More Sketchup

Some more sketch-up stuff. This program is definitely a good skill to have. Pretty soon, there are no longer going to be 2D drawings of buildings. It will all be 3D, and not only can you make the building, you can take a tour inside by zooming in and walking through.

Chinese Culture

The Chinese like all other nations have a very unique culture. I decided to write about it because I am taking a class on Chinese family and kinship. It is a very interesting class and one of the topics we cover is marriage rituals. The bride and groom do not actually see each other until they are married. First the 8 characters of the bride and groom are put on a table and checked to see if they match. The 8 characters are the hour,day,month, and year the person is born in with 2 characters for each one. Next if the match is accepted by the heavens the groom's family sends the bride's family gifts called bridewealth. The bride's family gives some gifts to the new couple called dowry. Once the gifts are given, there is a 3 day celebration where the families feast. On the final day, the bride moves into her new home. As the bride is leaving, her father slams the door behind her so the family's fortune doesn't leave with the bride. The bride is carried to the groom's house on a chair(this was an old custom, brides are now taken by cars most of the time). The bride's feet cannot touch the ground until she gets to her new house. More on this another time.

Comic Life

For my interpretation of visual arts class, I am working on a program called comic life. Our assignment was to create a story of our family using comic life. I came up with something that I thought turned out pretty good. Comic starts from the bottom and reads up

sketchup

I've been working on this program called sketch-up. It's really cool. You get to make 3D objects. So I made a house and filled it with some pics of my family. I thought it came out looking pretty cool.

Zeitgeist... All I can say is wow...

I love conspiracy theories and I was looking on the web and came across this gem. I had heard of it before but never bothered to look into it that much. To summarize, Zeitgeist is a movie that presents Christianity, the attacks of 9/11, and the US Federal Reserve Bank as instruments in plots for social control and world domination. It just completely boggled my mind. Do I believe it??? Maybe some of the things mentioned but I like to be an optimist. I believe that people in the 21th century are free to make their own decisions and not be manipulated by a handful of people. Anyway here is the link to the movie for anyone interested.

http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/

There is a second movie that also came out which I plan to watch next weekend.

The Gathering

So this is the outcome of our experiment where everyone is gathering to discuss the results and how we will present the info. To make life more simple we each gave a member of our own team to the other team to help find the items easier. It was definitely a well planned scheme and I hope it works out. Otherwise we fail. Tomorrow we will know the outcome so lets see how it goes.

Results of the Experiment

Personally I thought what we accomplished as a class is quite rare. To get this many people working together is not an easy task. The only reason that I believe we were able to do this was because we all had one goal to reach. That goal was to get an A in this project and we all felt that would be easiest to accomplish by working together. Prof. Baldwin made this a competitive assignment. One person could have destroyed the whole plan and gotten the A themselves but I think everyone had a fear of failing this assignment. That fear outweighed the reward and everyone thought it would be best to share the load and accomplish the task as a group. Collaboration instead of competition In this case the zero sum case failed because no one gained anything on the behalf of someone else. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others. I think our experiment really fit this description of game theory. Based on the choice of other students in the class, we all individually decided that the best choice would be to agree to the choice made. There were times when the group seemed like it was about to fall apart but everyone stuck together till the end and we got it done. For a social experiment we as a class showed that teamwork is a great solution to any task. Also this showed that no matter how competitive the world is these days with everyone trying to get on top of everyone else, people still prefer teamwork to accomplish their goals. I personally feel everything is a lot easier when you have people to share the burden. One can also say that people would pretty much do anything to get what they want. In our case, getting an A. So this just makes everyone seem a little selfish because if there wasn't a grade attached would their really be this much collaboration? I don't like to look at it that way. I think everyone made the rational and best decision. Everyone knew this assignment would easier working as a team.