In the 2008 American fantasy drama film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, eponymous protagonist Benjamin Button, voiced by the ever suave Brad Pitt, describes how due to one tiny event that spurs a whole chain reaction of further relatively small events, a main character ends up getting hurt by an automobile.

Exactly what the event was escapes my mind (I think said character forgot her wallet or something similar to that), but whatever the event was, it provides a perfect example of something I think we all have felt before. One tiny little event becomes a metaphorical first domino in a line of dominos and snowballs until eventually something much larger happens. Unfortunately, I cannot think of an example of this from my own life off the top of my head right now, but I do remember it happening before, and perhaps you have had this sort of chain reaction play out in your own life at some point in the past.

There is a mathematical term for this chain reaction caused by a single seemingly insignificant event: the butterfly effect. The name originates from the possibility that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Texas could cause a tornado in Brazil. After all, who knows what effect the air molecules moved by a butterfly’s wings might have on the whole global weather system as a whole? You might think that such a tiny breeze causing a tornado in an entirely different hemisphere is absurd, but think again.

Have you ever noticed that the weather reports are never truly one hundred percent accurate? Have you ever wondered why this is the case? Well, it’s simply, really. Weather is a very complicated phenomenon. It is so complicated in fact that in order to truly predict it with guaranteed accuracy, we have to know the position, velocity, and acceleration of every single air molecule in the world, as well as everything influencing those air molecules. However, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that we can never truly know both the position and velocity of any object with one hundred percent accuracy. The amount of uncertainty is inversely proportional to the size of the object. For example, for a baseball, we can reasonably calculate its position and velocity at any given time with negligible percent error. However, for something incredibly small such as an electron, the margin of error is so massive that we simply cannot know both its position and velocity at the same time. If we know one of these values, we cannot know the other one. As such, we can only really guess at where electrons are located inside an atom. This is why electrons are always drawn in science textbooks orbiting an atom’s nucleus in large clouds and not as individual particles.

Air molecules may not be as small as electrons, but they are still relatively small and still under the effect of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and as such are inherently unpredictable. Because being able to predict the weather requires knowing so much information regarding every single air molecule in the world, weather forecasts are inherently always going to be inaccurate to some degree. They simply rely on too many variables to be predictable. This principle is known as chaos theory and applies to a whole host of other events and phenomena, such as coin tosses, the stock market, traffic, and pretty much anything you can think of in your day to day life. (This is why random stuff happens and causes you to be late to class)

Earlier this month, a few very lucky men and women remarked on how they had bought a ticket for Malaysia Airlines flight 370 (which now sits somewhere in the Indian Ocean) but were late or had missed their flight for some other reason. Similar situations occurred on September 11th, 2001. By a tiny chance event, these men and women were spared being part of a catastrophic tragedy. Though their circumstances may seem miraculous, they are not alone. We are all citizens of a world where the butterfly effect and chaos theory can cause unbelievably impossible events to happen, such as an entire plane disappearing into thin air. However, rather than let this fact terrify us, we should be in awe of it, for it can lead to good things too. For example, in 1971, American ping pong player Glenn Cowan missed his team bus in Nagoya, Japan. A Chinese ping pong player took notice and invited Cowan onto his own team bus. While inside the bus, Cowan met Chinese ping pong champion Zhuang Zedong.

(Zhuang Zedong in 2007)

When the two got off the bus, they were swarmed with reporters (remember that is still 1971, during the Cold War). Later, the US ping pong team received an invitation to visit China. Slowly, US-China relations were being built, and in 1972, late US president Richard Nixon finally visited China himself, formally establishing US-China diplomatic relations.

 

(Richard Nixon in China in 1972)

It might be a tiny event, but thanks to the wonders of the butterfly effect and chaos theory, a single American ping pong player missing his bus in Japan in 1971 is precisely the reason why I am here today studying at Penn State and how you are able to read this blog right now.

In light of the introduction of our persuasion and advocacy unit and its possible tie-ins with our civic issues blogs, I thought to myself, “How could I branch off from my civic issues blogs and use them as the springboard for persuasion and advocacy?” Of course, I had the choice of starting my project from scratch, but having already made some headway into the civic issues blogs and seeing some of my classmates rather passionate about expanding upon their civic issues blogs through persuasion and advocacy, I thought to myself, “There must be some way to tie this into my civic issues topic!” Unfortunately, as I read through the driving questions featured in my very first civic issues blog, I realized that a direct tie-in might be difficult. The persuasion and advocacy unit focuses on attempting to influence policy change, and that is not necessary for the US in regards to portrayal of controversial subject matter, since the US is one of the most liberal states in this field. However, there are plenty of other states that are far more restrictive on free expression in the arts, often to humorous and sometimes disturbing degrees. By looking at where first amendment rights in regards to free artistic expression have fallen elsewhere in the world, we can gain a better sense of how privileged we all are to live in the US and what dangers threatening our rights we should all be wary of.

 

One of the more egregious places where free expression is suppressed is China. Despite China being my birthplace, I find the country a rather despicable place to be in. The government has not loosened up that much since the days of Mao Zedong’s harsh rule. Restrictions on first amendment rights are rampant throughout the country. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Blogspot, Change.org, and plenty of other such sites are all blocked. Artistic expression is also under tight control. In 2002, the computer strategy game Hearts of Iron (set in WWII), was banned since it depicted Tibet, Manchuria, and Sinkiang (all nowadays part of China) as independent states and depicted Taiwan under Japanese control (which is ironic since the island was under Japanese rule during WWII).

In 2005, the absurdity of China’s censorship became even clearer when it banned a soccer computer game (Football Manager 2005) simply because it featured Tibet as a free country.

That same year, China banned the American crime film The Departed simply because in the film, actor Jack Nicholson remarks (somewhat sarcastically) on the Chinese potentially nuking Taiwan.

(Jack Nicholson)

More recently, China just lifted a 14 year ban on all video game consoles, believing them to be deleterious to the country’s people. This is ironic considering that China helps build a lot of video game consoles, though this comes at quite a cost. In 2013, workers at a factory building Xboxes threatened protest via mass suicide if they were not given better working conditions (The factory already had suicide nets in place at the time. I unfortunately lost the link to this news story.).

 

The Middle East is another place of harsh censorship of free expression in the arts. Anything related to Pokemon at all was banned in Saudi Arabia 2001 due to “promoting Zionism and gambling.” The 2013 fighting video game Injustice: Gods Among Us was banned in the UAE simply due to having the word “god” in its title.

In both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the 2007 shooter video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was banned for depicting violence against Islamic soldiers.

Even more surprisingly, the UAE banned the 2012 shooter video game Spec Ops: The Line simply for depicting a post-catastrophe envisioning of Dubai.

In Iran, the 2011 shooter video game Battlefield 3 was banned for depicting violence against Iranian soldiers, and the 2007 American action film 300 was banned for negative depiction of the ancient Persian people (I will admit though that I found the film to be rather racist, especially given actual historical facts and circumstances regarding ancient Greece and Persia.).

 

Perhaps most astoundingly of all, a multiplayer map (Favela) in the 2009 shooter video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was temporarily removed and edited simply because it featured a picture frame with the words “Allah is beautiful and He loves beauty” in Arabic.

The picture frame is located in a bathroom, and in Islam, saying anything about the faith in a bathroom is forbidden. Ironically, in a game where you can freely massacre innocent civilians in an airport, what raises controversy is Islamic praise on a picture frame in a bathroom. Also, in Modern Warfare 2, the player is given evil American enemies to kill. Strangely though, no one in the US ever got riled up over depiction of violence against American soldiers. Overall, it appears that Western depictions of Islam and anything negative and/or violent regarding the Middle East are highly frowned upon in the region.

 

Around the world, similar restrictions on free expression in the arts have always been occurring, especially recently. The 2009 American science fiction film District 9 was banned in Nigeria for supposedly being xenophobic and racist toward Nigerians.

Although Nigerian gangsters are common antagonists in the film, I personally hardly felt it was meant to disparage all Nigerians. The 2001 American comedy film Zoolander was banned in Malaysia due to its depictions of the country’s poverty and sweatshops.

In Indonesia, the 1993 American historical drama film Schindler’s List is banned simply for being sympathetic toward Jews.

The 2008 American action film Rambo is banned in Myanmar due to negative portrayal of Burmese soldiers.

Ironically, the film is praised by those in opposition to Myanmar’s oppressive military, a fact that director and lead actor Sylvester Stallone personally remarked upon positively.

 

(Sylvester Stallone)

In Russia, the 2006 American comedy film Borat is banned simply for being “offensive,” and the 2007 American biography film Charlie Wilson’s War is also banned for depicting Soviet brutality during the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan.

 

In Samoa, the 2008 American biography film Milk, which depicts the life and assassination of gays rights advocate Harvey Milk, is banned due to the country’s homophobia.

In Ukraine, the 2005 American horror film Hostel is banned for depicting Eastern Europe as a hotspot for abductions and subsequent financially inspired torture and murder.

The 2009 British comedy film Bruno is also banned there for homosexual themes.

In Kenya, playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o was imprisoned for over a year due to his plays addressing the dark side of the Kenyan regime.

 

(Ngugi wa Thiong’o)

Finally, on a slightly more frivolous note, the 2012 American adventure film The Hunger Games is banned in Vietnam for “excessive violence.”

 

 

Every once in a while, some form of free expression in the arts arouses controversy here in the US. While some Americans, including myself, may find it a bit ridiculous at times how sensitive people can be, it is important to remember that we live in a very free and liberal country when it comes to our first amendment rights. In a lot of other countries, the government controls all, and anything that it does not like will be banned, even for the most seemingly stupid and pathetic of reasons. This censorship highlights the excessive nationalism, homophobia, religious intolerance, and paranoia that plague too many world leaders. While some may claim that such extreme governance is limited to dictatorships, I warn against such dismissal of the threat. Here in the US, the government has done plenty of controversial things in the past and will likely continue to do so as long as the US is a functioning state. While it has so far done little to repress first amendment rights, we must always be wary of the possibility of further censorship while reminding ourselves how blessed we all truly are to live in a country where free expression can be a real thing.

Sources:

http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/articles/weird-reasons-video-games-were-banned-around-world

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_of_Iron

http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Call_of_Duty_4:_Modern_Warfare#Trivia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spec_Ops:_The_Line#Regional_ban

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Call_of_Duty:_Modern_Warfare_2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_films

Theatre in Your Life: Second Edition – Robert Barton and Annie McGregor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C5%A9g%C4%A9_wa_Thiong’o

 

 

A long, long time ago, back during the ever so distant days of high school, I performed in the annual school musical. Now, if any of you find picturing me in a musical to be different, please keep in mind that my roles were minimal, and having to memorize lines was no problem for me due to the dearth and sometimes nonexistence of lines for me to memorize. Now that we have gotten that out of the way, let us turn our attention to what I find truly epic and interesting. Since I went to a Catholic high school during my junior and senior years, we would always hold hands and pray in a gigantic circle before every performance. One of the more interesting prayers that we did was the platypus prayer.

While most of its details have now escaped my mind’s grasp, from what I can remember, the platypus prayer remarked on how odd platypuses are and how they seem to be hodgepodges of different body parts from numerous different animals. I do not remember how this was worked into the form of a prayer, but I do find it very interesting how humans view platypuses. Most of us see them as strange beings that are very alien to the world compared to all the other animals alive today, especially when compared to modern mammals. Europeans were amazed when they first encountered the platypus in 1798. When the first platypus specimen arrived in Britain, zoologist George Shaw thought that someone had sewn a duck’s beak onto some form of beaver-like animal.

 

George Shaw

He even started to cut up the specimen with scissors in his search for stitches. Robin Williams even joked that God was stoned when He created the platypus.

Robin Williams

However, all this is an illusion created by our own very egocentric minds. In reality, the world has been used to platypuses for 125 million years. The earliest known relative of the platypus is Teinolophos from Australia, followed by Steropodon from 110 million years ago in Australia.

 

Steropodon

As you can see in this reconstruction of Steropodon by paleoartist Nobu Tamura, the platypus form was already well developed even 110 million years ago. although odd, the platypus body plan is nothing new to this world. Meanwhile, we humans, the strange hairless bipedal apes who somehow manage to survive outside normal primate habitats, are the truly foreign creatures of this world, having been around for only 200,000 years, and at most only 8 million years if you include all bipedal primates. In fact, the modern platypus species itself has been around for 9 million years, already at least a million years older than even our earliest bipedal ancestors.

As my deliberation group learned this past Monday, being mostly Schreyer Scholars and Paterno Fellows, we are rather in a bubble, as we quickly found out when we realized that none of us knew anything about trade schools. In a way, all humans are in a bubble. We are so used to our own cultures, perceptions, experiences, and values that anything that falls outside of them, such as “strange” creatures such as platypuses, we immediately label as weird and view in a different light even if what’s “weird” has already been around for hundreds of millions of years longer than we have. This innate egocentricity is something that we should try our best to overcome while reminding ourselves that it also makes us all human and gives us all one common trait that we can feel united under.

 

This past week saw the end of the wildly popular app/mobile game known as “Flappy Bird.” Ultimately, the app’s creator Dong Nguyen simply could not deal with the fact that his little game that he had intended for short relaxing breaks had become an addiction for many and such removed it from app stores. Nor could he cope with the sleep loss he suffered after the game saw huge success. While some may consider this quite a shame, it does not make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things considering the hugely vast number of games out there for us to play in today’s world where there is supposedly an app for everything.

But why do we play games? “Because they’re fun.” Fair enough, I suppose. But on a deeper, more instinctual and primal level, why do we play games? It is a question that not many have delved into. In order to investigate this question, we first have to define what a game is. In almost all cases, a game is an event where a player competes with one or more other players, a CPU (central processing unit, essentially the “brain” of your computer, your smart phone, your video game console, etc.), or some other opponent or obstacle in order to attain an end goal. In “Flappy Bird,” a player competes against the game’s level design and game mechanics in order to obtain as high a score as possible. In football, a player competes against the opposing team in order to score as many touchdowns, field goals, and/or two point conversions as possible. In chess, a player competes against another player in order to try to put the other player’s “king” piece in “checkmate.”

But look at the definition of a game again. Based on that definition, is not life also a game? In life, does not one also compete with one or more other “players” (competitors in the job market, other students in class, etc.) and obstacles in order to attain an end goal (financial security, a dream job, the highest grade in the class, etc.)? If we assume that the answer to this question is indeed yes, then it soon becomes very clear that life is a very terrible game that few would actually pay money for. In life, we do not know how the decisions we make now will affect is in the future and how well they will lead us on or off the path to attaining our end goal. Even worse, life is full of so many random variables that it is very difficult to predict where life is going to take us and how we should act to circumvent the obstacles we encounter in life.

However, in “Flappy Bird,” one knows immediately if their actions will reward them with success or failure. One does not have to wait several decades to see whether or not they “won” the game (we will define winning here as reaching a particular high score that is up to the player’s discretion). And since “Flappy Bird” runs on a set game engine with set game mechanics and coding, there are a lot fewer unpredictable variables one has to worry about when playing “Flappy Bird.”

In the end, this is why we play games. Life is one big game that spans (hopefully) decades, and one never knows how close they are to “winning” the game. As such, games provide us a way to simulate the competitive nature of life while having instant or rapid results to our actions and limitations on how random variables can affect us. This simulation of life that is both easier and more immediately pleasing helps us to cope with the stresses of real life and remind ourselves that life too “is just a game.” So the next time you play any game, remind yourself that if you can beat it, then life should be no problem for you.

Earlier this week on Monday in class, I had brought up the topic of phrenology during our most interesting and lively discussion on ethos, pathos, and logos, and how they fit within an “ideal speech situation,” as Juergen Habermas would call it. For those who do not recall what I said, phrenology is the pseudo-scientific study of the human skull and mapping it out with the belief that certain characteristics of certain parts of the skull have particular implications. The example that I had brought up in class came from the 2012 film “Django Unchained” (If you have not yet seen this film, I highly recommend you do so sometime).

In the film, a Caucasian male tries to claim that bumps on the skull or lack thereof signify Caucasians such as the astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei to be naturally brilliant and Africans such as the numerous slaves seen throughout the film to be naturally submissive.

 

(Galileo Galilei)

I had brought up this point to show that logos is not always the most important factor in an ideal speech situation, particularly in response to Kyle’s metaphor featuring the chariot with the white horse representing reason and the black horse representing unbridled and raw instinctive emotion. Kyle reaction to my mention of phrenology clearly showed his feeling of repugnance toward the pseudoscience.

Race has been a factor in human history since we started becoming people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. It has of course been the cause of major amounts of conflict, violence, and division throughout the millennia. It is a sad truth about humanity that we often like to pretend is behind us or that we can at least hide from sight. However, hiding human division from sight is a lot harder than it sounds. Even with the Berlin wall now torn down, the divide between East and West Berlin can still be seen clearly from space.

The decades of Soviet domination over East Berlin mean that today East Berliners still use different light bulbs from West Berliners, and this creates a very visible division when viewed from space. The border between India and Pakistan can also clearly be seen from space, as artificial lighting signals attempts to control the flow of people and commodities between the two countries.

Historian Will Durant once said, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.” If aliens are viewing the Earth from space right now, it is sad to know that they could likely see these divisions that we have set up among us. Perhaps they might feel that we deserve to be conquered if all we have done is tear ourselves apart. However, as astronaut Ron Garan pointed out here (http://www.fragileoasis.org/blog/2011/9/borders-from-space/), when he saw the border between India and Pakistan illuminated in the night sky from space, he also realized what unites us: “We can look down and realize that we are all riding through the Universe together on this spaceship we call Earth, that we are all interconnected, that we are all in this together, that we are all family.”

(Ron Garan)

We are united in more ways than you might realize. Simply by being Eurasian (if anyone in our class is not Eurasian, I am sorry for forgetting about you), we all have one to four percent of our DNA contributed through our ancestors breeding with Neanderthals.

(Model of a Neanderthal man)

Native people throughout Southeast Asia, Melanesia, and Australia all have four to six percent of their DNA contributed through ancestral breeding with the Denisovans, a more recently discovered extinct form of humans that lived throughout Eurasia. A Furthermore, analysis of our mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) (for all you non-science folks out there, mDNA is DNA that specifically is inherited from our mothers only) shows that we (as in every modern human who has ever lived) can all trace our ancestry back to a single woman living in African 200,000 years ago. Actually, based on mathematical calculations of family trees, if you go back even to just the time of the Roman Empire, there should be at least one person on Earth at that time who is related to every human alive on Earth today. Furthermore, that person was likely Taiwanese, seeing as how the island was a major trading port at the time.

Seeing as how we were all born in the 1990s (or, in the case of Kyle, 1980s), it can be easy to forget sometimes how divided we humans truly are. Sometimes a single photo from space is all you need to remember this unfortunate truth about humanity. Yet let us not dwell too much on what divides us but instead focus more on what unites us. We are all human, our ancestries intertwining if you go back just millennia in time, and our DNA more similar than any 19th century phrenologist could ever have imagined. So while conflict is a daily part of society, we ought to not let it cloud our view of the true unity that holds us all together.

We live in a world full of ads. In your residence halls, there are ads posted on the bulletin boards. In both your physical and your digital mailboxes, ads flow in when actual legit mail fails to. At the HUB, both physical and digital ads are posted everywhere or are being handed out by people standing in relatively strategic locations. On TV, ads are essentially the whole point behind the existence of television in the first place (in case you never thought about it, television stations make revenue off of commercials, so essentially TV as a commodity simply revolves around selling ad time to companies); hence we are bombarded with ads anytime there’s a commercial break. In theaters, at least in my experience, half an hour is always dedicated to nothing but ads (this includes trailers other films), most of which are very loud in order to draw your attention as much as possible.

Of course, the one place where ads have become particularly important in recent years is on the Internet. I remember when I was a little kid, pop-ups were all the rage. Now, not so much anymore. Pop-up blockers have changed the course of advertising as we know it, but that has not kept companies from trying ever harder to appeal to your consumer tastes. A lot of Internet ads nowadays have little Xs in the corner that you can click. Upon clicking them, Google requests your feedback on why you clicked the X… Google is trying to determine your tastes so that only ads that appeal to you will be shown, thus improving the efficacy and efficiency of advertising, which means more revenue for both Google and the companies that pay Google for ad space. Gradually, society is learning how to streamline the advertising process so that it can target each individual person with only the ads that would be most successful at persuading that person to buy something.

Don’t think this is a big deal? Consider this: A few years ago in Minneapolis, an angry man walked into a Target store demanding to see the manager. He was angry because Target had sent his daughter in high school coupons through the mail for baby products. The father claimed that Target was thus encouraging her to get pregnant. The manager apologized for this incident. A few days later, the manager called the father in order to apologize again. However, this time the father ended up apologizing to the manager… He had had a talk with his daughter… She was due in August…

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=7&_r=4&hp

(You don’t want to know what goes on in here…)

Whenever the daughter had made any purchases from Target, the store’s internal algorithms had been tracking these purchases. They had noticed that she had begun to buy different products from the ones that she usually bought, ones that the system flagged as a suggestion that she was pregnant. As such, Target automatically sent her the coupons for baby products. In today’s society, a corporation like Target can know when a girl is pregnant before even her own father, living in the same house as her, can.

 

(Bad things happen when you click on this…)

We live in a world where our every move (well, most of them, especially the ones online) is tracked by our government or a corporation. It is difficult to escape this grasp of constant monitoring. We have become so used to seeing ads everywhere we go every day of our lives that we have forgotten how much power lies behind them. Every time you click an ad or click the X next to it, some server somewhere in the world keeps track of it so that it may be used to better direct more appealing advertisements for you. It is a bit of a scary thought to think about at times, but it reminds us how much consumerism has taken over our culture in recent decades. Sometimes the simplest everyday things can be part of something so much greater that by the time you recognize their true potential and power, it is already too late, as one unfortunate teenage girl in Minneapolis once discovered.

If you are like me, then you probably felt like your first college semester flew past you like a supersonic jet. Perhaps maybe you are worried that by the time you graduate, you will be wondering to yourself, as a senior friend of mine put it, “Where did all the time go?” Indeed, the passage of time can sometimes seem like an extraordinarily powerful phenomenon outside of our control. As humans, we seek to control things, hence why we rule the world, have driven hundreds if not thousands of species into extinction, wiped out entire ecosystems across the planet, and seek to explore more of the known and unknown universe. Since we have seemingly no control over time, its rapid passage is perhaps rather daunting to us.

 

(Ah yes, don’t you remember back in the day when all of us were younger and had no gray hair? Seems like it was only yesterday…)

But is it true that time is really uncontrollable?

Before we begin to examine this question, let’s first think about why time seems to pass more quickly to us now in college than ever before. One reason is simple: assuming that you are indeed busier in college, of course time is going to seem like it is flying by compared to if you sat around all day doing absolutely nothing. The other reason is also fairly simple but perhaps maybe not quite as intuitive: as you grow older, every year that you add on to your life accounts for a smaller percentage of your total cumulative lifespan. As such, your freshman year of college will be a smaller percentage of your overall life when you are done with this semester than your senior year of high school was when you were graduated from high school. This difference in percentage means that every year of your life will only seem to be go by faster and fast as you age… unless of course you become less busy, in which case time might seem to pass by slower for you.

As for controlling time, there are two main methods that we can use if our goal is to slow it down: exploiting gravity and exploiting velocity. Gravity is simple: stronger gravity, a direct result of being more massive, slows down time more. As such, if you approached a massive object, such as our Sun or a black hole, the intense gravity will cause time to pass by for slowly for you. Theoretically, this same principle also applies on a much smaller scale. As such, if you want time to pass by more slowly, I originally thought you should eat or work out more so that you gain more mass and as such create more intense gravity and thus slow down time more. Then I realized that in doing so, you would only be slowing time down for yourself, while the rest of the world progresses through time at its previous rate. As such, you would actually be traveling forward in time since you would be unaware of time passing more slowly for yourself and would instead only find the rest of the world having progressed slightly more in time than yourself. If you truly wanted to feel like your life was passing by more slowly, you would have to eat and work out less so that you do not gain more mass and thus age more slowly than the rest of the universe. Of course, any extra or less food that you eat or muscle than you gain or lose has entirely negligible effect on time, but theoretically and technically, it all does have at least a tiny influence.

(These guys slow down their own time more so than most people, so life will fly by even faster for them!)

Traveling at high velocity also slows down time. If you traveled at the speed of light, you would age VERY slowly. Former Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev currently holds the world record for time travel into the future since he has spent so much time orbiting the Earth at insane speeds (a total of 803 days 9 hours and 39 minutes, the most for any person) that he has slowed down his own time progression relative to us folks here on Earth to the point where he has effectively traveled 0.02 seconds into the future. (http://www.universetoday.com/105650/cosmonaut-sergei-krikalev-the-worlds-most-prolific-time-traveler/)

 

(Sergei Krikalev)

Interestingly, Krikalev was in space when the Soviet Union collapsed. We might not all have access to space-faring vehicles, but just by traveling at some speed, each and every one of us can indeed slow down our time and thus travel into the future. Of course then, if you want time to pass by more slowly, you would have to move as little as possible.

As busy college students, life can sometimes seem to pass us by without mercy, and there may seem to be nothing that we can do about it. However, thanks to the wonders of gravity and velocity, in actuality, we can influence time and make it actually pass by more slowly for us. Of course, our effect on time is negligible, and unfortunately to have a marked effect would involve technology and money that no human on Earth currently has access to. However, I personally do not feel that that should deter us. We can become so used to the mundanity of daily life that we simply access the status quo and make no attempt to challenge it. If we simply consider the clear and simple facts right there before us, we come to the conclusion that yes, technically we can control time, and if we seriously want to have a larger effect than we do now, we should invest in discovering new ways to start having a larger effect. The road to success might be difficult, but if we start off telling ourselves that we will not succeed, then we have little to no hope of accomplishing anything.

My passion blog posts this semester will again focus on taking everyday facets of life or anything mundane that we’ve become used to and reminding people how awesome such supposedly mundane facets truly are. This theme was not made entirely clear (even to myself) at the start of the semester, and as such some readers were confused as to what my overarching theme was and how the blogs all related to one another. I apologize for the inconvenience and confusion last semester.

I have several inspirations for this theme. First and foremost is the educational YouTube channel Vsauce (http://www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce). Channel owner Michael Stevens (a University of Chicago graduate) devotes the channel solely (nowadays) to being educational… in interesting ways. His videos are usually have attention-grabbing titles that pose interesting questions such as “Why are things creepy?” and “Why are things creepy?” These questions usually concern aspects of daily life that most of us have taken for granted so much that we forget to ask such interesting questions about them.

Another source of inspiration for my theme is David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, often titled “This Is Water.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhC_N6Bm_s) Since many of you have already seen this speech in class, I will not provide much of a summary, but basically Wallace describes to the graduating class how pathetically mundane adult life is but reminds them that by changing the way they think, they can look past this mundanity and realize how awesome all the “little things” in life truly are. Finally, my final inspiration for my theme are TED talks. My two favorite concern font (unfortunately, I cannot re-find the URL for this one) and cloud watching (http://www.ted.com/talks/gavin_pretor_pinney_cloudy_with_a_chance_of_joy.html). These are such mundane topics, yet the presenters make them so interesting. As I pointed out in class one time, there is a cloud that looks like a topless sunbather in that respective TED talk!

Due to the nature of this theme, my blogs won’t have much immediate relation to one another other than the overarching theme of finding awesome epicness amidst the dullness of daily life. In order to try to improve upon my usage of this relatively broad theme, two effective practices that I hope to continue from last semester include good usage of pictures and topics that truly get people thinking. At the start of the semester, my blogs seemed rather dull just at first glance, but eventually I began adding colorful pictures to help readers better grasp what I’m describing and to help break up the monotony of so many words. Based on the comments that I got on my posts, two of my favorite blog entries from the first semester that I feel truly inspired people to think beyond the everyday include “This is Penn State. This is Earth” (https://sites.psu.edu/sounder/2013/10/04/this-is-penn-state-this-is-earth/), where I cover how my hike up Mt. Nittany forever changed my view on what really matters in life, and “Bees, Baboons, and Pubic Hair” (https://sites.psu.edu/sounder/2013/11/01/baboons-bees-and-pubic-hair/), where I discuss how much we still do not know about the simplest things in nature.

Two major changes that I’d like to try to incorporate in my blogs are a more amiable persona toward readers and an appeal to a more diverse audience. In my first semester, I received a number of complaints from both fellow students and Kyle about marked level of irreverence and disrespect toward my readers. I am undoubtedly guilty of this and will admit right now that I do have both an enormous superiority complex and a twisted, often biting sense of humor. These are aspects of my personality that I struggle with and will attempt to mitigate in my blogs this semester. Also, since I am extraordinarily nerdy and enjoy the wonders of science, I tend to sometimes write about rather niche scientific topics that failed to attract a large audience. This semester I will try to make such topics more readily accessible to everyone. I think my “Baboons, Bees, and Pubic Hair” post from last semester did a relatively good job of this.