“All the tchotchkes of the world – the coffee mugs, the bracelets, the nose rings – would serve double duty as keys to content like music” The idea behind using physical tokens as keys to listen to music would supposedly be to bring romanticism back into the music industry. Unfortunately, I do not agree with this view.

Maybe I am the only one in this class young enough to remember playing around with ‘HitClips.’ This toy was based on the exact same premise as Mr. Lanier’s vision. Basically, they were little handheld devices that you got little cards for, and when you put a little card in, it would play the latest big pop hit or whatever. They were extremely awesome; you were basically the coolest kid in the school if you had one of these. The problem was, your HitClip set would almost overnight turn into something not unlike this:

HitClip Rats Nest

The only difference between HitClips and Mr. Lanier’s vision is that Songles would have tangiable, non-fiat value since they would be incorporated into household items. Imagine you really like Snoop Dog, so you go out to the grocery store to buy one of his songs. Snoop Dog’s music is in the form of dog-collars. You buy it, plug it in to your Songle player and enjoy your new music. Except, there’s just one problem:
You don’t own a dog.
You will eventually end up with a few dozen different Snoop-Dog-Collars among countless other cumbersome accessories you have no use for and own solely for the purpose of listening to music.

Such a form of music distribution would grow very old very fast.

I hope I have not come off as if I am unquestioningly and blindly against every sentence in this book. There are many interesting points he makes and I look forward to seeing what else he has to give. Just like Mr. Lanier, I believe drastic changes are necessary in media propagation to allow artists to unleash their full creativity. Maye not these changes, though.

The best reason I can think of that Mr. Lanier would leave this section in his book is as an excuse to use the word ‘tchotchkes.’

These cover:
Many examples of simple separable differential equations, including ones involving u substitution
Unsophisticated application of differential equations to population growth/decay (Infinite resources assumed, never levels off)

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I am sorry to say that the first few chapters of this book do not sit very well with me. After having read chapters 2-4 I found myself utterly confused with respect to what message Mr. Lanier was trying to convey so I decided to reread just chapter 2 with a fine-toothed comb. To be honest I do not feel much more in agreement.

Mr. Lanier decides to start chapter 2 with a recollection of his encounters with radical Rapture believers throughout his upbringing as a segue into a discussion on the science fiction concept of the Singularity. After this he decides to explain to us relativism by using non-sequiter statements like. “A computer isn’t even there unless a person experiences it.”

He goes on to tell us a few stories about Alan Turing and Kasparov getting beat at chess by a computer system because of his poker face. Admittedly, I quite enjoyed both of these although I am still not sure what he is getting at.

Near the end of the chapter he graces us with two thought experiments, the second of which is a thinly veiled carbon copy of the infinite monkey theorem. ( Basically, if you’ve got a bunch of monkeys all typing random things on an infinite amount of typewriters, given enough time and resources they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. ) He argues that if we took a big mass of data and took an infinite amount of time interpreting it in different ways we will eventually end up with a copy of our brain. Ultimately I think this experiment falls apart right when he assumes that our brains are nothing more than advanced computers. Sure, the hive mind of the internet may be capable of dwarfing the development any single person is capable of but that is only because it is backed by tens of thousands of such people. If every human being was suddenly eradicated from the face of the earth, the internet and computers would not continue to invent and discover things, as Lanier seems to imply. Not once have we gotten a computer to reproduce creative thought. This argument is more or less similar to saying ‘research labs will soon overpower humans because they are doing things n so much more rapidly than a human can.’ Humans are the ones powering the research labs…

Up until now it appears that Mr. Lanier has just strung together an absurd grab-bag of neckbeardish arguments. I do not think I have devoted enough time to this book and look forward to examining it more carefully in the coming weeks. It seems that others understood Mr. Lanier’s message better than I did so I will try to respond to their interpretation of his opinion in my responses to their posts.

Cheers

We will see how the class responds to this.

EDIT: In standard Community College fashion, it was ignored and I got a 100.

you may notice ‘matricies’ is spelled wrong throughout.

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These notes cover:
Atomic properties of Insulators and Conductors
Columbs Law formula definition & examples
Electric Fields as point and line sources
Elementary example electric fields from ring sources
How to calculate the force of an electric field on a point some distance away

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On 1.2 we used a calculator to work the problem.

These are just class notes so I know they’re not that clear without a narrative. Post a comment and I will post an explanation.

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These last few days the instructor has done little more than work problems so these notes are fairly self-explanatory. These notes record the following procedures:

How to test a solution set against a differential equation
How to derive acceleration/velocity formulas using differential equations given
How to solve a simple differential equation that describes population growth
How to get a specific solution from a general solution given some initial conditions

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Feedback is welcome; if parts of these notes aren’t clear enough, don’t hesitate to ask questions or leave suggestions on how I can take notes better.