I’ve been scared of snakes in the past, so I went into this event thinking that I would be facing my fears. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I’m not really frightened anymore. Of course I was still wary of the snake that was almost as big as me, but I was fine with the average sized snakes. I even held a cute little hog-nosed snake. And I learned some fun facts. Apparently when hog-nosed snakes are scared, they puff up and flatten out their heads so they look more like a cobra. Then they hiss at you and immediately after fall backward and pretend to be dead. I don’t think that it’s the greatest defense mechanism. I mean they literally try to be scary and don’t ever wait to see if it worked. They just immediately bail and try to play dead. Still, a they’re very cute snakes that are a lot of fun to hold (unless they decide to regurgitate on you). I don’t think I’ll end up playing with snakes much in the future, but I do think they’re a lot more interesting than I did before.
Author Archives: iad29
Skewed numbers
I went to the election viewing party and ended up making a new friend. I expected the event to be really dry and stressful because it’s a very important election and I’m not that into politics, but it ended up being kinda fun, or at least interesting. Me and my new friend ended up figuring out how to decipher the news report and determine what was speculation displayed as fact and what was actual fact. We ended up turning to a news article that was updating in real time what the votes were for each open seat. It showed the percentage of votes for each candidate and the percentage of votes for that district that were already counted. The tv program, meanwhile, flipped between showing what seats were Democrat or Republican and what they speculated with few indicators of the change. It made me realize just how skewed the media really is and how that effects public perception. In the last election, media outlets kept reporting that whatever side the show leaned towards was winning because they took skewed data. This caused many voters to feel secure when they shouldn’t have been. The same thing could have easily happened during this election where overconfidence based on skewed data causes the results to be even more skewed.
The intentions of Wall-E robots
This week we watched the children’s movie Wall-E. I’ve watched this movie numerous times since it first came out, but this time I noticed a few things that I never noticed before. Of all of the Wall-E style robots at the beginning of the movie, Wall-E is the only one that’s still functioning. He repairs himself while the rest just stopped functioning. He collects things while the others just worked. He is somewhat sentient in a way that the other “Wall-E-bots” were never meant to. So how did Wall-E accomplish that? What made him special? I also realized that the Wall-E-bots were never intended to clean up the world. They were meant to simply move the trash out of the way so that people could have space. The people who built the robots actually wanted to clean up the world, they would have come up with a faster way to get things to decompose. Instead they compacted all the trash which will make it take longer to decompose because less of it is then exposed to the elements. Even in a post apocalyptic world, humanity tries to take the easiest possible way out, not necessarily the best way.
How to Use Hockey Skates
At last night’s ice skating event, I actually learned a lot more than I expected to. I thought it would just be fun to go skating, but I learned a bunch about how to use hockey skates. I didn’t actually use them myself (from prior experience I know that is a bad idea), but GRF Sam was teaching the brave souls who decided to try them how to not fall over. Suffice to say, they did far better under his tutelage than I did when I tried hockey skates. Turns out that with hockey skates you want to angle your feet outward and push off almost to the side to go forward because the blades have edges on both sides. Even though I now know how to use hockey skates, I think I’ll leave the hockey skating to the professionals. I’ll stick to my figure skates and not getting in the way of those who can skate well, like the people skating on one foot and that guy who was confident enough to text and skate at the same time.
Food (or at least packaging food) for Thought
Tonight I went to a church and helped put together food packages for hungry children. Personally, I ended up putting labels on the bags that the food is packaged in. This left me a lot of time to talk and get to know a little bit about the people I was working with. We talked about lots of different things from hockey to hospice care, and in the process I learned a lot about more about the world than I thought I would. One of the women I was speaking to was originally from Italy and so we compared the different educational and healthcare systems. It made me wonder what the actual best systems for the two are. Clearly the US education system has a lot of problems and the almost always free college tuition seems like a plus. But the unemployment rate in Italy is around 40% because everyone has an education, but no one has a job. So what is the best system? I’m pretty sure that no one actually knows, but I’d be curious to find out about more options and how the current systems in both countries can be improved.
How to Email Without Offending Anyone
I attended a seminar on email etiquette last night because I wasn’t really sure if I was drafting emails properly. To my surprise, a lot of the things I do like introducing myself, being concise, and including a small amount of pleasantries are actually what you should be doing. I also learned about the different honorifics used to address people. I never realized that there was so much controversy over addressing someone as Ms. or Mrs. I now know that it’s very important to address people properly. And that can be learned through “stalking” the person you’re emailing. I already knew about most of the methods of “stalking” like LinkedIn, but Research Gate was a new one for me. I feel like there is this whole world of academic sources that I wasn’t aware of because I’ve been focused on business, not academics.
Can Machines Feel Emotion?
Friday’s film Ex Machina unexpectedly took me back to my Freshmen Writing Seminar. My Freshmen Writing Seminar about vegetarianism. At the surface, the two don’t seem to connect. But in the film, Ava (the AI) gets help from the main character by generating empathy from him when she starts to get emotional about her situation trapped as she is in her creator’s house. But when she is finally freed, her empathy seems to stop as she leaves the main character trapped in the house like she was. So, the question becomes did she actually feel emotions, or was she just mimicking what human emotion looks like? This is where my FWS comes in. In that class we debated weather animals had feelings, if they deserved to be given empathy and rights. This movie made me go one step further in that questioning. If we create an AI that feels like we do, what really differentiates us from machines? Why would we be more deserving of rights if we all act and feel the same? And how would be be able to tell if they could actually feel or were just more perfect pretenders than humans? I’ve concluded that just like with animals, we can’t really know for sure. And that is a scary thought.