It Doesn't Have to be Painful To make You Smarter

   Learning does not have to be a chore. It does mot have to be painful. In the age of the internet nearly any subject has an entertaining, or at least interesting video or explanation on YouTube. Wanna giggle while you learn about wildlife? Bam. The history of drug laws regarding marijuana? Here you go. The Australian Emu War? Hello. Chemical reactions? Backyard chemist. Messed up American tax laws? Meet John Oliver. Ever wonder how orbits work? I would recommend playing KSP, but this video is pretty good as well.

You learn basic astrophysics while you fly these guys around their galaxy. What's not to like?

    That's the funny and mostly useless stuff, but the practical applications are there too. Having trouble understanding something in your math class? Try better explained, a site that takes seemingly complicated mathematical principles and breaks them down in easily digestible ways. Or one of the many online math calculators, which will take what you see as gibberish, solve it, and walk you through the solution step by step. Balancing Chemical Equations? WikiHow's got you covered. And there is nearly no subject that khan academy hasn't tackled.
   The point is, don't be afraid to explore the internet. Spend some time hitting the random article button on Wikipedia, browse the askscience subreddit, or to watch the documentary category on Netflix (especially Cosmos). You may or may not learn something that you'll use, but you will never regret learning it, because knowledge is its own reward. And if in your virtual tarvels you find anything interesting, send it my way. Share the knowledge.

Steroypes are good, unless they're bad.

   So I'd like to start off by addressing the essay "No, Hope Solo Is Not "Like" Ray Rice," by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I agree that for the majority of human history, males were the gender legally and socially afforded more power, often to extreme extents such as classifying females as subservient or even property. These were egregious errors that I hold in the same contempt as the practices of slavery and genocide. However, I disagree wholeheartedly with Coates' assertion that the alleged actions of Hope Solo, an American soccer Olympian (that she repeatedly and viciously assaulted her younger siblings), do not qualify her to be associated with the actions of Ray Rice, a professional football player famous for the video that shows him punching his future wife into unconsciousness, then dragging her limp body out of the elevator they had been sharing. The reason I disagree is that the author of this essay does not defend Solo's actions based on the dynamic differences between the relationships, which do not necessarily excuse or even mitigate the severity of the situation, but because Coates chose to, in my opinion, use the history of patriarchal society to diminish the severity of the allegations against Hope.
   Implying that historical inequalities in someway excuse a crime is a concept that angers me for a couple reasons. First, most of us are taught from childhood that two wrongs don't make a right, a concept I hold in high regard. as I mentioned before, these historical inequalities are a blight on our history, but excusing crimes committed contrary to their cultural standard will in no way atone for the blight. Second, the alleged victims of Solo took no part in the historical inequality. They were not subject of righteous revenge, but innocent victims. If you agree with my arguments, the points that the Coates chose to argue are totally irrelevant. The stereotype of the aggressive male does not change the fact that Hope Solo and Ray Rice are comparable. Both are professional athletes, and both are violent criminals. Their gender has no effect on their guilt.
   Next comes a happier subject (for the most part). "The State of Women's Athletics, 40 Years After Title IX," buy Maya Dusenbery and Jaeah Lee demonstrates the unintended positive effect that a law meant to concern the workforce had on the fields of both female and coed athletics. Because of the patriarchal standards mentioned recently, sports were taboo for females until this anti discrimination law was passed. After title IX was passed, the participation of females in athletic programs skyrocketed, with just one in twenty seven females participating in high school sports when the law was introduced in 1972, to two in five currently. While this is an amazing trend, there is still a gap to close. None of the major professional sports (MLB, NFL, NHL) include any females in their teams, despite the comperable talent and performance occasionally exhibited. In addition, female sports still receive a fraction of the funding and support of their male counterparts. There is obviously still a stereotype at play here, and it is preventing females with skills equal to, or even greater than their male counterparts from entering the level of professional play they are qualified for.
    Though I have focused exclusively on gender stereotypes and their negative effects up until now, I believe the general nature of the argument made in Paul Bloom's TED Talk is not only valid, but very important. Stereotypes are a product of evolution and personal experience. They are an important tool we use constantly to survive, whether we realize it or not. Categorizing a dog that raises it's hackles as a dog we should not pet is a useful example. This is a stereotype, as we expect a dog acting in this manner to be prone to violence, which it statistically is.

Don't Want!

   The Problem comes when we overreact and fail to apply reason to the situation. The dog may have no intention of inflicting harm in any situation, and is merely afraid; the dog may intend to react violently if attacked itself, but will change it's attitude completely when treated with compassion; or the dog may intend to react violently regardless.

Oh okay. Want.

    In my experience the first two situations are much more probable, but the third situation certainly does exist. It is when people interpret the raised hackles as only indicative of the third scenario that stereotypes become a real problem. Just because the dog raises his hackles doesn't mean he is viscous, just because a human is a man doesn't mean he hates women, just because a human is a woman doesn't mean she is manipulative, and just because a man is Muslim doesn't mean he is a terrorist. It is not bad to believe in stereotypes, in fact you need them to survive, but if you refuse to temper your stereotypes with logic and qualify them with observations, you are failing to recognize that no two organisms or situations are the same, and therefor no stereotype can apply to any one person. Holding a stereotype as absolute may be even more harmful than holding none at all.

The Cybernetic Hive Mind

    These days most Americans (myself among them) would happily sacrifice a leg before they gave up their internet connection. We have become accustomed to our instant access to information, whether it's news of a breakthrough scientific discovery, or something as seemingly inane as what an acquaintance did on their vacation, so much so that we become unreasonably uncomfortable when deprived of it. Some people see this as a sign that our dependence is unhealthy, and there is some evidence to support that claim, but the potential benefits are exciting, and really what technology doesn't come with a downside?

Can't make an omelette...

     One of the benefits that I just learned about is the ambient awareness we develop concerning our friends and family because of social media. I used to believe that twitter and facebook status updates were rarely more than pointless digital word vomit, pointless wastes of kilobytes. And while it turns out that if they are considered individually, they are mostly meaningless, as we are exposed to these thoughts over time, we develop a sense for peoples thought and interests in a way and to an extent that was impossible before social media existed. This awareness leads people, even if they're thousands of miles apart to feel close in a way that's "similar to the kind of awareness of another one would have when physically co-located" (Thompson).
     With this in mind, the predictions made by Ray Kurzweil in his TED talk, Our Digital Lives, pose some interesting questions. Ray speaks about how our brains process stimuli, and about how we are working to replicate this in computers. He predicts that in the future, microscopic computers will no longer need keyword inputs, but instead will interpret our stimuli as they course through our bloodstreams. I know it sounds crazy when I say it, but watch his talk, he makes it sound much less like the ravings of a lunatic. This makes me wonder how social media will adapt to computers like this. Will we be able to communicate raw pure thought and emotion instead of trying to describe it in words? Will we be able to network our minds together to collaborate on problems? Would this kind of connectivity even be a good thing? Social media is already a vector for misinformation. A study performed by a danish psychologist convinced over 27,000 people in less than a week that a historic fountain was going to be destroyed, simply by implying it on a facebook page (Morozov). Would misinformation become more virulent, or would it be disproven more quickly?
     It's interesting to see how the internet and social media are already changing the way we communicate and form relationships, and I am excited to see how it will evolve along with technology. I hope to see the day when telepathy is realized through technology, and to witness the ascendance to global cooperation, or Armageddon that it brings.

Thanks Zuckerberg.

Citizenship Through Acedemic Exploration

     Citizenship is a difficult concept to quantify. In order to be considered a citizen, must a person fit a certain physical description? Should they speak a certain language, or subscribe to a specific set of beliefs? I would argue that these are not the true criteria for citizenship, but instead that a personal stake in the community and purposeful effort to improve it are the true criteria for citizenship. These are not difficult standards to meet. As a member of a community, you very likely hold a personal stake, as its improvement or decline will directly affect you, and improvements come in many different forms, from picking up a piece of trash as you walk, to voting for a bill you think would make life better, to creating more efficient technology.

     The most interesting and beneficial way to contribute to the community in my opinion is working to advance academics and science. Improvements in these fields have the potential to benefit not only the relatively small communities (anything from countries down), but the entire planet in both tangible and abstract ways. On the small scale, tangible advancements in defense technology, manufacturing, and resource acquisition help to make our country more secure and prosperous, while abstract motion in philosophy and ethics are making us question our laws and even rewrite them in the interest of equality and changing morals. On the large scale, advancements in medicine, genetic engineering, and environmental science are saving lives, eradicating diseases., feeding the poor, and pushing the world towards a more sustainable way of life. Research into geology and physics are helping us all to understand how our world was formed, how to better predict and prepare for natural disasters, and to travel through space to other worlds.

      How you contribute, and even how large the impact of your contributions are is mostly unimportant. What matters is that you care enough for the community to make the effort.

Meet Matthew

 Meet Matthew

   I'm Matthew Hammons, an engineering student at Glendale Community College. I started this college thing recently, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far. I have always loved learning, and am a repository for a wide array of mostly useless information. I spend a large portion of my free time reading articles on anything from current events to animal trivia. I also read books so quickly that I often end up exhausting the list of books I want to read. I listen to almost any music, other than country, though my favorites are rock. Lately I've been addicted to the musical Hamilton. If you haven't heard it, it's on Spotify for free, and it's well worth the time and effort. It doubles as a crash course on one of the most important yet underappreciated founding fathers, as well as the formation of the United States. Other than all that, I build computes for my friends, cook pretty well, enjoy working with my hands, and love my dog Loki way too much.

 

Look at that cute punk. How could you not love him?

 
   I left high school in 2007, and enlisted in the Army. Originally I only meant to do four years and then go to college, but I turned out to be a very good soldier. I was a metalworker by trade, and quickly rose through the ranks, achieving the rank of Sergeant after only two and a half years, and the rank of Staff Sergeant in just six and a half years. In this time I deployed twice to Afghanistan, lived in six states (mostly Alaska and North Carolina), as well as spending decent amounts of time in a few more states and seven countries. I finally decided it was time to get out after eight years and some health problems to pursue my education. I am happy to be a civilian again, and I only miss a few things. I miss the people I worked with and lead, Alaska, and jumping out of aircraft.

   That's enough about me for now. I look forward to getting to know all of you a little better and learning from you. I hope we can have some good discussions, and become better people because of them.