In this class we talked about signal to noise ratio. We also talked about A Life At Play where we talked about Shannon. His work is reconsidering the process of communication. In the beginning of the class My professor taught us that the signal means what you want to hear and the that noise is everything but the signal. For an idealist (which I am) the signal would be the ideal for them.

Something to take away from the book is that language is full of redundancy the example we got (which is hilarious by the way) was U ppl dnt reed t bok which most people will read easily as you people didn’t read the book. The key point in this was that we do not need a lot of letters to make a sentence, or even a word. The biggest thing I took away from the class is that Information and meaning are two different things and that Information theory is indifferent to meaning.

We also listened/ watched the teacher make a song on garage band that was both really good and slightly triggering.

-Andrea Moye

I know i’m late but it should be fine the sun isn’t even up yet!

In this class we continued on from yesterday. What I took away as the most important was that in World War II is an example of a command and control system which would become seemingly permanent after WWII. I also think that an important part of the lesson was that thanks to Vannevar Bush that have the mindset we do now about the growth of technology and efficiency. I think this because as mentioned in class during the Cold War we had a lot of information that was being siloed, but Bush was thinking of alternative ways acting on the information given; thus giving a democratic outlook on computers by the end of the Cold War. My teacher also talked about the creation of memex, which is like a smartphone but the size of desk, as well as the ENIAC, which stands for Electronic Numerical Integrate And Computer. This tool has vacuum tubes, unfortunately it is less capable than the phone mainly because sound going through something overtime becomes less and less vibrant, making it hard to hear.

Today’s class was a lot easier to understand and helped explain any confusion I had on Week 4 Day 1. I think my favorite part of this class was learning how Douglas Englebert was responsible (partially?) for creating the images/ icons we see on the computer screen rather than having to type in a command in order to pull up a file.

-Andrea Moye

Today we talked about idealism vs. realism in the physiological sense. So from what i understand i am an idealist. Reason being that i do believe in God and i am working up to his ideals. But I may be more of a realist so i’m not exactly sure. Ever since i was young i would question why i like a certain thing or question the meeting of something, yet I do have an ideal to follow. So what am I?

… I’ll just go with idealist since i seem to agree with that more when we were going over it in class…except for music. That is my only exception. i know that I like a song based on the beat it has or if I can sing to it. The only question is, is this my ideal or my reasoning?

Who knows, i sure don’t

-Andrea Moye

In this class we talked about the book The Shallows and we focused mostly on the concept of the “medium is the message”.  From what I understand this means that what is most important is the message. If I send a text the important part is the message. In the sense of a computer the important part is what I’m looking up… right?

Another thing we talked about is the concept of reading to yourself. Which pretty much is like reading to another version of yourself. My teacher made a point to ask whether this is weird. To me I think of thinking to yourself or even thinking out loud. I mean you look like a weirdo when you think out loud (or so I’ve been told) so how is reading to yourself weird?

Finally we also talked about points of views. In movies (the old-time ones) first show one part of the movie from one point of view before switching it to show what the other person is experiencing at the same time. Movies now show the point of view of everybody! In the movie we saw today we were a solider, a nazi, a fish, a ghost…etc. long story short we were many things within the movie  which just seems to externalize the concept of point of views. Really we get different points of view in books we read but as my teacher said we only internalize that concept, much different from the movie where we switch pov in a matter of seconds.

-Andrea Moye