Last weekend I finally got together a couple of friends and shot a movie that I had in mind for a couple of weeks. What an amazing experience. It was very interesting. When you try to make a movie you start realizing all the little problems that you can bump into and that can make something that you would think as very easy to do as a titanic project. But it went well. The audio was kind of bad, but we all had a lot of fun acting and two of us ended up jumping in the lake, which was freezing cold.
I have had some experience with editing movie clips, but I had never tried to put together a short movie before. I have indeed acted before and I knew that it is a very tiring process, that you have to repeat many times the scenes over and over again. But it was a completely different experience to have to tell other people what to do. When directing a movie you need to be conscious of the other people needs as well as your needs to get the scenes well done, which can take many tries. It is a hard balance to keep.
Then, once the shots have been taken, I brought everything to my lab. It took at least eight hours of work to edit all the scenes together, and to think as well how to put them together. It is a sad process, since you also have to decide what to keep out, even if you liked and you know that everybody else put efforts in acting it. The movie ended up being kind of long, about nine minutes. I thought it would have been about three. That tells already how unexperienced I am.
Overall, the experience was a blast. If you have the time and the skills, I suggest to save a weekend to do it. It pays off a lot, and watching it a long time from now will bring back a lot of good memories. On the side, I developed a kind of tick now. Everytime I see a movie I am now always looking at where the hands are and when the angle changes, you will always find out that their position moved a little bit. After you try to edit a scene with multiple angles, you cannot stop thinking about it.
Final remarks, what is the movie about? Well, I do not want to give the details away. If you are curios, then you need to ask me.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Languages around the world
Yesterday evening I ended up entertaining conversation with a Turkish girl at dinner. Turkey is such a close country to Europe. More than a decade ago I went to Skopelos, in the Aegean sea, not too far from it, and maybe I will eventually go sailing with my uncle to Rhodes, which is very close to the Western coast of Turkey.
Despite little desire to learn Turkish, I am always fascinated by how different languages are and how we bear the irreversible imprinting of it. So I started asking all possible questions about names for different objects and concepts trying to catch any similarities with the languages I know. Despite the long list I had little luck, the only thing that came out was "kim" which is the Italian equivalent for "chi" and "baba" that is the equivalent for dad and which can be said in Italian as "babbo". Not much overall.
What I had forgot was that Turkish is not an Indo-European language. Despite the fact that Turkey is closer than India, it would be easier to find similarities with Indian languages. I did not investigate the grammar myself but I read that it is very different. Turkish is part of the bigger superfamily of Altaic languages which do not use articles or gender or even pronouns, if I remember correctly.
I have been studying a little bit of German and I got fascinated by how much the echo of an ancestral grammar lives in Italic languages like Italian and Spanish as it does in German. I can understand how dialects come to life. Each one of us, looking at his own past, might find istances of inventing a new word to describe something special to be recognized only by a small circle of friends. But grammar structures go way beyond what anybody might have tried to come up to change how we comunicate with each other. Who was responsible for genders in Germanic and Italic languages? For sure, for such a change to take place, the logical explanation would be that there was a time that language was spoken by a really small circle of people. Those choices of change, whoever made them, have an everlasting echo across the whole Europe now, and, through English, across the whole world.
Nevertheless, even the Turkish language has the familiar Subject Object Verb order as German and Latin do. Most of languages seem to share this characteristic around the world and I easily believe that this might have to do with something hard encoded in our brain. So, how much is language innate and how much is it acquired after birth? A lot of people asked this question and the answer is such an amazing mystery. It is a fact that in the past ancestral humans could not spoke and at some point something changes, maybe something dramatic. But we have to remember that everything that happened must have taken place step by step. In this regard, I find in these words from the book "Before the dawn" fascinating:
"... the human capacity for syntax might have evolved out of animal brain module designed for some other purpose, such as navigation. Their argument is that the essential feature of language is recursion, the ability to embed one phrase inside another in an indefinitely long chain. Recursion may also be a feature of faculties like navigation that require an animal to remember how to get from A to D, with and excursion to B and C if the way is blocked. If the genes that specify the brain's navigation module were accidentally duplicated, the spare set would be free to evolve and perhaps acquire the function of encoding thought into language."
We might know much more about it in the next decade. Just recently, the Neanderthal genome project proved that Neanderthals had the same copy of gene FOXP2 as humans do, which is believed to have had a big part in the development of language. Even if this is not proof that the Neanderthal could talk, finding a different copy would have indeed proved the contrary, as many people believe.
Little doubt there is that language is one of the key defining feature of the human species. Languages, in their diversity, carry the choices that people like us took thousands of years ago. Choices that echo still now, everytime we entertain conversation with someone.
Despite little desire to learn Turkish, I am always fascinated by how different languages are and how we bear the irreversible imprinting of it. So I started asking all possible questions about names for different objects and concepts trying to catch any similarities with the languages I know. Despite the long list I had little luck, the only thing that came out was "kim" which is the Italian equivalent for "chi" and "baba" that is the equivalent for dad and which can be said in Italian as "babbo". Not much overall.
What I had forgot was that Turkish is not an Indo-European language. Despite the fact that Turkey is closer than India, it would be easier to find similarities with Indian languages. I did not investigate the grammar myself but I read that it is very different. Turkish is part of the bigger superfamily of Altaic languages which do not use articles or gender or even pronouns, if I remember correctly.
I have been studying a little bit of German and I got fascinated by how much the echo of an ancestral grammar lives in Italic languages like Italian and Spanish as it does in German. I can understand how dialects come to life. Each one of us, looking at his own past, might find istances of inventing a new word to describe something special to be recognized only by a small circle of friends. But grammar structures go way beyond what anybody might have tried to come up to change how we comunicate with each other. Who was responsible for genders in Germanic and Italic languages? For sure, for such a change to take place, the logical explanation would be that there was a time that language was spoken by a really small circle of people. Those choices of change, whoever made them, have an everlasting echo across the whole Europe now, and, through English, across the whole world.
Nevertheless, even the Turkish language has the familiar Subject Object Verb order as German and Latin do. Most of languages seem to share this characteristic around the world and I easily believe that this might have to do with something hard encoded in our brain. So, how much is language innate and how much is it acquired after birth? A lot of people asked this question and the answer is such an amazing mystery. It is a fact that in the past ancestral humans could not spoke and at some point something changes, maybe something dramatic. But we have to remember that everything that happened must have taken place step by step. In this regard, I find in these words from the book "Before the dawn" fascinating:
"... the human capacity for syntax might have evolved out of animal brain module designed for some other purpose, such as navigation. Their argument is that the essential feature of language is recursion, the ability to embed one phrase inside another in an indefinitely long chain. Recursion may also be a feature of faculties like navigation that require an animal to remember how to get from A to D, with and excursion to B and C if the way is blocked. If the genes that specify the brain's navigation module were accidentally duplicated, the spare set would be free to evolve and perhaps acquire the function of encoding thought into language."
We might know much more about it in the next decade. Just recently, the Neanderthal genome project proved that Neanderthals had the same copy of gene FOXP2 as humans do, which is believed to have had a big part in the development of language. Even if this is not proof that the Neanderthal could talk, finding a different copy would have indeed proved the contrary, as many people believe.
Little doubt there is that language is one of the key defining feature of the human species. Languages, in their diversity, carry the choices that people like us took thousands of years ago. Choices that echo still now, everytime we entertain conversation with someone.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
And what if he gets hit by a bus?
This week I have been at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, the biggest conference for mathematicians taking place yearly in the United States. I have not been terribly impressed but it was an interesting experience overall.
I took a minicourse teaching how to use a computer software named GeoGebra. It is a program that allows to play with Euclidean geometry very intuitively. It is one of those tools that you wished you had back in high school. Still, I thought it would be interesting to learn how to use it in case I ever have to teach something to younger kids. And, it is completely open source, a plus.
Later on, I went to the exhibits and in one of the many stands there was a girl presenting SketchPad, a software that is terribly similar to GeoGebra but is proprietary and comes with a price. I could not be easily impressed.
Although I decided to engage conversation with the presenter starting saying that GeoGebra looked extremely similar to their software. As I said that, I could see the gloom in her eyes. She did confess me later on that people in their company were very worried about it since SketchPad was their main asset. And once a free and open source version is out, who would buy it?
Definitely not me, since SketchPad does not even run on Linux. Still, I was touched by the story. The people at SketchPad are not against open source, it is just that they do not have a business model for it.
Moreover, I learnt that there was a single designer for SketchPad and that actually, everybody in the company, ten people more or less, was very dependent on the work of this person. The girl confessed me that sometimes she wanders, and what if he gets hit by a bus?
That brought me to something that few people think about when using software. In general, software is very complicated. People write it, people change it. When those people leave, there is a piece of software that nobody wants to touch anymore because it takes forever only to learn how it was designed. It is very common for software engineers to rewrite it from scratch every once in a while. It seems like an inevitable doom. So what do you do? The only answer is: make it as modular as you can, so that when you need to rewrite a piece it is a small one. That seems like the best you can do. And open source is really good at modularizing. Maybe overall that is the very power of it. How many people understand that though?
I took a minicourse teaching how to use a computer software named GeoGebra. It is a program that allows to play with Euclidean geometry very intuitively. It is one of those tools that you wished you had back in high school. Still, I thought it would be interesting to learn how to use it in case I ever have to teach something to younger kids. And, it is completely open source, a plus.
Later on, I went to the exhibits and in one of the many stands there was a girl presenting SketchPad, a software that is terribly similar to GeoGebra but is proprietary and comes with a price. I could not be easily impressed.
Although I decided to engage conversation with the presenter starting saying that GeoGebra looked extremely similar to their software. As I said that, I could see the gloom in her eyes. She did confess me later on that people in their company were very worried about it since SketchPad was their main asset. And once a free and open source version is out, who would buy it?
Definitely not me, since SketchPad does not even run on Linux. Still, I was touched by the story. The people at SketchPad are not against open source, it is just that they do not have a business model for it.
Moreover, I learnt that there was a single designer for SketchPad and that actually, everybody in the company, ten people more or less, was very dependent on the work of this person. The girl confessed me that sometimes she wanders, and what if he gets hit by a bus?
That brought me to something that few people think about when using software. In general, software is very complicated. People write it, people change it. When those people leave, there is a piece of software that nobody wants to touch anymore because it takes forever only to learn how it was designed. It is very common for software engineers to rewrite it from scratch every once in a while. It seems like an inevitable doom. So what do you do? The only answer is: make it as modular as you can, so that when you need to rewrite a piece it is a small one. That seems like the best you can do. And open source is really good at modularizing. Maybe overall that is the very power of it. How many people understand that though?
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Android, that is, the Google phone
Christmas is still three weeks away but Black Friday, the second most important shopping day in the United States, has already passed. I decided to buy myself another Christmas present, after the DNA kit. This one is more conventional, the G1 from HTC, the first cellphone using Android, the Google operating system based on Linux. For those of you that have seen an iPhone (there are about 15 millions around the world, chances are that you have), the G1 is the first serious competitor. Since the moment I have heard about Android I have been waiting to see one. Since the G1 came out on the market I had seen a lot of videos of how cool the phone is and I really felt like I wanted one. Problem was that it was only sold locked to the T-mobile network that works only in big cities, and Dartmouth is way far from big cities. But recently some people have figured it out how to unlock it and after spending half afternoon reading on forums about people successfully unlocking it and playing around with it I decided to take my chance too.
I got a used one on eBay yesterday and I bought right away an unlocking code and this morning I got a friend SIM to perform the activation, since without it the phone is little more than a brick. Once all these technicalities have been solved I started playing. I do not even have a SIM card but the amount of Internet applications you can play with is so diversified that it is worth it the money just as a PDA. I think of it, for now, as an iPod touch with microphone and gps and a keyboard. Now, let me explain you why Android is so much better than the iPhone. It is not just because it runs Linux, although the open source philosophy has a lot to do with it.
First of all, the phone has a better processor, more memory and a keyboard which, if it might not look aesthetically beautiful when open, it does make it way more functional when browsing. This in turn gives more flexibility to the applications that you can run.
One of the features I like the best is the ability to synchronize with the Internet your contacts, your calendar and your email. This basically puts an end to having to organize your private information more than once ever again. Just one problem less to think about in your life. As the developers put it, if you lose your phone you just buy another one, login into your account, and you are ready to go with no further configuration.
The applications you can install are absolutely innovative. The most surprising is the barcode scanner. You can scan anything with a barcode and in a few seconds you are redirected to a website with a list of online shops with prices for that product. Basically the best deal is now always two clicks away. Merchants will have to deal with this at some point because customers are about to get a lot smarter. Another very cool application is the one that recognizes the name of a song after listening to it for a few seconds. It is not fail proof but it works fairly well. This one exists also on the iPhone actually, as it should be. Applications should not be tied to a given operating system. Another great application to show off the features of the G1 is the one to look at the stars in the sky. Using the accelerometer and the compass built in the phone, it is enough to point it to the sky and the correct region of the sky is displayed on the screen. So easy that I almost cry at all the time spent trying to recognize the stars in the sky equipped with different maps and books. Now it is just about to become much easier.
Overall the idea of the phone is simple. Making the information on the Internet as easily accessible as possible. To this extent, probably the best application is the browser. There is not much to say about it. It works great, as much as the one on the iPhone, since both browser are based on Webkit. If you ever used a browser on a different phone do not get it wrong. The experience on the G1 and the iPhone is completely different and it will not make you regret too much not being in front of the computer.
Someone once said that since the beginning of the 80s little has changed in the PC world, other than the little chord that connects it to the Internet. I can see the point but this new generation of cellphones is adding something new to the PC experience. Maybe 20 years from now we will all have connections deep in our brain that will allow us to connect to the Internet straight with our thought and cellphones will seem something from the past. But, nevertheless, the G1 is about to make history and I am not missing the excitement.
I cannot way to get back home for Christmas to show it off.
I got a used one on eBay yesterday and I bought right away an unlocking code and this morning I got a friend SIM to perform the activation, since without it the phone is little more than a brick. Once all these technicalities have been solved I started playing. I do not even have a SIM card but the amount of Internet applications you can play with is so diversified that it is worth it the money just as a PDA. I think of it, for now, as an iPod touch with microphone and gps and a keyboard. Now, let me explain you why Android is so much better than the iPhone. It is not just because it runs Linux, although the open source philosophy has a lot to do with it.
First of all, the phone has a better processor, more memory and a keyboard which, if it might not look aesthetically beautiful when open, it does make it way more functional when browsing. This in turn gives more flexibility to the applications that you can run.
One of the features I like the best is the ability to synchronize with the Internet your contacts, your calendar and your email. This basically puts an end to having to organize your private information more than once ever again. Just one problem less to think about in your life. As the developers put it, if you lose your phone you just buy another one, login into your account, and you are ready to go with no further configuration.
The applications you can install are absolutely innovative. The most surprising is the barcode scanner. You can scan anything with a barcode and in a few seconds you are redirected to a website with a list of online shops with prices for that product. Basically the best deal is now always two clicks away. Merchants will have to deal with this at some point because customers are about to get a lot smarter. Another very cool application is the one that recognizes the name of a song after listening to it for a few seconds. It is not fail proof but it works fairly well. This one exists also on the iPhone actually, as it should be. Applications should not be tied to a given operating system. Another great application to show off the features of the G1 is the one to look at the stars in the sky. Using the accelerometer and the compass built in the phone, it is enough to point it to the sky and the correct region of the sky is displayed on the screen. So easy that I almost cry at all the time spent trying to recognize the stars in the sky equipped with different maps and books. Now it is just about to become much easier.
Overall the idea of the phone is simple. Making the information on the Internet as easily accessible as possible. To this extent, probably the best application is the browser. There is not much to say about it. It works great, as much as the one on the iPhone, since both browser are based on Webkit. If you ever used a browser on a different phone do not get it wrong. The experience on the G1 and the iPhone is completely different and it will not make you regret too much not being in front of the computer.
Someone once said that since the beginning of the 80s little has changed in the PC world, other than the little chord that connects it to the Internet. I can see the point but this new generation of cellphones is adding something new to the PC experience. Maybe 20 years from now we will all have connections deep in our brain that will allow us to connect to the Internet straight with our thought and cellphones will seem something from the past. But, nevertheless, the G1 is about to make history and I am not missing the excitement.
I cannot way to get back home for Christmas to show it off.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
My DNA
The day after Halloween, after more than five weeks waiting, the company 23andme finally returned me the results of my DNA test. I was so excited I could barely wait to see. The first impression I had was that there were so many things to look at I did not know where to start. I will start with what was the most fun.
By virtue of being a male, 23andme genotyped both my mitochondrial DNA and my Y chromosome. These two are very special pieces of DNA since they cannot go under recombination. This means that they are passed generation after generation without mixing or changing, other than for mutations. But mutations are rare so they change little even in a 1000 year span. You get the first one from your mom and the second from your dad, if you are a male.
It turned out that my mitochondrial DNA belongs to haplotype H13a1, a rare group that is mainly common around the Caspian sea. According to the history, it was brought to Southern Italy and Southern Spain during the last ice age, something like 20000 years ago. My Y chromosome belongs instead to haplogroup J2, a kind that seems to be very common in Southern Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. Again, according to the history, it seems to have migrated multiple times from the Fertile Crescent to Europe and in particular to Italy where it is overall pretty common.
If you are curios about your ancestry you might find this very interesting. Although it only relates to your maternal line and your paternal line. So, for example, it does not witness the fact that I am 25% Greek. Something else surely does though. If you are interested in your ancestry then this might be a first step but you might want to look at ancestry.com. It seems that this company now teamed up with 23andme. Their service works as follows: you try to give them as much information as you can about your pedigree and if you far back enough you end up connecting with the archives that they built that could go back up to the 1600. They only did this for America and Europe but they claim to have already collected more than a billion entries, together with the people that subscribe to their services. My understanding is that 23andme and ancestry.com will do for the world what the company deCODEme did for all the Icelanders. Something we probably all thought impossible 10 years ago will be something normal in an even shorter time.
It might be fun to look at this kind of information, although we do not need to know our ancestry to know how our DNA affects us. It would be enough to understand its language. The real information that determines us is in the rest of the chromosomes. There are almost 100 associations described, as I write, that can be accessed through the 23andme website. These are divided in four categories, associations that put you at a more elevated risk, associations that put you at a decreased risk, associations that put you at a typical risk, and finally associations with traits that are not considered diseases. For example I could confirm the fact that I am an heterozygous for eye color, that is, my eyes are not blue but I can have a child with blue eyes. I seem to be lactose intolerant. This does not mean that I cannot drink milk but only that my ability to digest it decreases faster as years go by. This comes as no surprise since the mutation that prevents that is common only in Northern Europeans.
I also am not a carrier for three severe recessive diseases like cystic fibrosis and others for which the genetic reason has been identified. Not that my life is going to change much because of this, at least not any soon, but it is cool to know. There are so many more things to say that I will stop with a last one. Going bald is something that is usually inherited from your mom, in the meaning that your father has little to do with it. The reason is that a variant of a gene on chromosome X, inherited only from the mom for males, prevents you from going bald (to be precise you have 11 times less chances, but this is a very strong association). It turns out that I do have that variant. This was very cool, also because it is one of the few variations for which I know who I inherited it from.
My next goal now is to convince other people to do it as well. Why is that? Because I believe that what I paid for now is only the tip of the iceberg. The more people will be genotyped the more people will know about the way genes affect people lives. This service gives you at the same time the ability to know more about yourself and help other people know more about themselves. As 23andme puts it, in the same way you help research by giving some money to participate in a race, you can also do it by giving your DNA available for research. Your single contribution will not make the difference but if many people do it, their overall contributions will.
It costs only $399 and that means that everybody in the civilized world can afford it. Now it is only a matter of making people understand why it so important. I believe that in the next 10 years it will change the way we look at what we are and, furthermore, it will give a new insight of what directed evolution to shape us the way we are. How could you not be curios about that?
By virtue of being a male, 23andme genotyped both my mitochondrial DNA and my Y chromosome. These two are very special pieces of DNA since they cannot go under recombination. This means that they are passed generation after generation without mixing or changing, other than for mutations. But mutations are rare so they change little even in a 1000 year span. You get the first one from your mom and the second from your dad, if you are a male.
It turned out that my mitochondrial DNA belongs to haplotype H13a1, a rare group that is mainly common around the Caspian sea. According to the history, it was brought to Southern Italy and Southern Spain during the last ice age, something like 20000 years ago. My Y chromosome belongs instead to haplogroup J2, a kind that seems to be very common in Southern Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. Again, according to the history, it seems to have migrated multiple times from the Fertile Crescent to Europe and in particular to Italy where it is overall pretty common.
If you are curios about your ancestry you might find this very interesting. Although it only relates to your maternal line and your paternal line. So, for example, it does not witness the fact that I am 25% Greek. Something else surely does though. If you are interested in your ancestry then this might be a first step but you might want to look at ancestry.com. It seems that this company now teamed up with 23andme. Their service works as follows: you try to give them as much information as you can about your pedigree and if you far back enough you end up connecting with the archives that they built that could go back up to the 1600. They only did this for America and Europe but they claim to have already collected more than a billion entries, together with the people that subscribe to their services. My understanding is that 23andme and ancestry.com will do for the world what the company deCODEme did for all the Icelanders. Something we probably all thought impossible 10 years ago will be something normal in an even shorter time.
It might be fun to look at this kind of information, although we do not need to know our ancestry to know how our DNA affects us. It would be enough to understand its language. The real information that determines us is in the rest of the chromosomes. There are almost 100 associations described, as I write, that can be accessed through the 23andme website. These are divided in four categories, associations that put you at a more elevated risk, associations that put you at a decreased risk, associations that put you at a typical risk, and finally associations with traits that are not considered diseases. For example I could confirm the fact that I am an heterozygous for eye color, that is, my eyes are not blue but I can have a child with blue eyes. I seem to be lactose intolerant. This does not mean that I cannot drink milk but only that my ability to digest it decreases faster as years go by. This comes as no surprise since the mutation that prevents that is common only in Northern Europeans.
I also am not a carrier for three severe recessive diseases like cystic fibrosis and others for which the genetic reason has been identified. Not that my life is going to change much because of this, at least not any soon, but it is cool to know. There are so many more things to say that I will stop with a last one. Going bald is something that is usually inherited from your mom, in the meaning that your father has little to do with it. The reason is that a variant of a gene on chromosome X, inherited only from the mom for males, prevents you from going bald (to be precise you have 11 times less chances, but this is a very strong association). It turns out that I do have that variant. This was very cool, also because it is one of the few variations for which I know who I inherited it from.
My next goal now is to convince other people to do it as well. Why is that? Because I believe that what I paid for now is only the tip of the iceberg. The more people will be genotyped the more people will know about the way genes affect people lives. This service gives you at the same time the ability to know more about yourself and help other people know more about themselves. As 23andme puts it, in the same way you help research by giving some money to participate in a race, you can also do it by giving your DNA available for research. Your single contribution will not make the difference but if many people do it, their overall contributions will.
It costs only $399 and that means that everybody in the civilized world can afford it. Now it is only a matter of making people understand why it so important. I believe that in the next 10 years it will change the way we look at what we are and, furthermore, it will give a new insight of what directed evolution to shape us the way we are. How could you not be curios about that?
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Vermont Corn Maze
Yesterday I went to what is known as the Vermont Corn Maze. The name already explains much of what the place is, that is, a maze inside a field of corn. Have you ever been inside a field of corn? Starting from the summer the corn is so high that it is not much different from a wall. But what is the maze? I had no idea until I actually got inside there.
Together in a group of seven people I went to this touristic location north in Vermont. Upon arrival I entered this big field of corn with the simple belief of how hard could it be to get through a a big field of corn? It is going to be very easy even if the designer was trying to make it as hard as possible. It turned out that I was right only about one of the previous statements. You can imagine which one.
The main problem is that the simple two-dimensional structure was complicated by a couple of bridges going on top of multiple corn paths and after wondering around for a while you could actually get the feeling that no matter how hard you tried you were not going to easily succeed at going through the paths going under the bridge. And this really kept building up your frustration.
While you are inside a corn field everything looks the same. Even on top of the bridges, from where you can see the whole field, you cannot see where the paths go and about twenty meters from you every starts looking like a gigantic field of corn. The sun can help you orientate but it is still very hard to measure how far you went in one direction. I confess that after a while I gave up trying to outsmart the designer and I started to turn left at every fork. It took a long time and my brain gave up trying to build up a map but it eventually worked. I could feel it when I finally ended up under the bridge I tried to go under for so long.
When I finally came out, more than two hours after I entered, the sun was almost sunsetting. I felt defeated and when I looked at the aerial photographs I actually could feel that the designer really managed to outsmart me and all of my friends. It was a good feeling.
After sunset and a long dinner with my group, I returned to the corn field for an adventure night in the corn. A different corn field was set up for groups of people to go through at night while props dressed with horror faces would try to scare you. It was actually not so scary after all but it was so dark that you could not see the props jumping out of the crops. The design was impressive. Imagine yourself going through a narrow path inside a corn field with red candle lights scattered around and corpse like some of which were faked and some of which were real people. Moreover, you could also feel the constant screaming of people in front of you and behind you, mainly girls who seem more easily impressed. And finally the sky on top of the field was full of stars and so clear that you could see the whole milky way.
It might have not been exactly like you could imagine an horror movie but it is probably the as good as you can get experience possible. I will never look at a corn field the same way. Did you know, by the way, that corn was imported to Europe from the Americas? Yes, you probably did. But did you know that corn is that big because it was domesticated by farmers in the Mesoamerica trying to reuse only the plants yielding the most? If not, then check on the internet to see what a wild type corn looks like. If this still doesn't make you feel the magic of corn then go to the Vermont corn maze. Farmers have not run out of ideas on how to play with corn.
Together in a group of seven people I went to this touristic location north in Vermont. Upon arrival I entered this big field of corn with the simple belief of how hard could it be to get through a a big field of corn? It is going to be very easy even if the designer was trying to make it as hard as possible. It turned out that I was right only about one of the previous statements. You can imagine which one.
The main problem is that the simple two-dimensional structure was complicated by a couple of bridges going on top of multiple corn paths and after wondering around for a while you could actually get the feeling that no matter how hard you tried you were not going to easily succeed at going through the paths going under the bridge. And this really kept building up your frustration.
While you are inside a corn field everything looks the same. Even on top of the bridges, from where you can see the whole field, you cannot see where the paths go and about twenty meters from you every starts looking like a gigantic field of corn. The sun can help you orientate but it is still very hard to measure how far you went in one direction. I confess that after a while I gave up trying to outsmart the designer and I started to turn left at every fork. It took a long time and my brain gave up trying to build up a map but it eventually worked. I could feel it when I finally ended up under the bridge I tried to go under for so long.
When I finally came out, more than two hours after I entered, the sun was almost sunsetting. I felt defeated and when I looked at the aerial photographs I actually could feel that the designer really managed to outsmart me and all of my friends. It was a good feeling.
After sunset and a long dinner with my group, I returned to the corn field for an adventure night in the corn. A different corn field was set up for groups of people to go through at night while props dressed with horror faces would try to scare you. It was actually not so scary after all but it was so dark that you could not see the props jumping out of the crops. The design was impressive. Imagine yourself going through a narrow path inside a corn field with red candle lights scattered around and corpse like some of which were faked and some of which were real people. Moreover, you could also feel the constant screaming of people in front of you and behind you, mainly girls who seem more easily impressed. And finally the sky on top of the field was full of stars and so clear that you could see the whole milky way.
It might have not been exactly like you could imagine an horror movie but it is probably the as good as you can get experience possible. I will never look at a corn field the same way. Did you know, by the way, that corn was imported to Europe from the Americas? Yes, you probably did. But did you know that corn is that big because it was domesticated by farmers in the Mesoamerica trying to reuse only the plants yielding the most? If not, then check on the internet to see what a wild type corn looks like. If this still doesn't make you feel the magic of corn then go to the Vermont corn maze. Farmers have not run out of ideas on how to play with corn.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Bartending
Another Saturday is gone as every weekend that goes by. But this one was pretty different and deserving some talking. The day started with the Computer Science
Symposium on campus. My main reason to be there was to present a poster about my own work. The first part of the symposium was a lot of fun and then I was really glad a couple of people got interested about my work and genuinely spent time listening about what I was saying. It is usually hard to find people that like exactly what you like but I felt like I got their attention even if just for a while. It made my day.
After dinner I went to this party where I was supposed to bartend. I never did it before and that made me feel that no matter how it turned it was going to be
fun. And I was right. I spent four hours straight serving wine and beer for people with little pauses. There were always people in line. What is fun is to end up interacting with all this different people that otherwise would have little interest to come to talk to you. This way instead they basically have no other
choice other than to come. And some are really interesting. Some look at you with fun expressions and since they are either drunk or going to be, it is ok to
make a little bit fun of them. They don't mind. During the day it might be inappropriate but in this case it is totally cool.
As the party went on I started noticing the same people returning over and over again to get more beer and wine. There was actually nothing else to serve. Everybody looks different. There is the guy that is very friendly and will actually start dance for me when I ask it as a price for getting served, there is the guy that looks completely depressed and I wonder if it is the right thing to do to serve him more alcohol. I do it nevertheless.
Among the interesting people that I met there was one of my ex students and my ex instructor of climbing that seemed interested in coming to dance salsa after I promised that I would teach her some moves. My neighbors were there too. Somehow they get to know about all the parties in town.
Overall I am really glad I agreed to bartend for the party. I am usually the kind of guy that eventually gets bored at parties. This way I actually got to have some fun and it made me feel good to serve so many people in a single day. I got served many times so this was my first way to return the favor. Well, almost, since I was paid well.
If I had the chance, I would definitely do it again.
Symposium on campus. My main reason to be there was to present a poster about my own work. The first part of the symposium was a lot of fun and then I was really glad a couple of people got interested about my work and genuinely spent time listening about what I was saying. It is usually hard to find people that like exactly what you like but I felt like I got their attention even if just for a while. It made my day.
After dinner I went to this party where I was supposed to bartend. I never did it before and that made me feel that no matter how it turned it was going to be
fun. And I was right. I spent four hours straight serving wine and beer for people with little pauses. There were always people in line. What is fun is to end up interacting with all this different people that otherwise would have little interest to come to talk to you. This way instead they basically have no other
choice other than to come. And some are really interesting. Some look at you with fun expressions and since they are either drunk or going to be, it is ok to
make a little bit fun of them. They don't mind. During the day it might be inappropriate but in this case it is totally cool.
As the party went on I started noticing the same people returning over and over again to get more beer and wine. There was actually nothing else to serve. Everybody looks different. There is the guy that is very friendly and will actually start dance for me when I ask it as a price for getting served, there is the guy that looks completely depressed and I wonder if it is the right thing to do to serve him more alcohol. I do it nevertheless.
Among the interesting people that I met there was one of my ex students and my ex instructor of climbing that seemed interested in coming to dance salsa after I promised that I would teach her some moves. My neighbors were there too. Somehow they get to know about all the parties in town.
Overall I am really glad I agreed to bartend for the party. I am usually the kind of guy that eventually gets bored at parties. This way I actually got to have some fun and it made me feel good to serve so many people in a single day. I got served many times so this was my first way to return the favor. Well, almost, since I was paid well.
If I had the chance, I would definitely do it again.
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