Captivating Art

I shall add to our dicussion on Monday, as we talked about whether the art, being music or pictures, enhances the words being spoken by the conveyer. I personnally, having sometimes what I think to be a form of A.D.D as I usually have a very short attention span, gained the ability to listen to the words in the in the texts because I was intrigued by the form of art. It worked especially well for me during the second. Even though I found that her bias was showing through, and she would swing evidence by not telling the whole story throughout her presentation, I found it easier to pay attention with the animation. Yet, I wanted to see if this is how other people would view this response. So i did a little bit of research. From the website of "Learning Your Way" it says that there are three ways of learning. There is 30 % accounted to the people who learn from touch, and 65 % of people who benifit from a visual demonstration. That means only 5% of people are prone to benifitting from souly oral presentations. Suggestions for helping these visual readers would be accompanying photos, charts, or power points with audible conversations. Now this accounts for the second presentation. The first however, for me has a different story. There would be a fine line that this dually audible perrformance could possibly cross. It was not the fact that the art was accompanying the text that I was able to focus and listen to it, but just that fact that it intrigued me to find out what this man was up to. There is the fine line of too much musical distraction where I would become oblivious to the text for some parts of it. Therefore, for me, the visual art of the second presentation enhanced the presentation, where as the second it was just a general intrigue presented by the music that enhanced it.

FUTURE AAAHHH

So these are my random thoughts about my life and I am curious to see of anyone else feels the same way.

I have not applied to any universities, looked at any living possibilities, or basically planned anythign about my future other than that I am going to be a dentist. I am a person tho dislikes change a lot so i have somthing subconscious about planning my future because I do not want it to happen. I do not think I am the only one who does this, but even if i am, what is it about change that is scary. Everyone can say the unknown, but you would think by now that there would be we enough examples in my life where change was a livable, let alone positive thing in my life that i would not be fearful of it. The unknown is also going to be a lot scarier if it is unknown becasue i do not have any plans in place. hmmm, just a random thought I guess that has been on my mind and want opinions slash comments.

Woah. I found a paradym

so, I was fatefully watching tv the other day, when the football game ended and all of the sudden a show popped on that both presented thought provoking questions but also displayed a paradym shift. The subjuct of this was laughter.

Now the paradym shift that they briefly mentioned was that laughter used to be interpreted as evilness, so laughing was rarly heard. People laughing was not displayed in portraits painting all through this time. I did not catch the time period but the Mona Lisa was one of the solemn picture that was used as evidence of this, as they flashed through them. I found this rather interesting.

The pondering question was that there was this couple who lived a very sad life, and did not laugh (apparently, i don't understand how this was possible) yet they had a baby and around two months old, this baby started to laugh. The question for him was where did this baby learn to laugh. There was studies done on babies blind, deaf, and with lack of proper sensation and all the babies started to laugh at around the same age as the babies who lived with out these conditions. So the questioned remains, is laughter just instictual and as we grow older some people decide to stop doing it? Should we allow stress or pressure distract us from doing something inate from birth?
I just found it interesting.

random thoughts on technology

So ONE of the problems with me is that I have a short term memory and I tend to forget much of what we talked about in class by the time I get onto blog. So i like to take random quotes and expad upon them, so this is exacly what I am going to do for this blog.

"For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quailty of life, please press three." Alice Khan

I came across this poem while researching a debate topic about generally modified foods. Having not done extensive research on this topic before, I had never thought about the veiwpoint of GMO's that they reduce the amount of our experience of the world, as through technology we are manipulating our plants to become negligent to the natural factors of the world. Technology with therefore the manipulation of the world so we do not have to experience it. Now is this actually a bad thing? I don't really have that answer. It depends on the extent to which technology takes us. With the example of the GMO's, think of the advantages we give the farmers. They would be able to have a crop they could readily rely on and a steady income regardless of how much rain fell and when. There would be less fluctuation within the markets of these raw materials and would create a more stable ecomony. Therefore, by us not experiencing the world, technology makes the world easier. ie. here i sit, with my laptop to relay my thoughts to you, my cell phone to coordinate my acitivities, or ask what is due at school tommorrow, access to the internet and millions of webpages full of information. Therefore I believe that whether this manipulation is true or not, technology is going to be devolopped and be usedin our world and soon we will be the generation looking back at when we were in school and we only had two high speed computers, three flat screened tv's and cell phones that only texted and connected to the internet.

I think I should be getting better therefore I am getting better

I enjoyed very much the video we saw on Monday about logical fallacies. The movie touched on the effect of placebo trials, yet I researched a little more on placebo pills and their effectiveness and I found a couple interesting facts. (These facts are all from medical literature)

“In the 1950’s angina pectoris, recurrent pain in the chest and left arm due to decreased blood flow to the heart, was commonly treated with surgery. Rather than doing the customary surgery, which involved tying off the mammary artery, some resourceful doctors cut patients open and then simply sewed them back up again. The patients who received a sham surgery reported as much relief as the patients who had the full surgery.”

“In a recent study of a new kind of chemotherapy, 30 percent of the individuals in the control group, the group given placebos, lost their hair.”

These are only a few of the examples of the effectiveness my placebo trials. I wonder greatly at how our body could be so greatly effected by our mental component. So is it then that pain is just a figment of our imagination? Or from the latter example, was the hair going to fall out anyway? We know that they chances of this is next to none, so why did the human body act like this. We can justly say that the pain would not have left of the hair would not have fell out if the people involved in this did not decide it was supposed to happen. This directly contradicts the cause and effect theory of the world, for there is not cause for the relieved pain or the hair falling out. So we are left with this question: Can our mind be more powerful than the normal course of the world, that it can defy it?

my thoughts on Sophie's World

I was reading the amazing book of Sophie’s World and I was rather intrigued by a point made. It was one of the philosopher’s many example

“A Russian astronauts and a Russian brain surgeon were once discussing religion. The brain surgeon was a Christian but the astronaut was not. The astronaut said, “I’ve been out in space many times but I’ve never seen God or angels.” And the brain surgeon said, “And I’ve operated on many clever brains but I’ve never seen a single thought.”

I think this is a perfect example of how something can exist without the proof of your eyes. This is the total basis of faith, and knowing something even when you do not see it. Sometimes you can know something without having what most people call ’reason’ to do so. Scepticism is the basis for this. Yet, I believe that sceptics are missing many points of knowledge because just as the example shows the phrase “seeing is believing” is not always the decider.