Farewell

Dear readers, I am sad to say that our time together is coming to an end. My hope is that it has not been too obvious that this blog was created as a long-term assignment for an English class, and not out of pure, intrinsic motivation. However, the former is true, and as the school year ends, my posts will follow. As such, I'd like to leave behind a few final thoughts on the subject matter that we've been exploring.

So far, I've talked a lot about competition being applied in very specific ways, such as neuroscience or sci-fi writing. In my final post, I'd like to apply it to broader concepts. Specifically, I'd like to talk about the consequences of competition regarding global issues such as overpopulation and the limitations of our environment. Jeffery Sachs talks a lot about this idea. In essence, competition serves as both a tool to combat growing issues of overpopulation and environmental degradation, while also being part of the problem. Throughout my posts to this blog, I've almost always treated competition as a positive, powerful entity - the driving force behind evolution and technological innovation. What I'd like to say before departing this corner of the Internet is that I've painted a decidedly monochromatic portrait. In addressing many global issues, competition can inhibit progress. If you think about it, this is almost intuitive. If a U.N. committee needs to work out a plan to organize the building of infrastructure in undeveloped countries, the competing interests of nations wishing to access new markets will slow progress. If companies continue to compete with each other to produce more products more quickly, greenhouse gas emissions will remain unchecked. In my writing I have failed to get this across, but these negative aspects of competition need to be kept in mind.

Now that I've tied up that loose end, I'd like to conclude with some things unrelated to the lens of competition. High school is about to end for me, and in a few months I'll be starting the next academic phase of my life: university. It's so difficult to describe the way I feel right now. Some days I can only think about the new people I'm going to meet, and other days I can only think about losing the friends I have now. Every day I feel a frightening sense of impermanence, as I know for sure that a day will come when I'll be old and frail enough to look back upon this period of my life, and many others, to say to myself, "It really does fly by." The idea that everyone is experiencing this... is simply overwhelming. Every single insignificant detail of my life that I know will be lost to time once my memory fails me, every tiny moment that has been lost as soon as it passed - everyone possesses myriads of these snapshots. Everyone lives a life incredibly rich in complexity, no matter how mundane they may consider their job, their family, their friends, their existence. And yet, no matter how complex the memories, how beautiful the brief moments, all will eventually pass. When I draw my last breath, with me will depart the whole of my memories, whether they are major events or minute details of a greater picture: the majestic smile of my favorite dog as a child, Sunny; the distinct sound of the showers in the YMCA boys' locker room being turned off before a swim practice; the overwhelming nausea of a long car ride to Indianapolis; the utter disappointment brought by an unforgiving scoreboard; the profound beauty of a beloved girl's hair; the sound of the air conditioning running as I type this. That these things will one day be taken from me; that one day there will be no "me" to take these things from - that is a beautiful and terrifying thought.

It's been a pleasant journey, my friends, but it is time to say our goodbyes. Au revoir.



"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
Blade Runner

A Change Of Tone

Readers, my thoughts must tire you after a while. Let's hear from a fresh voice - a friend of mine who goes merely by Bill, but has a lot more to say than that.

"I’m doing a guest post on my friend’s blog to mix things up for both of us.  The theme of my blog is communication.  Feel free to check it out if it interests you.

Right now seniors in high school are finishing and juniors in high school are starting what may be the most important, but competitive, competition they will ever take part in: applying to college.  When our parents and grandparents were applying to college thirty or more years ago, fewer people sought out higher education and for many a high school diploma was sufficient for a quality lifestyle. However, more people than ever before are vying for the same number of spots at collegiate institutions.  When my mom was applying to college people only applied to two or three schools and they had to mail in the application.  Now, three schools are considered to be miniscule in comparison to the eight or nine applications that most people completed at my school.  There was also the occasional extreme of fifteen or even higher. 

I blame this increase in sheer volume of applications that colleges have to sift through mostly a result of the common application.  For those of you who don’t know, the common application is collection of forms that can be completed online and is sent to multiple schools.  Some schools require supplemental forms to completed as well, but they are much shorter in length.  With 463 colleges currently using the common application, people can easily apply to more schools than they should.  In 2010 Harvard accepted only 6.9% of the more than 30,000 that applied, and other schools experience similar trends.  Another cause of the increase in applications is that colleges have been actively advertising themselves in an attempt to fill their incoming freshman class with qualified students.  This marketing informs and encourages students to apply to schools that may be a great distance from where they live. 

It is also not surprising that as a result of the competition, people are planning their activities in order to construct a well-rounded activity resume.  Sometimes I'll even hear from my mom, who teaches fast-paced reading and language arts at an elementary school, an occasional story of a parent that called her asking what their child had to do in order to be in honors English in junior high so that they would be in honors English in high school so that they would get into a good college.  I have even had people ask me what clubs they should join so that it looks good to colleges.  The competition, for many, has begun even before the applications are filled out and sent.

The reality of the situation is that there are always more qualified applicants that could succeed at the school than there are available spots.  You could have incredible standardized testing scores and a glowing resume of activities that demonstrate your varied interests and abilities, but the odds will never be in your favor.  There are things you can do to increase them ever so slightly like demonstrating interest or applying early decision or early action, but in the end it all comes down to luck.  And no matter the game or competition, Lady Luck is a fickle and cold-hearted bitch."

Perhaps we'll hear more from our friend Bill in the future. Farewell good people, and tune in again next time.

A Matter Of The Mind

Through the field of neuroscience, humans are approaching the crossroads between philosophy and science. The question being asked is not new - it is, in truth, a question that has been examined since the times of our earliest thinkers and philosophers. Today, it comes in this form: how does the mind arise from matter? In a post regarding this issue, Robert Krulwich of NPR starts by quoting Diane Ackerman: "If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, dream and electric, how does it manage to contemplate itself? Worry about its soul? Do time and motion studies?" If consciousness is viewed as simply chemical reactions, isn't the existence of free will itself challenged?

These questions will hopefully be answered one day, but the question of whether to even try is more immediate. Neuroscientists are entering a debate: is a complete mapping of the brain (a "connectome") something worth investing time and money in? If so, a stupendous amount of the two will be needed. Krulwich deals with this debate in an earlier post about the "Jennifer Anniston neuron" (one that fires abnormally often for images of the actress) and his more recent post dedicated entirely to the debate (linked earlier).

Put simply, the debate centers around practical issues. Mapping the brain could require decades of time, even with the most advanced of supercomputers in use today. With such an intangible and far goal to work towards, would the most talented and curious of scientists not become discouraged and seek exploration in other fields? On top of the cost in time, there is also the risk that the map will lead nowhere, so to speak. What if thoughts and emotions can't be "read" from the connectome?

Through this debate, we start to see science in a different light. As a new historicist reading about this issue might say, it is not always clear which "direction" is "forward," if indeed such a "direction" exists. How then, do we approach such a paradox? Neuroscientists rally together under the banner of studying and understanding the nervous system, but anything more specific than that statement might spark conflict.

Europe's Next Hurdle

Why limit yourself to only following elections in your own country? Don't. There are plenty of significant ones taking place around the world. One to keep a close eye on especially? France. They

Leagues

Speaking as someone who has only a mild interest in basketball, the start of March Madness is a time of confusion. This will be the first year that I construct my own "bracket," attempting to predict many dozens of game outcomes without knowing the slightest thing about any of the teams. The "bracket" competition touches upon a phenomenon which I find almost more interesting than the NCAA tournament itself - fantasy sports. Why do so many people, particularly men, find enjoyment in picking fantasy teams and keeping track of arbitrary points? The activity has become so popular that a TV show centered around fantasy football has aired for four seasons now. Is it simply the same fervor which drives normal sport-watching fans?

Unsurprisingly, the answers to these questions are not very straightforward. A study done in 2007 found that fantasy sport participants fall into two very broad categories: those who truly invest time in analyzing statistics and preparing their teams, seeking the satisfaction of outsmarting their opponents; and those who don't put much effort into their sport-fantasizing, but still enjoy the thrill of winning by luck. Interestingly, the study found that social interaction was not a huge motivation for participation. Most users participate for the possibility of victory, through skill or chance.

Perhaps the most essential aspect of fantasy sports is the addition of control. Users can become more than just sideline sports fans, instead taking part in the game itself, winning or losing through their own actions. In doing so, they are taking a traditionally passive pastime (watching sports) and making it active. This raises an interesting issue - are fantasy users unchanged as spectators?

Capitalist Candy

A class of twenty seven students is very hungry. Fortunately, there is a special machine in the classroom which can address their food needs. This special machine makes M&Ms out of essays, dispensing a maximum of 2700 every day. To get M&Ms for their growling stomachs, students write essays and turn them in for M&Ms. A grade-A essay nets three M&Ms, a grade-B essay two, and a grade-C essay one. The class is mostly happy with their M&M machine, but after a while young Karl notices something... Some of his classmates are consistently getting more M&Ms than others. What's more, not all of these classmates are good writers! He observes his seemingly more privileged classmates to find out their secret. Sam is always loaded with M&Ms, so Karl decides to watch him closely. Sam writes a grade-C essay. Instead of feeding it to the machine though, he goes to the teacher and gives her two of his M&Ms. In return, the teacher proofreads the essay and turns it into an grade-A+ paper. Sam takes the new paper and turns converts it to ten M&Ms. Karl is amazed. He tells nineteen of his classmates (who don't get a lot of M&Ms) about it, and they establish that from now on all essays should be proofread by the teacher before being turned in to the machine. The next day, the twenty excited students walk up to the teacher with essays in hand - but there's a problem. The teacher is already proofreading the essays of the seven other students in the class! In fact, those seven students have reserved her proofreading skills for the next five days using their M&Ms. Karl starts to think very hard...

He thinks so hard that he develops a worldview which profoundly shapes political and economic thought as time passes. Eventually, after the deadliest war that was never fought, it seems to lose influence, but we know better than that. Marxism today is applied differently, but its ideas are still relevant. In a world where the gap between the rich and the poor grows wider exponentially, a shadow of a doubt begins to form in our minds. Eventually, a question must be answered: does wealth naturally concentrate in the hands of the few in capitalist societies? Is there a darker side to Smith's Invisible Hand? Marx produced an extreme and somewhat generalized model of society - there are certainly more than just two social classes in the modern world, and their interactions are probably too complex to be predicted or described in one overarching theory. Yet clearly we have come across economic times which reflect Marxist predictions to a certain degree. Will a spectre once more haunt the world?

Ender's Enemy

A week or so ago, while catching up on reading blogs that I subscribe to, I came across an interesting post from NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich. As a whole, his blog embraces a light-hearted and humorous approach to topics in science and technology, though he doesn't adhere to any strict guidelines. This post, however, raised a serious subject towards the end: that of the very nature of human innovation. Citing Wired editor Kevin Kelly, business scholar Peter Drucker, and science fiction writer William Gibson, Krulwich advances the idea that communication and technology have pushed human interactions with each other (and with their environment) further from the physical and closer to the theoretical -that is, thoughts over actions, brains over brawn. He quotes William Gibson, who writes about our communication technologies becoming increasingly similar in structure to the complex wiring of a mind, the connections growing finer and finer even as they stretch across greater distances.

Krulwich chooses to joke about this observation in his post, but he does so knowing that there are serious and rich trains of thought waiting to depart from this idea's station. The concept of an overarching "hive mind" is no stranger to human thoughts. In fact, it has been present in science fiction literature and media for quite a long time, a classic example being Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, featuring the "buggers," who are led by the queen's hive mind. For more, see this entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the phenomenon. If you skim through the list just linked, you'll notice something odd: almost every single one of the dozens of examples are antagonists in the settings they appear in. Here is the disturbing aspect of the notion which Krulwich touched on so lightly: the idea of a hive mind, of a real and active collective conscious, scares us. It challenges our individuality, removes to a certain extent our ability to empathize with any "person" acting under a "hive mind", and thus cements the role of a sentient collective conscious as that of a foreigner or alien (literally).

Examples can reach beyond sci-fi stories. In American history, we see this narrative in play during periods of rampant anti-communist fervor. What made the typical "communist" so inferior to the average (capitalist, Jesus-lovin') Joe? The most relevant difference to us, looking the competitive lens, is the lack of economic freedom. A participant in a communist system surrenders to the state their freedom to compete, instead performing the functions which are allocated to them by the state in the interests of the system as a whole. This removes a key aspect of all competition: self-interest.

The book that gave birth to so many young and imaginative geeks (as well as politically-charged critiques).