The Word Made Digital

So last semester I took a class called "The World Made Digital". It wasn't until I looked at my final grade that I realized that the class was actually called "The Word Made Digital", and all of a sudden the course made so much more sense. Anyways...

Here's an interesting question: As we grow older, why does it get harder to change or modify our perspectives on the world? As we experience more, see more, and do more, shouldn't we be able to view the world through more and more lenses? The answer might be pretty simple: As we grow older we build our own perspective, and we're less willing to let it go, and maybe we physically become less capable of appreciating new viewpoints as our brains mature and stop developing at the breakneck pace of adolescence. However, we might be conjecturing silly answers to the wrong question.

Does it actually become more difficult to change or modify our perspectives as we grow older, or is it a case of observational bias? That is, is it because we are aware of more viewpoints that we realize how rigid our own viewpoints are? But any high schooler would be able to tell you stories of overbearing, ultra-strict parents; but then one must ask, is this a case of the parents not seeing it from the high schooler's perspective, or the high schooler not seeing it from the parents' perspective?

I'm sure there have probably been a multitude of sociological studies carried out answering these questions, but quite frankly I'm not actually interested in the answer. The thing that interests me about perspective is that you can have a perspective on perspective, and that in itself will affect your perspective. It's impossible to try and step back from perspective to provide, well, a perspective on it without changing your own perspective in the process. But you probably already knew all of that. Anyways...

The academic study of humanities and social sciences (i.e. "liberal arts") often get a lot of flak for its perceived uselessness in technical applications. As an engineering major in an institute of engineers, it has been very easy for me to fall into that mindset. However, "The Word Made Digital" was offered as a joint course with graduate students who had been liberal arts majors during their undergraduate years, so a number of students in the class had an expansive literary background and, as I saw it, a completely different perspective on the works we saw than I had.

... And I found that I had a lot of difficulty seeing the works through their perspectives. Now I've done a lot of tutoring and technical communication, and people generally comment on how well I can convey ideas (at least when explaining things to small audiences that I think I have a thorough understanding of). I generally attribute this to my ability to switch perspectives and explain things from multiple angles not just in a technical sense, but in a more humanistic, intuitive understanding sense. Similarly, I can learn effectively from a variety of different teaching styles by thinking in the perspective of the 'student' that the lesson is targeting. Yet here I was, confronted by a perspective that I was unable to easily assimilate or imitate.

What was the lesson I took away from this? Perhaps I had become a little complacent with the box I lived in. It is easy to take a bit of cleverness and a bit of eccentricity and label it as "thinking outside of the box". However, (ignoring the fact that self-attributed eccentricity is almost always observational bias; of course everyone has their own unique set of quirks) more often then not all we are is moving the box. It doesn't take much effort to think outside of someone else's box; no two boxes are the same, after all. That's why teams with diversity in training, education, and viewpoints have been shown to produce strong, robust solutions to difficult open-ended problems. However, to think outside of your own box is not such a trivial matter.

Anyways, the true moral of this post is that for my class we made a number of individual projects to help us frame the work we were seeing in the context of work we did ourselves. I'd just like to share my final project, "A Reading Room". There also a couple of other projects I did that I'd like to share, but they aren't as suitable for web distribution and if I ever get around to porting them to some other language, I might release them. So without further ado, here is a link to A Reading Room. It's a Java Application with the two necessary files for it to run (level1.txt and terminal.png), as well as the source code in the form of an exported Eclipse project (requires vecmath). Have fun, use the wasd keys to move. Do whatever you want with it, as long as you don't change the authorship in the code without making significant revisions of your own and don't rehost the unmodified program anywhere. The .jar file should run out of the box, and it's a little computationally intensive due to a pretty unoptimized raytracer I built for lighting, but it should run on most modern computers.

Autumn Daydreams

Well, it's been two long years since I've been here. I graduated high school, finished my first year of college at MIT, and I'm about to receive my first official paycheck from the lab I'm working at this summer (I'm so excited to start paying federal income tax! (not really...)). On a whim I decided to load up this blog, a small snapshot of me nearly two years ago. It's interesting to see what has changed and what hasn't changed...

Partially inspired by life events over the school year, new experiences, new ideas, and my friend over at The Confetti Ideologue, but mostly once again by the summer doldrums, I've decided that I'll try my hand at keeping a blog again. So, to christen this turning of a new leaf (ahahahaha get it?) I've decided to rename my blog from "A Rustle in the Leaves" to "Autumn Daydreams", though the old title now sits in the subtitle.

If I were to describe myself as a season, I would be Autumn. To me, a native of the temperate forests of the northeast coast of America ("New England"), Autumn is a somewhat contradictory mix of self-reflection and new beginnings. Plants that began to grow first thing in Spring begin to bear their last fruit. Trees shed their leaves in a somber yet wondrous swirling display of red and yellow as wind shears leaves off branches. As the temperature begins to drop, one can't help but think of Autumn as the end of something fleeting and precious, even though the trees and plants will simply return with full force next Spring...

At the same time, Autumn marks the beginning of the school year. Old blood, fresh faces, friends both old and new gather for 8 months to gain yet another level in the game of life. Even after graduating I feel like this rhythm, so ingrained into my mind and conscience, will continue beating for quite some time...

I've always been a reflective person, hunkering down as if to prepare for some sort of metaphorical winter. Even when I seem calm on the surface, beneath the surface I am never at peace with myself. Always swirling around my mind are thoughts, withered from the branches of my subconscious, arguing, reaffirming, inspired, random, me. I've always considered my fractured mind, never content with itself, never content with its discontent with itself (so on and so forth), to really be who I am. A mess put together into something resembling, but not quite, a sane and rational human being. You know, this whole trees and leaves and Autumn metaphor might not work out after all.

I would consider myself a dreamer, a realist in action yet an optimist in thought. I am normally a straightforward, pragmatic man but when it comes to things out of my grasp, I've always dreamed, romanticized. Worlds which exist only in my mind - if only I had the power or language to express them, to bring them into reality! If I cannot express them even to myself, did they even exist at all?

Anyways, this post has devolved into some badly written stream-of-consciousness junk that two years from now I'll probably look back to in disgust. Oh well. I hope you'll enjoy Autumn Daydreams, or something like that.