Author Archives: ttf

Red

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This past Friday we watched a movie called Fire.

It was eerie watching a movie that depicts reality so close up. I had to avert my gaze many times not because any scenes were explicit, but because they were so poignant and different in their form of loneliness. This wasn’t the western idea of loneliness, that I find often presented bounded by romantic, social, work etc lines, but a cohesive, consuming one.

The want to be desired isn’t just a romantic want, but an innate human need to feel valued. Not delegated to carnal desires, but the desire to be valued for anything: work, effort, or intention. Instead, if a person is constantly berated and treated like a second class citizen it can lead to a fire, one providing a slate for a new beginning.

Into the Woods

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The flora team volunteered as part of the into the streets program. I’ll admit, at first, I thought the program to be unfulfilling– cleaning the woods?? After picking up trash, roping down grape vine, and helping move logs around I realized this was not the instant moral gratification I wanted, but a subtle part of promoting nature. The gift of an idealic nature I received when I was young that made me who I am today: a human being in touch with the natural world. With an increasing indoor society, especially for the younger generations, I think by doing this I helped made the understated inspiration of nature more possible, visible for some kid, and that’s all that matters.

 

North by Northwest wouldn’t make it to South by Southwest

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I don’t understand how this movie is considered to be one of ‘the greatest films of all time’.

I don’t know exactly how true this statement is as I’m pulling it from Wikipedia, but that’s irrelevant because this still sums up the film’s integrity to logic: “Lehman would sometimes repeat this story himself, as in the documentary Destination Hitchcock that accompanied the 2001 DVD release of the film. In his 2000 book Which Lie Did I Tell?, screenwriter William Goldman, commenting on the film, insists that it was Lehman who created North by Northwest and that many of Hitchcock’s ideas were not used. Hitchcock had the idea of the hero being stranded in the middle of nowhere, but suggested the villains try to kill him with a tornado. Lehman responded, “but they’re trying to kill him. How are they going to work up a cyclone?” Then, as he told an interviewer; “I just can’t tell you who said what to whom, but somewhere during that afternoon, the cyclone in the sky became the crop-duster plane.”

To summarize this movie, it is a glamorous version of the  gif from the Telgu film where a man drifts underneath a train on a horse.

Marketing for the non-major

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GRF Sam gave a pretty thorough presentation on the many platforms and methodologies that should be employed to create a market-friendly online persona. After the presentation, I went straight to my LinkedIn and fleshed it out beyond the default grey profile picture and student at x description. I didn’t realize just how valuable social media is, I knew it was a truth of life in the theoretical sense 2+2 = 4 is, but physically attending this seminar helped to make concrete the influence a lack of a proper social media presence can have on my future and goals. In fact, because of this seminar I’m trying to develop more social media for my very lowly idea of a business that I want to develop. A business develops through interest by  possible consumers, not simply the capital or technical skills residing in the business it self, which I feel gets lost in the creation of small businesses.

Genetic Engineering

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Down at the flora rose dinning hall, about a dozen of us sat down with GRF Shiv to talk about genetic engineering. We bounced from pigs to Star Trek to designer babies. As with any topic as controversial such as this, a large part of the discussion centered around the ethics of its seemingly imminent commercial use.

This conversation made me think of what it means to be human in the 21st century. As of late, I’ve been giving much thought to my education and what it means in universal terms, not just jobs and societal ‘upnods’. A large part of my own major involves genetics, and I wonder if the extent we’re looking at from designer babies to saving someone who would not even come into existence in the first place is changing human nature.

I settled on the definition of education most widely pursued today, vocational, to be something that exists to make life easier for humans, for us to focus on…living. But when we change our own makeup 1) we’re removing a few elements/obstacles in life that give rise to the essence of humanity such as dealing with the emotions in response to the unknowns nature hands us. With genetic engineering we remove a lot of these unknown and for the better. 2)  We are literally changing our makeup. Personality is widely considered to be more of a product of our environment than genetics but our genotype does influence who we are. Not only directly, but through the characteristics it deals us and how we navigate our life with them. Does this mean we effect a persons nature, their exploration of what it means to be human?

 

A girl was wearing a floral top and a bee tried

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I’ve been to the botanical gardens a few times so I thought I wouldn’t have much too learn on this tour- I was wrong.

I never knew that the first woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize was from Cornell. Barbara McClintock broke through barriers, she was one of the first women in Cornell’s history to study plant breeding. A few feet away from the Nevin Center, at the Botanical Gardens, stands her lab where she discovered ‘jumping genes’  or genetic transposition.

I pass that lab a few times during the week, but its inspiring to know the story behind it. Another piece of Cornell has been humanized to me.

 

The Microeconomics of Education and Family Income

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Dinner with Dr. Dambala Kutela was an enlightening introduction to not only Dr. Kutela’s specific research or Ethiopian socioeconomic issues, but those faced by many agrarian countries that have been left behind in the tide of globalization. Dr. Kutela explained how seemingly irrelevant phenomenons, specifically climate change, are influencing who gets educated.

Even education, the great equalizer, is not immune to the effects of the butterfly effect.

It was inspiring to hear how at the age of 14 Dr. Kutela first began his education- from the first grade. It’s humbling to know that what is offered to me on a silver spoon is something the rest of the world attains like its a luxury. It’s a luxury for some people my exact age in the world to know what place they occupy in this world and of what is actually out there physically and/or metaphysically.