IT HAS no Wikipedia page.
Every time I find someone who has not yet heard about it, I feel a wave of revulsion and awe at the sublime innocence of the noble savage. I feel like a preacher and a pusher all at once.
I dimly recall a time, in distant prehistory, when I spent my free time on Internet TV or playing guitar or reading dumb webcomics: those days are gone. QWOP and Too Many Ninjas are facile and hollow. Even pornography has lost its allure. It has changed everything. I am, at once, both baffled and shamed by the profundity and depth of my addiction.
I started as a casual user, I guess. A social user. It was a fun thing to do with my roommates, or while having a beer with a friend. But it wasn't long before I was doing it alone, compulsively, and in more and more inventive ways. Because the vanilla stuff wasn't taking me as far, see. So I found new ways to play, skirting closer and closer to the abyss--until this morning I found myself labelling a map of Africa, hastily scrawled across a notebook, at 10 AM in the middle of a lecture. I got every single country, although I switched Benin and Togo.
It is not complicated. In fact it is dazzling in its simplicity. It has no music, no robots, and hardly any bacon. But what it offers is even more compelling: the opportunity to learn, and to prove how much you already know. It is fast-paced, which is one reason it's more fun than going to class; it is easy to learn facts through repetition in a way that understanding relationships through explanation is hard. Since it categorizes and quantifies knowledge, it makes comparison and competition--both with others and with oneself--much more convenient. You only got 175? I got 184! It systematizes trivia--and unlike Jeopardy!, it also democratizes trivia. Everyone can play, as many times as they want, without fee or penalty.
But how should we interpret this renaissance of rote learning, precisely when it seems least important? The same Internet that allows games like these to explode into popularity renders the trivia gained therefrom utterly redundant and worthless. As fast as I can hit ctrl-t-maps-africa, I can check what that blob north of Ghana is. (It's Burkina Faso.) If I ever needed to know--perhaps to make some prediction about Ghanian emigration or border policy--I could find out instantly.The Internet--really the mass availability of information, a movement which much predates even Al Gore--has changed the game of thinking from knowing things to knowing questions. It doesn't matter whether or not I know what the 25 largest standing armies are, as long as I know it's important to find out when I'm trying to form an opinion about the Koreas (#4 and 6).
The second problem with rote learning is that I don't know anything about Burkina Faso other than where it is. (True, it only takes a ctrl-t-wk-burkina faso to find out it's a semi-presidential republic with a population shy of 14 million, formerly called Upper Volta and independent from France in 1960, and that its capital is Ougadougou. But the argument is the same.) Is there a process through which this kind of trivia knowledge gives us a false sense of knowledge, or even of action? Is it a basically patronizing, even imperialist position to pat oneself on the back for a comprehensive knowledge of the Dark Continent, given the reality that a lot of people don't even know as much about Burkina Faso as I do? Is this the same as arguing about the sociology of the ghetto with only The Blueprint and Low End Theory as credentials? For that matter, is there a risk that trivial knowledge of African geography lulls us into a sense of self-satisfied complacency? Sure, I don't volunteer, but how many of those Save Darfur clowns know where Malawi is? (The only slightly more sophisticated rationale is: by learning where countries are, I can help later. Is that any less pathetic?)
What is the future of the fact in an Internet world? What is the role of geography--which can only be learned by rote; that's why it's a good example--in forming good ideas? Why do I love Sporcle so much? And what is the capital of Burkina Faso?
Monday, February 2, 2009
Studying, for a change...
I'm not a big studier. Actually, I pretty much just don't study ever and then freak out at the last minute and try to cram and fail. I am fantastic at procrastinating and not giving school any of the importance it deserves, and I generally live my life not really caring about it. I choose to do other things with my time, like play Super Mario Galaxy, or drink beer, or sit in my room listening to weird music and staring at the clouds through the skylight (when it's not covered in snow). It makes for a pretty interesting life. That being said, I've realized that when I actually do study, it excites the shit out of me.
I remember studying for a Molecular Biology exam last semester at the last minute, not having gone to any of the lectures, and trying to watch 11 of them on the day before the exam. I spent about 18 hours at the library, and the mundane processes of DNA became the most interesting thing in my life. Because really, chemical processes aside, DNA does the coolest things. And it's weird knowing how much it has evolved, and how it has developed to compensate for the malfunctions that are bound to occur (it even adds on nonsense bases before the important part so that even if it doesn't start replicating from the absolute start, nothing is missed (zOMFG!)).
Today I spent the entire day learning about the history, culture and traditions of Judaism. Reading about the different denominations of Judaism, I began to draw comparisons with the sects of Islam, or the similarities between Kabbalah and Hinduism. In the past few days I've read pieces of the Bible, the Quran, and both Martin Luther and Hitler's writings about Jews. I don't know why but it made me irrationally happy just to know the stuff.
And I've realized that it's not just studying. I'll read a random article about the GPS revolution, or the Formula 1 controversy of 2006, and every little bit of it makes me really happy. Now, the thing that I can't understand is why I don't do it more. If I like learning so much, why the hell don't I stop playing MouseHunt and actually read a little? Why do I choose to surf facebook instead of listening to my professor? Why do I lay in bed all day not doing anything when I could be learning about the marvels of simple molecule manipulation that stops a cancer medicine from destroying a patient's heart? Because I don't think any of it is boring (except for math, I fucking hate math). Everything else is ridiculously interesting. The world is incredibly interesting. So why do I still sit on the couch like a zombie watching House season 2?
Love,
Mer
I remember studying for a Molecular Biology exam last semester at the last minute, not having gone to any of the lectures, and trying to watch 11 of them on the day before the exam. I spent about 18 hours at the library, and the mundane processes of DNA became the most interesting thing in my life. Because really, chemical processes aside, DNA does the coolest things. And it's weird knowing how much it has evolved, and how it has developed to compensate for the malfunctions that are bound to occur (it even adds on nonsense bases before the important part so that even if it doesn't start replicating from the absolute start, nothing is missed (zOMFG!)).
Today I spent the entire day learning about the history, culture and traditions of Judaism. Reading about the different denominations of Judaism, I began to draw comparisons with the sects of Islam, or the similarities between Kabbalah and Hinduism. In the past few days I've read pieces of the Bible, the Quran, and both Martin Luther and Hitler's writings about Jews. I don't know why but it made me irrationally happy just to know the stuff.
And I've realized that it's not just studying. I'll read a random article about the GPS revolution, or the Formula 1 controversy of 2006, and every little bit of it makes me really happy. Now, the thing that I can't understand is why I don't do it more. If I like learning so much, why the hell don't I stop playing MouseHunt and actually read a little? Why do I choose to surf facebook instead of listening to my professor? Why do I lay in bed all day not doing anything when I could be learning about the marvels of simple molecule manipulation that stops a cancer medicine from destroying a patient's heart? Because I don't think any of it is boring (except for math, I fucking hate math). Everything else is ridiculously interesting. The world is incredibly interesting. So why do I still sit on the couch like a zombie watching House season 2?
Love,
Mer
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Bruce teabags cameraman; world watches in enjoyment
After just getting home from a friend's Superbowl party no more than five minutes ago, the first thing I did was Google search "bruce halftime crotch".
The amount of hits was remarkable. The fact that it's on YouTube already makes me happy, because that means we can all a) unite over how hysterical it is; b) unite over how awesome Bruce is; and c) all know what I'm talking about when I mention how I particularly enjoy expressions like "someone just got a crotchful of Boss".
But that was just the reason I started to watch the 'bowl--not the reason I stayed.
I'm not a "FOOTBALL!" kinda guy, but the fact that I was legitimately engrossed and entertained by what I understand was a particularly intense Superbowl means that I can appreciate sports as an entertainment medium (if we can call it a medium) as much as I can enjoy, say, Crank.
Though on a scale from one-to-Crank, I'd say this is only about a 5.
The point is that I actually enjoyed watching beefy men tackle each other man than I expected to (to preempt the gay jokes: this includes all that GHEY PR0N I WATCH LOOOOOL), though I hesitate to accept that it was because of the sport itself. In fact, I refuse to believe that. I could never watch the Superbowl on my own. It was fun because Leigh was a Steeler's fan, an apparently hereditary trait from his grandfather before him; it was fun because Dan was explaining to Ginny all the rules of the game and we talked about how silly they all seemed.
Which made me wonder if I could ever watch Crank alone. I like to think that I could, but if given the opportunity, I might turn it off out of boredom.
It's like a party where you're not just the only one drinking, but the only one even there. I don't think mindless fun can exist on its own--that it is a fundamental part of a friendship (or relationship, for that matter).
I acknowledge that I'd offend some (read: Bernice) by calling football, or sports as such, "mindless fun". Obviously there's thought gone into it--the plays are strategic, and the Superbowl was proof of that.
I guess I want to distinguish between a critical analysis and mindless watching. I concede that you can watch anything mindlessly or critically, so I'll avoid any arguments by clarifying that I, specifically, watch sports and Crank mindlessly.
Which narrows the question down to a question of mindlessness. If it can't exist when one is alone, then is it something we engage in with others, or is it something fundamental to any sort of relationship?
Can you be mindless alone? Maybe that's just masturbation.
Kind of like this post. Apologies for the verbal masturbation. I honestly just wanted to post The Boss crotch-sliding the cameraman at first. It was a fucking killer halftime show.
Rah-rah Pittsburgh, go Steelers go, and so on, and so forth.
The amount of hits was remarkable. The fact that it's on YouTube already makes me happy, because that means we can all a) unite over how hysterical it is; b) unite over how awesome Bruce is; and c) all know what I'm talking about when I mention how I particularly enjoy expressions like "someone just got a crotchful of Boss".
But that was just the reason I started to watch the 'bowl--not the reason I stayed.
I'm not a "FOOTBALL!" kinda guy, but the fact that I was legitimately engrossed and entertained by what I understand was a particularly intense Superbowl means that I can appreciate sports as an entertainment medium (if we can call it a medium) as much as I can enjoy, say, Crank.
Though on a scale from one-to-Crank, I'd say this is only about a 5.
The point is that I actually enjoyed watching beefy men tackle each other man than I expected to (to preempt the gay jokes: this includes all that GHEY PR0N I WATCH LOOOOOL), though I hesitate to accept that it was because of the sport itself. In fact, I refuse to believe that. I could never watch the Superbowl on my own. It was fun because Leigh was a Steeler's fan, an apparently hereditary trait from his grandfather before him; it was fun because Dan was explaining to Ginny all the rules of the game and we talked about how silly they all seemed.
Which made me wonder if I could ever watch Crank alone. I like to think that I could, but if given the opportunity, I might turn it off out of boredom.
It's like a party where you're not just the only one drinking, but the only one even there. I don't think mindless fun can exist on its own--that it is a fundamental part of a friendship (or relationship, for that matter).
I acknowledge that I'd offend some (read: Bernice) by calling football, or sports as such, "mindless fun". Obviously there's thought gone into it--the plays are strategic, and the Superbowl was proof of that.
I guess I want to distinguish between a critical analysis and mindless watching. I concede that you can watch anything mindlessly or critically, so I'll avoid any arguments by clarifying that I, specifically, watch sports and Crank mindlessly.
Which narrows the question down to a question of mindlessness. If it can't exist when one is alone, then is it something we engage in with others, or is it something fundamental to any sort of relationship?
Can you be mindless alone? Maybe that's just masturbation.
Kind of like this post. Apologies for the verbal masturbation. I honestly just wanted to post The Boss crotch-sliding the cameraman at first. It was a fucking killer halftime show.
Rah-rah Pittsburgh, go Steelers go, and so on, and so forth.
Obamarama
I was browsing the whitehouse.gov site (there's nothing to watch on tv - Sunday, February 1st, 3:00? Nothin'.) when something struck me - if Obama was a professor, then he must have a profile on ratemyprofessor.
I expected his profile to be full of Obama-Girls and boys, I expected 500 pages of comments.
Instead, I found this: Professor Obama's ratemyprof rating page.
It's an interesting angle on a fairly unexamined aspect of Obama's career. What was Obama like as a University of Chicago law professor? While it's a bit of a stretch, how he treated his students could be a good indicator of how he'll treat his constituents.
Apparently, he was "GREAT!!!!", and apparently he was "very helpful in office hours". But that's it. Two comments for Prof. Obama.
His final was a joke, but otherwise Obama seems to have done alright.
His final score:
Easiness: 3.0
Average Helpfulness: 5.0
Average Clarity: 4.0
Overall Quality: 4.5
(He lost some clarity marks because some students felt he was making up for a lack of content with an excess of rhetoric.)
Full comment reads: "he's so easy and lenient. lots of hw though but it's not that hard. the final is a joke. very helpful in office hours"
I expected his profile to be full of Obama-Girls and boys, I expected 500 pages of comments.
Instead, I found this: Professor Obama's ratemyprof rating page.
It's an interesting angle on a fairly unexamined aspect of Obama's career. What was Obama like as a University of Chicago law professor? While it's a bit of a stretch, how he treated his students could be a good indicator of how he'll treat his constituents.
Apparently, he was "GREAT!!!!", and apparently he was "very helpful in office hours". But that's it. Two comments for Prof. Obama.
His final was a joke, but otherwise Obama seems to have done alright.
His final score:
Easiness: 3.0
Average Helpfulness: 5.0
Average Clarity: 4.0
Overall Quality: 4.5
(He lost some clarity marks because some students felt he was making up for a lack of content with an excess of rhetoric.)
Full comment reads: "he's so easy and lenient. lots of hw though but it's not that hard. the final is a joke. very helpful in office hours"
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