Robot Writing

Today, I flex my HTML muscles.  Welcome to Table 1.0! Its features include: Vertical Columns! Horizontal Rows! Text! Font that is emboldened! Font that is not emboldened! Let's get started. Table 1.0 - English Basics Words Used to Open Communication Words Used to Close Communication Words Hello Goodbye marrow Hey Bye subtle Yo See ya decomission Sup Later precursory Oh, you again Fuck off satellite Howdy Toodle-loo oxen That was actually pretty fun for me.

Tonight, I saw a film about bees. Swiss film director Markus Imhoof's documentary,  More Than Honey (2012) , talks about the current situation of honey bees on Earth, the change in their relationship with humans over the last century, and what may be in store for their future. I don't consider myself a bug guy, but I was moved by this film. "One-third of what we eat wouldn't exist without bees." I have spent a lot of time loving capitalism. Because of the culture in which I was raised, it always seemed unequivocally right to me that every human should earn a salary proportionate to their work output. You work hard and you see the benefit of that hard work in the form of a satisfactory pay check. The free market seems, naturally, the correct and good economic system in which to live: if you want to start a business or offer goods to consumers, you can do that, and you're free to grow your business and increase your output and production and gain prop...

On page 98 of her book Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century , Cynthia L. Selfe quotes computer scientist Seymour Papert's answer to a question that plagued parents during the rise of the PC's pervasion in the American home.  "Q: What can a parent do to get over his or her fear of computers? Seymour Papert: You can sit down with your child and prompt him to show you something– perhaps how to play a game. By learning a game, you're getting close to the kid and gaining and gaining insight into ways of learning. The kid can see this happening and feels respected, so it fosters the relationship between you and the kid." This is a pretty nagging issue that I've had with the generations preceding Gen Y. Too often have I heard members of older generations take issue with the "lack of respect" in the younger generations. The "apathy" or "laziness" inherent in people around my age. But, like, no. Seymour Papert is ...

I'm going to briefly mention and, in doing so, undersell the crap out of Tia Baheri's the Toast article " Your Ability to Can Even " about internet language and linguistic evolution in a world dominated by technology. It's fascinating and well-written and supports/explains linguistic development in online communities.  The reasons I mention it are several; it's a good read, it pertains to subjects that interest me, and it got me thinking. Since the dawn of the videogame, there have been two very divided camps in a culture war that revolves around them and their effect on us medically and emotionally and spiritually, et cetera. As a result of the conjecture-based conflict, my parents refused to allow video game consoles into our house. I did get to experience early console games at my cousins' and friends' houses: the early nineties saw the explosion of the video game due to Nintendo's success with Super Mario Bros. for the NES, the late...

The acronym on everybody's lips these days is HTML. It stands, I recently discovered, for "How To Make Latkes." Hm. Just kidding, neither of the above sentences are true. HTML actually stands for HyperText Markup Language; it's a language of letters and symbols and it looks like this: I hope this doesn't translate to something unpleasant. Which is only a little  scary at this point in my life. This language makes the internet be. The pages we go to every day are built with this code. Each section of code is a marker that acts as a command that provides information that determines how a webpage will look and function. Actually, as I write this post, I'm eyeing a slew of little buttons that can help me add images, videos, and links to my text, as well as buttons that we might consider standard for any contemporary word-processing program. It looks like this: Click me! And this is very useful to me. Because I don't know how to do those thi...

I'ma tell you right now: I love language. I love it. I think accents, dialects, etymology, and linguistic anthropology are some of the most interesting things I could ever learn or know about. Like, did you know that there's a website that you can go to that allows you to hear different peoples' accents from around the world? (Actually, I'm sure there are several. Ask Old Man Google.) And that there are a lot of words and phrases whose origins you think we know, but you really don't ? ...duck? tape? One of the most interesting (and sometimes frustrating) things about language is that it's dictated by its speakers. Even though there's a standard language that attempts to be upheld by dictionaries and grammarians, language is constantly changing; new words are being created and used as we create new things that need words for us to call them, like or (I don't think you're ready for this jelly), Just think: before the mid-20th ...

Barry Brummett wrote an essay that attempted to define terms. He grappled with and presented three possible interpretations of the phrase "rhetoric is epistemic." He tells us that this phrase, depending on the lens through which it is understood, can mean any one or all of the following things: 1) Communication is the only way we can arrive at Knowledge or a single, universal Truth. 2) Truths are multiple and complex, and communication or discourse is the only way we can understand some of them. 3) Our Truth is entire dependent on communication: the Truth is malleable and changes as we change how we communicate about it. But, like, why does this matter?  In a class entitled Writing in a Digital Age, why would we care about how we create or interpret truth or whatever? Because that's what we do every day, always, every time we communicate ever. We're living in a pretty dense and lush historical moment; we are at the highest height of communication that we...

I keep catching myself thinking about the way that humans interact with technology and vice-versa. Like, I have never once wanted to build a computer. I have never cared to study physics or engineering. I love applying technology, but I don't really want anything to do with how it's created. I have a tattoo of a robot on my thigh. I love robots. I embrace robotics, but I don't scrutinize their innards or whatever. And for the past couple of days, I've been wondering why that is. What is it about technology that draws us in? Is the mystery of being beyond the layman's comprehension so attractive? Maybe.  I think, at least for me, that the attraction lies in its closeness to humanity. If we think of technology as a new Kingdom in the tree of life, of lawn mowers, iPhones, and almost illogically cool hover-bikes  as species in themselves, wouldn't it be the most interspecial interaction/cooperation on the planet? Humans and technology, I mean.  Fro...