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June 25, 2007

Internet Culture War

So, there’s a blurb on Slashdot mentioning this article that talks about class divisions between users of MySpace and Facebook. It kinda talks about the history of each, especially how Facebook used to be exclusively for college students and, because of this, seems to be almost more “elitist” in its constituents. For example, Facebook users hated the idea of high school students joining their ranks late last year, and even with the infusion of “younger blood,” the site still seems to contain more educated users, while MySpace users tend to be even younger and less-educated.

One of the more interesting points in the article (about mid-way down) discusses the U.S. military, and more specifically how they banned the use of MySpace, but allow the use of Facebook. This is particularly interesting because officers tend to have Facebook accounts, while lower ranked soldiers have MySpace accounts upon military entry.

So yeah, the article talks about methodology and data recovery to a minor extent, and personally I think some of the “data” may be suspect, but it still brings up an interesting point or two… On a related note, I loathe MySpace… I hate going to MySpace pages and seeing terrible web design, horrible pictures in the background that make a given page nearly impossible for me to read, and I think it’s too easy for people to be able to access someone’s page. Now, on the other hand, I think it’s quite useful for getting your music “out there,” but a better-designed web page would be more useful…

Are different socio-economic classes using each site? Perhaps… I’m not sure this site represents anything definitive, but it does bring up a few interesting points and things to think about. I really don’t use MySpace, so I can’t attest to it… Facebook, however, is very clean and easy to use. I’d almost go so far as to say “elegant.” So, my bias toward Facebook is moreso about useability and access restrictions, rather than “the people that use it” (I’d like to think). Then again, as I scanned through some user groups around the time of the last election (Fall 2006), there were a lot of poorly educated high school students making up all kinds of “science” about stem cells…let alone frequently misspelling things…

Thoughts?

June 13, 2007

Of inspiration and life-direction…

So, as many of you may have heard today, “Mr. Wizard” Don Herbert died today at age 89 of bone cancer. Slashdot reported on the death and, if you read through some of the comments after the posting, you can see what this man meant to a lot of geeks and scientists, let alone the general public. I, personally, remember watching the show back in the 80s on Nickelodeon, but can’t remember specifics, really. I can certainly visualize the studio set and the kinds of experiments he did, but not necessarily specific ones like others can…

Reading through those Slashdot comments, you can see how much of an effect Mr. Wizard had on generations of scientists (his first show was in the 50s…had another in the 80s…), and that for many, he is solely responsible for their interest and fascination with science, much in the same way Carl Sagan is for others.

I guess it makes me wonder how many people can point to a single event, TV show, book, etc. that determined their careers and course in life. It’s the kind of thing you put in your college admission essay, really… For me personally, it was probably “Star Trek: The Next Generation” that piqued my interest, then other science fiction writings/shows after that, but these really only affect “scientific” careers. And moreover, even people that like “Star Trek” or science fiction don’t necessarily become scientists, engineers and mathematicians. What about people that have “always wanted to be a lawyer,” “always wanted to be a banker”, or “always wanted to be a doctor?” Are these people just as inspired by celebrities, books, television shows, and the like? Or are they getting their career direction more from parents and people they know? Are there kids out there that are inspired to become doctors because they watch Zach Braff every week on “Scrubs?”

Either way, much like Carl Sagan, Mr. Wizard brought science into the homes of millions of children, making it accessible to them and their parents. I just hope he knew the effect he had on the world as a whole.

June 7, 2007

A month of weddings…

This month is getting pretty busy, lemme tell ya… Last weekend, Brooke and I went up to Lincoln, IL for Alex Pham’s wedding. I was “drafted” to play my djembe for a song (“You and Me,” by Lifehouse), so we had to go up on Friday for the rehearsal and then, of course, stay for the wedding and reception. All in all, a good trip, and we certainly got to see lots of people, many of which I figured I’d never see again after undergrad. On the way back, we dropped by the new Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, IL, which was pretty neat. It was just opened last year (I think?) and features a few different theaters and plenty of documents, including original copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the marriage license between him and Mary Todd. Anyway, it was an interesting trip and you all should drop by if you happen to be in mid-Illinois…

Otherwise, we’ve got Mirnela’s wedding next weekend (co-worker here at the lab…) in Mountain Home, AR and Adam Waudby’s wedding on June 23rd in St. Paul, MN. For Mirnela’s, we’ll just drive down for that day and stay a night, but for Adam’s, we’re going to head up that Wednesday and camp in Wisconsin for a few days before heading into Minnesota…a sort of “vacation,” if you will… While I look forward to the trip, the 12 hr drive there (and 12 hrs back…) aren’t all that appealing…

So yeah, July will be a welcome change from all the driving we’re doing this month… Although, I think we’ve got a few more weddings popping up in August, both of which will be here in St. Louis… Too many people getting married, I tell ya…

Oh, and I turn 25 on June 20th. Send cash. 😉

May 29, 2007

Summer Viewing List

…not to be confused with a “summer reading list,” ’cause that’s so 1992… I don’t really read, that is, so movies will have to do, and more specifically, trilogies. Thus, I’m going to do my best to watch all the trilogies I own this summer. The goal, of course, is to watch each trilogy in one day as best as possible. This may be difficult for some of them, but I’m sure going to try…

So let the list begin:

Star Wars
The Matrix
Back To The Future
Indiana Jones
Pirates of the Caribbean
X-Men
Spider-Man
The Terminator
Ocean’s 11/12/13
Lord of the Rings

I watched the Star Wars original trilogy this past Saturday whilst playing games with Josh, and I’ve got 2/3 of Pirates watched (…need to re-watch the first one again…) – Spider-man is also getting spread out, in that I need to re-watch 1 and 2, after seeing 3 in theaters a few weeks ago. I’ll try to watch all ten Star Trek movies as well, but those are more difficult to fit into one day, so I’ll have to spread that set out over the entire summer.

Of the nine trilogies listed above, Lord of the Rings will be the most difficult (extended edition, of course!). I mean, Nathan, Jerry and I watched all three in one day back in Undergrad… That’s a good 12 hrs straight, of course… I guess I’m saying that I’ve done it once, so I’m unsure as to whether I need to do it again…but I probably will, anyway…

Obviously, I need to be spending more time in the lab… 😛

May 28, 2007

Review: POTC – At World’s End

So, if you’re read any reviews for “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” you’ve seen that they’re somewhat mixed, and honestly, I think I agree.

While the acting and effects were just as good as either of the previous iterations, the story was all over the place, to the point that I really didn’t know what was going on for half the movie…and when a movie is nearly 3 hours long, that “half the movie” quickly becomes 1.5 hrs. I don’t like being that confused for so long… As other reviewers have stated, much of this confusion comes from the fact that you don’t really know who’s on whose side until the very end of the movie…and even then, it isn’t completely clear… Then again, the double/triple-agents amongst each side are to be expected, as we are dealing with a movie about pirates…

But then again, there were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and at least some of the charm of the original made it through the second movie and into the third. I think the trouble for me comes in deciding whether this movie was better than the second one or not. Many were disappointed by the ending in the second movie, especially after following a mostly stand-alone first movie (and in my review of “Dead Man’s Chest,” I correctly compared this series to what was done with “The Matrix”…), and I can’t say that this third movie leaves me feeling all that much better. In all honesty, I still wasn’t completely satisfied with the ending of this one – but if you want some peace in your life, wait until after the credits for one additional, and useful, scene…

So, did I generally enjoy the movie? Yeah, I guess… Will I buy it when it comes out on DVD to complete my collection? Absolutely… But was it better than “Spider-Man 3?” Nope…

May 28, 2007

Review: POTC – At World's End

So, if you’re read any reviews for “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” you’ve seen that they’re somewhat mixed, and honestly, I think I agree.

So, did I generally enjoy the movie? Yeah, I guess… Will I buy it when it comes out on DVD to complete my collection? Absolutely… But was it better than “Spider-Man 3?” Nope…

May 24, 2007

Strange days…

“Times, they are a changin’,” says Bob Dylan… Not that things are drastically different right now from where they were a month ago, but school has certainly shifted to a different “chapter,” so to speak… As of a few weeks ago, I have no classes to attend anymore in graduate school, so I’m working completely on research now. Really, I’ve just been spending the last two weeks getting in to all the literature on the subject(s) I’m investigating, getting papers from the last few years and as far back as 1948…

I guess it’s just that it’s going to be weird getting used to not being spoon-fed information anymore. It’s not like I can go to a textbook for this stuff, or go to a few lectures on a general subject and take an exam after you learn the material… Nope, now it’s reading directly from the fringes of all scientific knowledge, sifting through hundreds of papers and data to try and decide what information to focus on, and what to set aside… It’s just a different kind of learning, a kind that I’m not terribly used to…yet… Kinda like solving a puzzle, really, in that you run across various pieces that you have to fit together. If they fit, you win a Ph.D… 😛

Anyway, life is good, otherwise. We’ve got three weddings to attend in June (let alone our own anniversary…), and we’ll probably spend a little vacation time up in Minnesota while we go to one of them, but that mostly takes care of the weddings for the summer. We’ve gotta figure out what to do with Edie for a few of those weddings, but I’m sure there are plenty of people that’d be willing to watch her (hint, hint…).

Onward, summer!

May 14, 2007

Turtle vs Cat

Don’t believe me? Well…

For those of us with cats, it’s pretty damned hilarious… Makes me wanna get a video camera and find a turtle for Sam to play with…

May 9, 2007

Of Generation Gaps and Twitter…

So, before yesterday, I’d never heard of Twitter…I had to learn about it from an NPR podcast I listened to… It’s apparently a new social networking phenomenon (a la Facebook or MySpace…) that tells the world what you’re doing at any given time. You can post, IM or use a cell phone with text messaging to post a short blurb giving everyone an update, and then you can subscribe to these updates by various means… For example, I could subscribe to your Twitter account and anytime you’d update it, my cell phone would vibrate and I’d receive a text message letting me know what’s up. You can write any message you want, from “looking at websites” to “eating a ham sandwich”…

According to the Wikipedia article, Twitter has been around since October of 2006… NPR and the New York Times, amongst others, have done articles about it… Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world use it, apparently…and this leads me to my point:

Why did it take until May for me to hear about it?

I guess it means I’ve reached something of a turning point… Up until now, I’ve kept up with technology and websites relatively well – Truman students knew about Facebook before it was even available for them to join, and well before news organizations jumped on it as a “phenomenon”… And I keep up with geeky things like that pretty regularly looking at sites like Slashdot and Engadget… So do we all eventually reach a point when our knowledge of the world becomes antiquated? You hear stories from parents beginning with “when I was your age…” all the time, and at some point, all of our parents probably realized that they were knowing less and less about the generation(s) that were coming after them… My generation is just barely involved in the whole “social networking” thing, but the high school students at church are all over MySpace – I simply have no interest in it. Back in college, I’d hear about stuff from friends in classes and new sites to visit, but we don’t really talk about such things in grad school…I’d assume that “real world jobs” would be similar…

I guess I just wasn’t planning on hitting this realization just before turning 25… I figured it’d happen after I had kids, and after they got a bit older and started getting into their own interests… I wasn’t thinking that I’d reach a point where I can visually see the generation just behind mine gradually distancing itself from mine…if only in this one sector of our lives…

I’m sure I’m just over-reacting, but with the world moving faster and faster and more information becoming available over the internet, it makes you wonder if the number of years between each generational shift is decreasing… For example, I’ve never thought that my sister and I (separated by 3 years) were in different generations, but maybe we are…

Has anyone else heard of or used Twitter, or is it just me?