Quinoa, as she is pronounced
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Sh-moh!
Woke up from a dream with these two songs in my head,
My only wish is that there was more ghostbusters in the bridge
Music Videos
I was feeling sick so I watched a bunch of music videos, thought you might enjoy them too:
Stuck in my head since I watched 7 Psychopaths the other night. Back then it was cool to smile when you sang.
Shingai and the Noisettes with a 60s inspired tune:
A seasonal favorite.
The original French:
This is a special treat to those I went to EB with;
Which seems to have the same chord progression as this Decemberists tune, (and maybe ever other folk song in existence);
Forgiveness
Last week I saw Paranorman, the new animated film by Laika, the makers of Coraline. The movie was kind of a (now) classic story of a child bullied because he is different, but then his gift ends up redeeming him in the bullies’ eyes. This narrative has become a trope in the past 30 or 40 years, from Carrie, to Revenge of the Nerds. SPOILER ALERT: The twist here was in the denouement, instead of just having the movie end with the rubble of the destroyed town, or the underdog who gets the girl, the movie ended with a lesson about forgiveness. If you destroy your tormentors, you’re no better than them for trying to destroy you; you can’t let your pain turn into a monster and take away the empathy you yourself were denied. As much as I appreciate the idea that everyone has a special gift, and that it’s often the same thing that people make fun of you for; it’s really never that simple. Telling nerds that they’ll become the next Bill Gates and girls that’s they’re just too mature for their peers only serves to isolate them further as the think they’re the smarter than everyone else (and as someone pointed out to me, that’s how we end up with the Columbine shootings). No one has a monopoly over pain, popular girls and bullies can feel bullied and misunderstood too; no one survives adolescence unscathed.
I think the diversity conversation that this country has been having since the 60s needs more of this. One interpretation of Obama’s poor performance at the last debate was that he became placid as a reaction to the angry black man trope. Identity politics can be incredibly useful to create a home and a community for people who feel undermined. But we also have to acknowledge the flawed and frustrating world we live in, we have to accept that sometimes we have to live with our oppressors and find some common ground.
Life is messy, people die before their time, people are mean, people are crazy and relationships end. We can be angry and upset, and we have a right to be, but we also have to move on because we’re only as strong as the things that pull us down.
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Longtime readers might notice that I’ve written about this before. Also, how come no one ever clicks on the links in my blogposts?
Infographics and UIs I’ve Loved
Some of my favorite characters in movies aren’t people, they’re GUIs (graphical user interfaces). In Iron Man, Stark’s robot butler named Jarvis is represented as a wonderfully snarky and futuristic UI. I recently saw a movie called Sidewalls where the main character was an architect and she would see the sketches behind the buildings. In Stranger than Fiction the GUI transports you into the mind of a compulsive IRS agent. It’s wonderfully appealing, see for yourself:
(I only picked up Pale King because I thought it would be similar, let me know if it isn’t). The recent British Sherlock Holmes show, Sherlock employs a similar trick. All of these UIs, as I’m calling them, display more information on the screen than you would otherwise see, but in a way that doesn’t feel cluttered or unecessary.
Lately I have been really enjoying these older data visualizations at A Handsome Atlas. Infographics and maps overlap in some very interesting ways. Good Magazine consistently does this well, as does the NYTimes Online. Here are some interesting visualizations of New York, and maps made by local artists/designers Sha Hwang and Eric Fischer. It seems like a designer’s job is to balance, usability, aesthetics and economy, is a cartographer a designer too? How is their job different?
Measuring Pain
Not all pain is visible. There are many different kinds of intense internal pain. The way that pain was always explained to me is as swelling of some sort, some organ or vessel is engorged enough to be too big for its container. There are other types of pain, (strains, psychological pain, etc.), but it seems to me that this type of pain would be good to measure. If you told a doctor you were in pain and then you gave them a measure of it, they’d be more likely to believe you and treat you. If, you weren’t able to measure it using that pain measuring device you would know that it was a different kind of pain and they would be able to treat you better because of it. win-win
Why can’t we measure pain? We understand a lot about pain these days, how it works in the brain, different mechanisms for its transmission, yet we rely completely on patient assessment for pain reporting. It is important (probably the most important thing) to take that into account, but it should not be our sole source of information.
Also this article is amazing:
No Evidence of Disease
In which I worry about my debt
I think it’s time to talk about my debt, because I certainly can’t stop thinking about it. Doing this masters degree is going to put me in debt. I’ve never had any student loans before, I’ve been able to acquire scholarships and financial aid, I worked through college and my parents were able to help out. Now I’m on my own and by the end of this year I will have almost $50,000 worth of debt. I worry about my debt.
I carelessly missed many scholarship deadlines so I can’t get help in that way and most masters programs don’t give financial aid the way that PhD programs do (this is extra frustrating since I plan to pursue a PhD). The idea is that with the professional degree you should be able to pay back the loan by working in your chosen profession. But what if I decide, after going to school, that I don’t want to be in this profession? I worry.
In order to pay back my loans in 10 years (for 1 year’s worth of a 2-year program), it will be about $500 a month. The theory is that having these computer science skills should raise my income by about that much over my lifetime. But not if I don’t use them. Even if computer science jobs are as recessionproof as they say I may not find a job. Even if I do find a job I can stand, $500 a month is a lot of money. I worry.
It’s hard for me to concentrate on my studies with the weight of this debt on my shoulders. In addition, my chronic health problem isn’t getting any better and I fear the stress of school and debt and work is making it worse. A few weeks ago my net worth went from positive to negative. I worry.
My mother assures me that I’m not alone, that the skills will not be worthless, that the knowledge will be helpful (even if it’s the knowledge that this isn’t for me). There are more scholarships, I could work for the government, and that we will repay my loans together. And yet I worry.
Would I worry less if I was in working retail and living in a crappy apartment? Who knows. I worry that I am putting off life in order to concentrate on school and it will catch up to me. I don’t know how this is going to work out, and not knowing is making me worry..
Imperialist Geography
People ask me what it means to be a geographer. Most people think of memorizing state capitals. I tell them I make and study maps, I also tell them about Tobler’s law : everything is related, closer things are more related than distant things. For my thesis, I wrote about Afghanistan, a country whose fate is determined by its physical and cultural geography.
Saying your’e a geographer or a cartographer makes you sound like a British Orientalist from the 19th century, but until American stops behaving like 19th century Britain in its foreign policy we’ll still need cartographers:
Apple Maps – Old News
*I’ve decided to change my blogpost day to Monday and shorten the posts while I’m in school.
It’s been a few months since Apple announced it would they would create their own map app, no longer relying on google maps. I’ve linked to a few articles below. I read somewhere (I can’t remember where) that apple has hired real cartographers to run their maps department while google hired computer programmers. I’m curious to see how this turns out.
- How Google Built its Maps – Atlantic
- How Google Earth Changed the World – the Independent
- A side-by-side look at Google vs Apple Maps – Gizmodo
With the advent of GoogleMaps everyone became an amateur cartographer. But in order to make maps that display more specific information you need to be able to use a program like ArcGIS and you need some rudimentary knowledge of programming. Is this a problem? In my Human Computer Interaction (HCI) class we’re learning that it is never the User’s fault if they can’t get something to work. Is it okay for some fields to require specialist knowledge? Why/Why not?
On a personal level I’m trying to figure out if it’s worth it to learn enough about computers and programming to write my own programs or whether I just need to learn how to use the crappy existing ones well enough for my needs.
Gossip
How bad is it to gossip? I’ve always felt that it was pretty bad. It’s not technically against the commandments, nor is it a cardinal sin, but it is decried in most religious texts and seems morally suspect. It also seems anti-feminist, not because we’re gossiping about women necessarily, but because gossiping is such a cliche thing for a girl to do. And I generally try to be better than that. I’ve been on the wrong side of bad gossip so I know how much it can hurt.
But after all this I must admit that I love to gossip. I love knowing secrets, and having the power to tell someone. I love taking the knowledge and putting it in my own words. I love the camaraderie it brings, when you both are in the inside.
I saw someone today who I hadn’t seen in a while, and I wanted so hard to gossip about her, but there’s something just as great about keeping good gossip to yourself. Even when the facts are correct, and it’s something I would feel comfortable saying to the gossippee’s face, you can tell when it’s news, and when it’s gossip, and there doesn’t seem to be a right way to do it. I don’t consider myself a gossip, but in the company of certain people (high school friends especially) I can get carried away. I’ll try to keep resisting this urge, even if the action gives me pleasure, since it does seem particularly vile and hurtful.
I memorized this sonnet in high school (I didn’t want one about love), seems applicable;
‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d,
When not to be receives reproach of being;
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deem’d
Not by our feeling, but by others’ seeing:
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad and in their badness reign.
– Sonnet 121 William Shakespeare