Procrast-Nation

It’s that simple.  Make a request, and I will draw an image of it on MS Paint that will be 6″ by 6″.  Multiple requests are allowed.  There are a couple of rules though:
-Limit requests to one or two words

-Requests may not involve a subject and a predicate.  For example, you could request “dog” or “pee” but you could not request “dog peeing”

-Proper nouns are allowed if they are relatively famous and well known, so “Abraham Lincoln” would be acceptable, but some random person, such as your neighbor, would not be.

-If your request is ambiguous or has multiple meanings, that is fine.  I will just interpret it however I feel like.  So if you request “sex” I could draw an image representing gender, or I could draw the act of intercourse.

-Don’t be annoying and only request things that are very difficult to express.  For every abstract request I’d like five concrete ones.

I’ll post the requests in batches of 5-10.

That’s all.  Post requests in the comment section.

This is a creative project I did in a math class for non-majors (the same class I wrote this article for  http://procrast-nation.com/?p=3578  ).

The project was to take one of the concepts or topics we learned about in class and to describe it metaphorically through art.  The project was very open ended, and the art could be anything from a painting, to a song, to whatever you wanted.  The medium I chose for my art was power-point.  I made a slide show that told a science fiction story about a future breakthrough that allows humans to “phase” into other “channels”.  The implications of this breakthrough are revealed as the slide show progresses.  The breakthroughs and important events are listed chronologically.  Pay particular attention to how the slides’ color changes as the slide show progresses.

The topic I was describing metaphorically was the idea of spacial dimensions beyond the third.  For example, I explain how if there was a fourth spatial dimension, surgery would be possible without ever cutting anyone open and how storage space would be virtually unlimited.

Obviously, you need the ability to watch microsoft power-point presentations in order to view this project.  Enjoy.

phasing-technology-timeline

Edit: For those of you who really want to see the text of the slide-show but don’t have the ability to view it, I have included the text below.  I will warn you though, it really should be viewed in its original medium, otherwise you will miss out on all the awesome illustrations and animations created by yours truly.

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Just got back from yet another awful concert.  I’ve begun to notice a trend in the low-mid range bands (if you can call them that) that play at the smaller sized colleges.  They get paid 5-50k to play to a group of 300-3000 intoxicated 18-22 year-olds.  They generally play in a gymnasium or some sort of event space poorly designed for musical performances and are complimented by aging sound systems that periodically emit feedback or simply cut out all together.  What this all boils down to is that these groups need absolutely no talent.  Essentially they need an arsenal of sound-clips, the ability to mumble vaguely coherent things into the microphone while occasionally referencing whatever location they are performing in, and a whole lot of bass.  It seems that if they can blast enough rhythmic noise, while occasionally saying, ” college X is da bomb” and “college X is tearing up the house” or similar things and “free-styling” in between, they are a huge success.  The sad truth is most of the people attending these events are simply to drunk to be able to distinguish a jumble of sound clips, noise and distortion from music.

I use to believe that maybe if I drank enough, I could enjoy these performances to, but I’ve learned that all drinking more does is make me feel physically nauseated whilst I am disappointed by the musical act.   It seems if you want to make decent money, the formula is simple, develop a reputation via the internet, get some really loud sound equipment and steal some sound clips form other popular forms of music, and say things that may or may not rhyme into the microphone.   Anyway, the title of this post… basically it seems that a large drunken crowd doesn’t care about the quality of what they hear, they just want it to be loud and rhythmic.  Sorta like that scene from the second Matrix.
Oh and the band I saw live that inspired this rant was Chiddy Bang.

It’s been a really long time since I did one of these, so yeah. Here we go.

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If you are a regular reader, you know by now that I am obsessed with starting these seemingly insane and pointless projects.  Well its time for another one, but this one I think has real potential.  As many of you may remember, project inbox overload was originally an attempt to see if it was actually feasible to fill a gmail account.  Sure enough, with the help of friends, I was able to reach the 7 gigabyte or so limit gmail provided.  I then found out that Yahoo offered “unlimited space”, so I immediately started a yahoo account and began signing it up for news letters and email updates and giving the email address out to sketchy websites that would spam it.  With some work, I was getting a couple thousand emails a day, over half of which for some odd reason were advertisements for Indian and plus sized breast porn.  Anyway, it didn’t take long for Yahoo to screw me out of my unlimited space.  Essentially the account broke.  It started accepting less and less emails and locking up more and more frequently until eventually, whenever I tried to log into the email I’d just recieve an error message.  The error message indicates that I should contact support, who were of course, non responsive.  The account had reached around 70,000 emails when this happened, which were, based on some calculations and estimating, under 2 gigabytes worth of space total.  As I predicted, yahoo’s unlimited space was a scam and their email was far inferior to gmail.  Anyway, the whole point of this past project was to test the limits of the free service, and also to see how easy it was to get signed up for a bombardment of emails.

Now, what does this have to do with Neil Ludd you may ask?  I will explain.  Recently people have used email less and less and have been spending more time and energy on facebook and other social networking sites. The amount of data transferred over these sites is ridiculous. People make hundreds, in some case thousands of “friends” to whom they send messages, post pictures, invite to events, play games with, and in essence, spam. For some crazy statistics, follow this link:

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Facebook-Statistics-2010.jpg

To highlight a few, there are over 400 million active users, 60 million status updates each day, 3 billion photos uploaded each month, and 5,000,000,000 pieces of content are shared EACH WEEK!

I feel that facebook, more than anything else, epitomizes the information glut that Neil Postman talked about in modern society. I figured, why not do a little experiment. I wanted to see how much facebook does to prevent people from over-using and distributing information, so I made an account under the alias Neil Ludd.

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Basically an argument that the American Criminal Justice system precludes the idea of an objective truth.  This violates one of the presuppositions of modernity, making the courts postmodern despite the fact that they are highly rationalized, creating a sort of paradox.  I use comparative law to build the argument.

If the Amanda Knox Case references seem kind of forced, it is because they are.  The paper was suppose to be about the case, so I somehow had to tie it in to my argument.
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