Author: Sam Skinner

Emotions Detective!

After reading the chapter on Empathy in Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind, I decided to take a couple of tests to see how good I am at reading people. My results were actually pleasantly surprising! It turns out I’m well above average at reading people’s emotions just from their face! The first test I took was the test to determine whether a smile is real or fake, and I managed to get 17 out of 20 of those correct. The second test I took was picking out an emotion based solely on seeing the person’s eyes and on this one I scored 31 out of 36.

It’s quite comforting to know I can read people’s emotions as I’d hate to be fooled by a fake smile or unable to read someone who needed help. I’ve always been a good person to talk to when someone is having some sort of trouble. I like comforting hurt or worried friends and I have been told I give good advice and really help and that’s a wonderful thing to hear! If someone is upset with a boyfriend or a parent, I am always offering my ears to talk to and I love doing it. My mum sometimes says I should be a psychologist, and I’ve always thought it would be a very interesting profession, but I don’t have the passion for it that I have for computer science.

Still, I found this chapter quite enlightening and enjoyed quizzing my face-deciphering abilities. People need to be empathetic, they don’t understand how much it can mean to someone in trouble for them to know that the person they are talking to is truly interested and truly cares and wishes to help. It really brightens someone’s day, and I know that first hand. :) x

A beautiful landscape that makes me smile! :)

Image source: http://www.foreveryoungadult.com/wp-content/upload/2010/05/english-countryside.jpg


Measuring Spirituality?

Well, I scored about where I expected on a Spirituality test – below average. I have never been a spiritual person and don’t really have the plans to be one in my future. I’m a very logical and realistic person (hence the computer science major!) and simply can’t make myself believe or have faith in anything that goes against that logic because it just seems almost silly. But to each his own, if someone can truly take solace out of having such spirituality in whatever form, then I say go for it! Everyone has different views on life and its importance. I am simply on the end of the spectrum that’s a little more skeptical of any higher meaning, and I’m okay with that. I’m content with living my life and being happy for the sake of living my life and being happy! I don’t need any more than that. If I am true to myself and true to others, nothing more should be required of me to feel meaningful.

One of my favourite quotes regarding spirituality is by Marcus Aurelius; he says:

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”

This is a wonderful sentiment, I believe, and it reinforces my view of life. Do whatever makes you happy! It’s as simple as that!

Picture I took of the beach in Whitstable, England.

Image source: ME!


Only Memories.

‘I ambled into the space and felt a void. There was something missing in that old bedroom. It made me realize the hole she had left in my heart in the way only distant, sad memories could. Things were different and I had to accept that. They were only memories.’

This was my feeble attempt at a mini-saga after reading the Story chapter in Daniel Pinks A Whole New Mind. I wrote about the first thing that came to my mind, which was what’s been on my mind for the past few weeks: a break-up. I am not a fan of writing stories at all, but I actually enjoy the idea of a 50 word story. It’s just long enough to convey an emotion, but short enough to not be arduous or straining. When you’re tied to such a small word count, every adjective and ever verb matters. You have to get across as much meaning and feeling as you can while adhering to the limit, so every word matters.

Story is an interesting concept and I think it is an important part of everything we do. Humans do relate to stories and the emotions they bring more than plain text, but I’m not sure I quite understand their importance in business. I suppose I’ll have to do a little more reading on my own to get it and I know it will be a good concept to have in my head. I enjoy narratives and I suppose that’s enough of a reason for them being a key part of an organization.

 

Only Memories

Image source: http://www.variedperspectives.com/Nature/Water/void.html


Now You’re Thinking with Portals!

There are very few puzzle games in this world that I actually enjoy playing, but one that stands far above all others in my books is Portal 2.

Portal 2

Portal 2, for those who have never played the series, is a first-person puzzle-platform game available on the latest consoles and PC. The game requires extreme levels of lateral thinking to complete. The game revolves around getting from point A to point B using whatever is in the room and your portal gun. Your portal gun can shoot two portals, blue and orange, which you can traverse between at will. Sounds easy? The trick is, there is only a certain surface that these portals can be placed on and this material is deviously vacant when you need it the most. To reach your goal, you have to use a whole number of tactics, depending on what you have in your arsenal for that particular challenge.

Jumping between Portals

A number of different objects and contraptions  might show up in a room. Some involving lasers, cubes, light bridges, and anti-gravity beams. Some rooms even require you to manipulate physics (as seen at 2:16 in the top video), by generating momentum through falls only to relocate your portals to use this momentum as a jump to access high and hard to reach places (at 2:26 you can see a much more advanced use of this!).

Manipulating Physics!

There are two vastly different routes that people choose to take once they enter a room: The first and smartest plan is to carefully plan your course of action by finding everything available and every surface and devising a step-by-step method to reach your goal. The second method, much more commonly used, myself inclusive, is to start shooting portals everywhere and doing anything in your direct vicinity and seeing where you end up! While this usually takes longer, I am a firm supporter of it being much more enjoyable!

2 Player Co-p.

Another way of playing, which I enjoy even more, is the 2 player co-op game-mode. This allows you to bring a friend along on your physics-bending adventures. Along with your companion, however, comes a whole new set of difficulties. Each armed with separate portal-creating-devices, you now have 4 potential portals in your inventory! With the now possible dark-blue, light-blue, orange, and red portals, the puzzles become much more complicated as you have an exponentially higher number of possibilities. This past weekend I dared to take on this challenge with my neighbour as we pulled an all-nighter progressing through the entire game! Dare I say, it was one of the most fun nights I have had in a very long time.The video below is a fantastic demonstration of the humour and excitement, as well as mind-bending puzzles, present in Portal 2.

Games like this should be played by anyone and everyone. Along with being an incredibly fun time, they really do make you think and exercise your brain to think of solutions to problems you would never come across in real life, but develop your lateral thinking skills immensely. I highly recommend anyone who has yet to try this game to rent it and find a pal to play through the co-op, or if no one is up for it, just play the single player. It will make you laugh, cheer, and sometimes pull your hair out, but the whole time you’re thinking and being creative and solving problems. Go on, try thinking with portals for a change!

 

Image Sources in Order:

http://www.xbox360videogames.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/portal2-logo.jpg

http://gnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Portal-2.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/Portal_physics-2.svg/387px-Portal_physics-2.svg.png

http://buzz.blastmagazine.com/files/2011/04/Portal2portals.jpg


Creative Influence

There are a lot of people in this world who are influential to me in my professional discipline. I am a Computer Science major and there are so many big names in the CS industry to look up to and be inspired by their work that it is tough to choose just a few. I have profiled below some of the big ones.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the founders of the most popular search engine in the world: Google. What made Page and Brin so successful was their simplistic view on what the web should be. They decided to do away with messy ads and busy pages, and stuck a search bar under a logo, and viewers loved it. These two began Google later than other search engines, but it quickly became the most dominant due to their unique design of a clean website and a creative work environment. These two are inspirations to any CS student as it shows that, despite how many products are out there in the field you’re interested in, if you can create something truly useful and unique, you will be successful still.

Andrew Gower

Andrew Gower is the co-founder of a game-development company named Jagex. Jagex, best known for it’s MMORPG Runescape, was started by Andrew and Paul Gower in Cambridge, England, and has become one of the most popular gaming companies in the world. Gower began writing the code for Runescape, which is all in Java, soon after the company began as a project and it is now the world’s largest free-to-play MMORPG! I am incredibly interested in programming a big game or working on a game-development team and this man is a big inspiration to me. I would love to follow in his footsteps and create the next big thing.

James Gosling

James Gosling is the father of Java. He created a language that is used around the world to teach students the introduction to CS as well as being used for advanced software design. He is an influence on me because he created my favourite language so far! Everything I’ve done in my CS career so far has been with Java and I think it’s an excellent language to get started on all thanks to this man. He is a smart and creative individual and has done a lot for the CS world while at Sun Microsystems and even still now after he has left.

 

Image Sources in Order:

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/galleries/2010/technology/1007/gallery.smartest_people_tech.fortune/images/2_larry_sergei_a.jpg

http://images.wikia.com/runescape/images/8/8b/Andrew_Gower.jpg

http://geeknizer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/james-gosling-java.jpg


Creativity in Logic

I’ve always been an extremely logical person all my life. I could argue my point across to anyone using simple step-by-step sentences, and I would solve math equations faster than anyone in my class. There was never really anywhere for me to put this mindset to use, in terms of academics, until I found out about a Beginning Program class in my High School. I enrolled in it with absolutely no idea what to expect and I loved it instantly.

Since then I have taken every Computer Science class I’ve been able to get my hands on and that’s the reason I am here at Georgia Tech. Tech offers a fantastic CS program with some of the best professors in the nation or even the world. It’s wonderful to have found a subject that I enjoy, I am good at, and that will offer me a vast array of opportunities for the future! A lot of my friends think I’m crazy for enjoying a subject that most of them despise, and that I get such a thrill out of a program successfully compiling, but I’m okay with being so nerdy.

The thing about programming is that because it is so logical and so step-by-step,  it requires very little creativity, but this is far from the truth. There is a lot more creativity in coding than people think. First of all is the code itself: to achieve the desired effect from your program, you have to be extremely clever in how you write it. Sometimes you’ll run into dead-ends and you’re required to think of a smart way around it. Often I’ll run into one of these road blocks and I’ll have to leave my code for a while to let me brain relax. I’ve had that ‘aha!’ moment out of the blue while doing anything, even sleeping. I’ve woken up with the answer as clear as day in my head and, even though it was the middle of the night, I had to implement what I’d come up with immediately. This thrill is so fulfilling and it’s definitely what I want to do.

The other way that Computer Science can be creative is where you apply it. Yes, you could simply program mainframes or platforms or databases, but there’s so much more you can do! I want to develop user-interfaces that are so simple, yet so advanced that they’ll be implemented somewhere where millions of people will see it and use it. I want to work on applications and entertainment software and do something that will affect a lot of people.

I want to be creative. I want to create something that everyone will see. I want to do this through being a Computer Scientist and thinking outside the box.


Playing with Comics.

I found the chapter on Play in Dan Pink’s book very interesting and entertaining. I agree that humor and fun should be woven into our work during school or business to improve our concentration and motivation. A joke can brighten up our day and a funny video can put us in a great mood and these joyful feelings help us work and stay focused. I couldn’t imagine working somewhere that I didn’t enjoy or somewhere I couldn’t have fun. That would just be torture. I also like anything that will convince my parents that it’s okay for me to game.. The activity I chose to participate in was the find a comic without captions and write my own. I searched around to find one that looked fun and eventually settled on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles one! The first thing I did was look over each of the four captions and try and understand what could be going on despite the lack of words. Very quickly, the mean-joking side of me saw a crude possibility for what could be happening in the frames. So I wrote down the first thing that came to mind before I over-analyzed it, and this is what I got: I did have trouble coming up with something for the last box.. I was tempted to leave it empty and just have his expression explain everything, but in the end I put that in. I’m not sure how good of a punchline it was. But I actually really enjoyed doing this. I did a couple others, but this was my favorite, particularly because it was the first time I did it.

The Symphony of Symphony.

Probably my favourite aspect of Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 is the variation on volumes of different sections and instruments. The soft strings that came in after a big percussion crash added such an element of balance and precision. And before I knew it, the horns came barging back into the scene! The ability to use these techniques and to actually sound good while doing it must take an extraordinary amount of skill.

I particularly like the woodwinds as they fade in.

Also, along with the volume, the tempo of the piece changed dramatically and spontaneously sparking a sense of urgency, but it quickly returns back to the slower speed bringing back the calm feel. However, before you know it it’s racing forward again! I can’t imagine the time that went into writing the music for each individual instrument. To me, a left-brained thinker, it sounds like an impossibly tedious job, but I’m sure to a right-brained thinker it must feel like an open field of possibilities. Each instrument is so in sync with the others that you barely notice how many there must be. If it was written poorly, I think you would notice a particular instrument sticking out, but it all flows and the synergy is astounding.

As Pink said, the composer took his array of instruments and created a piece so fantastic that it’s musical merit amounted to much more than the sum of each individual instrument. That is what lets a composer live in history.


Friday 09/02/11 Discussion

On Friday my group did quite a lot of productive brainstorming. We all brought in various items we’d made, but honestly none of them have anything to do with our ideas so far! It probably did provide us with some inspiration though, and being in a nice open room with windows and a white board definitely helped too.

First we all shared things we enjoyed and talents we had to get a feel for something we might all enjoy. Hannah shared with us an animation she’d made and I shared some games I’d coded and from there we found our idea. We are all a bit creative and after suggestions and rejections, we thought that a video might be a really fun and creative thing to produce. We’re still not entirely agreed on what the video will be about, but we’re set on it being about the differences around campus, whether that is different backgrounds, or different tastes in food, we’re not sure!

I’m sure once we get together again we’ll get more of a solid idea down because we only spent a little bit of time discussing on Friday. We got a lot done though! It was a fun process and I enjoyed getting to know some of my classmates a bit more.