good. (Which is probably where the whole chicken-soup thing comes from.) Researchers did a study where they pretended to be fumbling with a whole pile of stuff in their hands and then handed a cup of hot or iced coffee to people. They then described an unknown person based on a packet of information and asked the person holding the cup what that person’s personality may be like. The test subjects holding a hot cup of coffee rated the person noticeably higher for “warmth” than those with iced coffee. In another study, test subjects holding a hot therapeutic pad chose more gifts for a friend, while those with a cold pad chose gifts for themselves.

There are many other examples such as these that showed that we are unconsciously biased under certain atmospheres, and even under certain appearances such as gender and weight. Also, scientists did a study where they could predict people’s decisions up to seven seconds before the test subject was aware of making them. It seems our choices are already made and can’t really be hindered much in a short period of time. They even say that if we’re predisposed to believe myths, we actively block out any contradictory information.

This all adds up to whether we really make our own choices or not, and when we truly make our own decision, without any outside influence. Do we ever? And if not, what happens to the justice and ‘fairness’ of the world? Are we grumpy in the winter and happy in the summer? Will people at a social disadvantage always stay that way? And how can we fix it?

I also have another question that I know will not be answered any time too soon, but—the article generally implies that warmth=happy, positive-ness and cold=selfish, unfriendly. Not to the degree that when we’re cold, we hate the world and everything in existence, but to a noticeably greater degree than those with something that is warm. Which leads to my question—then what about hot? Why are we prone to be grumpy when we’re outside on a super-hot humid day? What makes us cheerful when we’re outside in the winter?

This almost ties up with a book I read recently, called The Body of Christopher Creed by Carol Plum-Ucci. In the book, a character says that everyone has a line of reality, and if you cross it, they just won’t listen (or something like that). It kind of makes sense, now, because we don’t hear things we don’t want to hear. In other words, we block out the truth when it hurts most.

Tooooooooooooooooooooday’s essay is going to be….

Drumroll, please…
doodoodoodoodoodoo….

BEST OF WHAT’S NEW (you probably already knew that) GADGETS!

This is an article-ish thingy from the science magazine, Popular Science, in the December 2011 Issue. This issue shows the 100 best innovations of the year. And they categorize the ‘best innovations’ into about ten groups. The group I’ll be writing about is the “Best of what’s New—Gadgets.” The contributors to this article/list/explanation are Tim Gideon, Corinne Iozzio, Steve Morgenstern, and Darren Murph. The Gadgets group has ten inventions—to list them all, they are
> Lytro Light-Field Camera
> Eye-Fi Direct Mode (SD card)
> Kyochera Echo (Android Phone)
> Looxcie Live (Video-Cam)
> Nvidia Tegra 2 (Android Batter Extension Chip)
> Sony Alpha SLT-A77 (Camera)
> Wacom Inkling (Tablet)
> Orobotix Sphero (RC Toy)
> Blocks Buster (E-toy)
> (There’s Probably a Tenth one, but I can’t seem to find it amidst all of the scattered paragraph layout. Sorry, Tenth One.)

They range from Cameras to electronic toys. But which one is truly the best, and which one do I think is the best? I guess it’s all different depending on the person, but to me, me who likes drawing and writing and notebooks, I would choose the Wacom Inkling as the best Gadget Innovation of 2011.

I guess I’m kind of biased towards it because of my views and interests, but I honestly think that the Wacom Inkling is absolutely AWESOMEISTICALLY an astoundingly, profoundly, amazing invention/innovation. Phones and cameras are cool when it comes to new additions and updates, but the new innovations are just improvements—a double touch screen, or a quicker shutter. Although, I have to admit, being able to change the focus after taking a picture is pretty cool. But I think that the Inkling is by far the best. The inkling is a whole new idea and invention. It can be so easily accessed and used for so many different purposes, and it would probably benefit if not all, most of its users.

Even me (if I had it). It brings the real art world and the digital art world together. Often, I find myself debating over whether I should use a notebook or Photoshop. I want to upload my drawings onto my website, but I also want a hard copy. Scanning isn’t good enough for uploading, and printing a drawing from Photoshop doesn’t give the same effect on paper, either. It often creates lots of self conflict, and I end up either regretting my choice, or wondering how to transfer that drawing on Photoshop onto my notebook so I can carry it anywhere I want.

The Inkling also eases the burden of losing a drawing or sketch, especially if it’s for an important job. If I had an important car sketch in my notebook that I drew for the next meeting, and I lost it, in most cases, I’d have to either find the notebook somehow, or redraw it. The Inkling gives you the warm and fuzzy feeling in your stomach that yes, you have another copy on your computer. Even better, you can improve on it using Photoshop or Illustrator.

What I find awesome about the Inkling is that you can use layers. It is just unimaginable that someone could come up with such ingenious idea! Simply brilliant, to my opinion. You can draw and create new layers and upload it onto your computer to edit layers and lines and colors, while still having the good feeling that you’ve used the traditional method to draw this, too! It’s combining the real and digital world, as I’ve said before.

It would be awesome if the Wacom Inkling can have another series with colors, and even with a pencil. I’m not sure if the Inkling now lets you browse through layers and draw on a prior layer, but if it doesn’t, Wacom should probably improve on that in their next version. Surely then, the Wacom Inkling will become an indelibly dominating art-related technological invention of all time!

Here is the Featured commercial video of the new Wacom Inkling, the AMAZINGEST TABLET-Y INVENTION! :D

Here is a drool-summoning picture of the Wacom Inkling.

Okay, bye! :D

Today’s E+ is on the article from the science magazine Popular Science, “Where Data Lives” by Rena Marie Pacella in the November 2011 Special Issue.

So basically, to sum it up, the article “Where Data Lives” pretty much gives you an in depth listing and explanation of the Worldwide Database. For a summary of that big a topic, it’s only two pages, but if you look into the short explanations of each type of database, you know enough to be able to imagine the never ending, vast, expansive land of data that exists out there. In fact, you know that you couldn’t possibly imagine it at all.

Data, to my opinion, is like a creature. If you know how to tame it, it can become your friend and also a helpful assistant. But if you let it slip or use it for the wrong sort of reason, it might just unleash itself onto the whole world. There is so much data—from genetic information to keeping track of every organism on Earth to even just the code of human relationships—it can be used for good, but it can also be used for bad.

One day, in the future, we will have an unlimited amount of information just put there in front of us, placed ever so conveniently that all we have to do is lean forward and grab it. It kind of takes the fun away from learning, don’t you think? Just the thought that with the right information, nothing can stop you from knowing anything—it kind of scares me. It makes me ask myself, is knowing a lot good? And because of all of this knowledge, we create and discover more and more things, which will, in the long run, probably turn out to be something drastically harmful and devastating (like cars). Of course, after those years, we find and create things that will counter our foolish actions from decades ago using the same knowledge.
It seems that humanity is destroying nature—in fact, if we hadn’t existed, if no intelligent creature had existed (which is technically not possible because one will always be smarter and therefore develop faster), theoretically, the Earth would be much more healthier. Instead, Earth is infested with this cancerous species calling themselves the top of the food and control-the-world chain, and shaking up the Earth’s health and inhabitants without asking a word.
To say, it’s not exactly our fault, nor am I blaming us and telling humanity to commit suicide—it’s in our general nature to want to survive, a very common and probably in many minds, overused phrase. It’s all back to Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection. But with or without biological proof, it’s obvious that inventing is, in a way, our way to survive. But now that we can think, and act upon decisions and counseling, maybe we can harness all of that data, and use it wisely.

This is where my ultimate opinion lies—that we should share data across the world. It should be universal, and unlimited—to every last fact (besides government-involved issues and such). Although we wouldn’t be learning anything if we had all of the world’s information right at our fingertips, but if the whole world—if every single person could see the same information, the world might become more unified. Instead of dividing people into classes of what they know, we would all be equal. And the majority of people may not bother into looking at the subjects of psychological advertising or biomolecular engineering.

Every bit of information, of course, would give credit to the founder of the fact. And although people from other countries may use scientific information to create chaos and disorder (maybe in our healths), we can use the same scientific information to disable that, or even prevent it. If every single capable person could judge what is true and what we should do about a worldwide problem with the same amount of information, we just might get closer to making a wise decision for once.

Today’s ‘essay’ is based on the article “Bookscapes” by Victoria Johnson, in the literary magazine “Muse” in the May/June 2012 Issue.

(I’d just like to give full credit so I don’t get sued. 3: )

I love books. Books are awesome and they sweep you off your feet and they take you to a new place, a place that everyone is welcome to and everyone can help develop and create. It gives me a break from stressful things and it can sometimes make me feel better. And reading this article just gave me another reassuring feeling that I am not the only person in the world who feels this. And that some people choose to take their love for books even further.

Johnson, in this article, takes the subject of ‘Books with maps.’ Basically, books with long journeys or books that take place in the same general area, places where a map can help guide you step through the new world it makes. She explains the differences of the purposes of the maps. For example, while the Phantom Tollbooth (by Norton Juster) map generates as a usual map would, the Winnie-the-Pooh (by A. A. Milne) map is more of an easy-fied map that doesn’t exactly prove useful in navigating through the story, but more of an along-side picture that is characterized to have been “Drawn by me and Mr Shepard helpd".

It is truly intriguing and very thought provoking that someone would take these maps, which were taken by me, for granted, and dissect them into categories and specify why this type of map would help in this type of story and plot.

One ‘famous’ book (series) with a map that Johnson forgot, or more likely, left out because of the length of the article, was the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis. I have read the whole series a while back, and I still remember looking at the map in awe of the detail and how the story came alive just because of the map. I think that the Narnia map falls into the ‘Phantom Tollbooth’ category—it serves as a normal map would.

At this, one must ask oneself a question. Do maps really do good to the reader? I have mixed feelings about this, and it seems I am situated on the border line between two options. To the author writing the story, it will do the reader good. Because it portrays the story and setting and relative location in a more accurate way than it would have without a map. It would make the story’s image in the author’s mind more similar to the story’s image in the reader’s mind. It would also bring the story alive and bring you closer to the story. But to the reader, I find that maps can be a little restraining. Maps create boundaries in the ‘imagination’ part of reading. After all, part of reading books is imagining the characters for yourself. We often find ourselves saying, “That’s not how he looked like in my head!” when seeing a movie based on a novel. Making a map sort of ruins that, and it kind of takes away the role of our brain working to put and fit together the pieces of the puzzle described in the story to create a whole, single, coherent map. The answer’s already there, on the first page.

With maps or without, Juster, Milne, Tolkien, and many other fantastic, well known, celebrated authors with maps as accompaniment to their stories have creative and imaginative stories that wouldn’t, and couldn’t be hindered by any sort of ‘restraint’ to imagination. Although maps themselves may be unhelpful, the story is what matters, and in the end, all that counts.

So I made a new label, which is, as you probably noticed (or not) from the title—“Essays+.” Basically, on every weekday, I have to read an article, either from the science magazine Popular Science or the literary magazine (I think) magazine, Muse.

Today, I’m writing a small essay (after scouring through a stack of Popular Science magazines for nearly half an hour) about “No Pulse.” an article by Dan Baum in the March 2012 issue of Popular Science.

What is life? It’s the question lots of people ask themselves, search for, and consider the still anonymous answer as wisdom. Life, if you ask me, is pretty much inexplicable, with a variant of possible answers. Variant meaning, infinite. It’s just the state of being, and it’s our brain which creates the complex thoughts and jumbles that confuse us and throw us off course in finding our places in social life. It’s the familiar da-dump, da-dump of your heart, giving that familiar friendly greeting when you place your hand on your chest. After all, for a long time, ancient civilizations have considered the heart the ultimate source and origin of feeling and emotion.

As of March 2012, eleven thousand people worldwide do not feel that friendly da-dump. They feel a whir of a computer PC turning on, a low humming of a fly, or no feeling or sound at all. To them, life is the whirring and humming of their heart. What has happened? Have their hearts decided to leave their hosts? Have they decided that they search for a new sense of identity, and revealed their rebellious side to make a different sound, for a feeling of a new sense of life? The answer is nothing near, in fact, it’s more surprising—a jump in medical science, the key to saving lives. No, it’s not a heart on steroids, it’s actually not a heart at all. It is the artificial heart, the HeartMate II. Composed of Home Depot products and some pumps from commercial LVADs, doctors stitched it together by hand to create what may be the redefinition of one of the most fundamental symbols of life.

Sometimes, we have to sacrifice symbolic elements in life to promote life itself. Everything becomes a bit more science-y, and maybe a bit less nostalgic and ‘old-times’-y. This is one of those examples. Giving up a your heartbeat for a few more years of life—anyone would do in a heartbeat. The artificial heart may take away the familiar da-dump, but the fact that it can save lives wipes away any thought of opposing artificial heart implants. I doubt that there are many people in this world who wouldn’t want the heart implant if they needed it, and I definitely think that it is an idea that should be expanded upon. At the moment, it can’t exactly last forever and most heart implants only aid the heart in its ‘pumping,’ but with the exponential amelioration in data, information, and science, it might not be long before people who would have needed to undergo lots of surgery and eventually face death would be walking around with whirring hearts and uplifted spirits and hope.

My only question is the future—if the preponderance of people with possible future heart failures were to have artificial, more improved, futuristic HeartMate IIs, then what would be the sign of death? If you feel no pulse at your patient’s wrist, while he or she is smiling at you healthily, when will you know the difference between conscious and unconscious? It’s just a question to ponder over, and may be solved in the future. But besides that trivial ‘predicament,’ I find the HeartMate two a life-saving invention.