Pontification
by John on Oct.12, 2010, under Random Rants
I really don’t understand how incredibly dense our population is growing. It’s interesting that today sixth grade students seem to be held responsible for more information than high school students were ten years ago and yet everyone seems to think that our society is slowly falling behind. The problem is how the education system works. Yes these students are held responsible for more information but none of it is original. Many of the students today are being taught to find information but few are actually creating new useful information. Students create websites and generate reports that use models and templates designed by others, very few students actually know how to or are even encouraged to create new information or ways of presenting that information.
Time is a huge factor in this particular dilemma; most original ideas take time to mature and become useful. With our ever shrinking world and fire hose style of education students are being required to produce results faster and in more forms than ever before. Students learn to stop worrying about how the data or media was generated and focus on where they can get it from and how it can be applied and modified to their situation.
So what’s the solution? There may be no simple solution, the world we live in relies on standard operating procedures and templates, taking those things away and forcing individuals to understand and discover on their own would require time and effort we just can’t seem to spare.
Runs Deep
by John on Nov.11, 2009, under Observations, Random Rants
Tonight I sat and watched as a group of students who are supposed to represent every student on campus argued and attempted to quantify a topic that is impossible at best. The Memorial Union at Iowa State University currently has a chapel that has been there for almost as long as the Union itself. At least once per year the controversy regarding religious symbols being displayed in a public institution comes up, and year after year I see the issue become a point of no issue, drown out by the financial and political issues that surround so many other debates on campus. This year however I managed to take a different opinion on the issue, as I sat as a voting member of the Government of the Student Body Senate I watched a wide spectrum of human emotions from violent outburst of anger to hidden tears of sadness and desperation; I couldn’t help but wonder what it is that drives such powerful reactions to what would seem to me to be such a trivial topic.
As a child I was never raised to be very religious, I don’t know if it was me or my parents that gave up first but in the end I graduated high school barely even know what religion I was supposed to be. I always figured it was supposed to be some epiphany moment where you suddenly realize that you need religion to explain your life choices and I just never had that. No matter what the cause of my lack of religious understanding I believe it gives me somewhat of an outside perspective. I wouldn’t say I’m easily lumped into any one category of religion because I accept all religions as equally valid given the purpose of control they were designed to serve; be that by man, woman or a higher power. So I sat in this meeting with little understanding of the issue at hand mostly because I would have a hard time finding myself physically angry or upset about this issue. So what is it that fuels such powerful beliefs, is it the learned family ways, a personal desire to explain the world surrounding the believer, or something different?
It was here that the argument took an interesting turn and split into two very powerful and very different arguments; the first argument was that of the afore mentioned offense caused by the presence of the religious symbols, the second was the issue of diversity acceptance. So for a symbol to cause a reaction we must first as a society assign some significance to that symbol. The Nazi swastika for instance is assigned a negative connotation within our society because of historical events associated with the group that used that symbol to represent their philosophy. The left curly brace however “{” has little or no significance in society and would evoke no emotion if placed in a public area. So this brings us to religious symbols. Each symbol is adopted by a set of beliefs to represent the mark of those beliefs. My point is that the symbol is only given as much power as we assign to it. I was never one to agree with the philosophy “let it roll off your back and move on” but in this instance I think it most directly applies. I understand that your religion means something very significant to you, and while I might not understand why, I respect that; so my question is if you believe what you believe why do you care what the other guy believes or what power he assigns to his (or her to be PC) religious symbols. If you really don’t believe in the other religion that means that you don’t believe in the power that is assigned to that symbol, and then that cross nailed to the wall in the chapel becomes a couple of 2×4′s hanging on a wall in an empty room; it might as well be that boring pattern that you see on the carpet in your office, classroom, or random room with carpet because it is meaningless to you. So what’s all the fuss about. Why offend someone by taking down their symbol that means nothing to you when it’s just as easy to remove the power that you are giving that symbol by giving their beliefs credit.
So, that brings us to the second half of this argument regarding diversity acceptance, which I’ve already started to touch on. First off diversity does not mean generic, you can’t say that you endorse a diverse campus and in order to do so we’re going to make everything so bland that it cannot possibly offend anyone. The point of diversity is respecting the differences that make us diverse and enjoying them. So by saying that we accept diversity but we want to remove all religious symbols from a publicly visible area we are contradicting ourselves and essentially saying that our acceptance of diversity is a shallow shell that we wear in order to make people happy; furthermore, we are saying that diversity is only ok as long as everyone conforms to a generic non-opinionated person with no personality. Given that, what’s the point? If the 5% that take offense to the public display of diversity would take a moment to think and evaluate the situation I would hope the come to the conclusion that it does not negatively affect them; if they still believe that it does I’d love to hear about it.
Skydiving Insight
by John on Jul.06, 2009, under Outdoors
It’s that day again when Ellen makes her annual jump out of an airplane. I met Ellen one year ago while I was still a student at Accelerated Free Fall in Boone, IA as she was gearing up to make her 12th jump out of an airplane from 10,000 ft. above the ground. For Ellen this had become a tradition where every year on her birthday she would go skydiving and this year, on her 81st birthday was no different. While Ellen has made 11 jumps before she has never taken a single sky diving course and her knowledge of jumping is the same now as it was the day she was born, she still manages to make the perfect landing every time. Ellen can do this because she never jumps alone; she’s skydiving in tandem with an experienced skydiver.
Through tandem skydiving anyone can safely make that jump out of an airplane. The sensation of skydiving is tough to beat and for many who have experienced it is not something they can only do once. It is because of this that skydiving has become a sport that’s growing too fast to keep up with. As with any high-risk event the faster it grows, with more and more new skydivers every day, the dangers that come with it have become more and more apparent. Because skydiving is such a dangerous sport organizations such as the United States Parachute Association (http://www.uspa.org/) have started safety programs, certifications, and insurance policies that help protect the skydivers and those around them. Though it takes hundreds of jumps to earn a tandem or instructor license, through USPA certification courses you can earn an entry-level license in fewer than 10 jumps.
As a skydiver with just under 100 jumps I can say that the biggest issue in safety that I have seen is with complacency. New skydivers start to become comfortable with the sport and start taking greater risks than they can handle. My personal scariest moment is know at the drop zone as the Pterodactyl incident.
The Pterodactyl started with a normal day of skydiving out of a Cessna 182 from 10,000 feet above the ground. There were four skydivers in the plane including a close friend of mine and myself; the other two skydivers were new to the drop zone but had gear and one of them was licensed through USPA. The four of us decided to do a formation jump, being that I was the leased experienced of the group, or at least the one who admitted to having the least experience, I jumped out first and flew in what we call the base position. I simply held myself steady in the air, not as easy as they make it look in the movies, so that the others could dock with me to create the formation. My friend docked with me first directly across from me. After he docked I started to watch the new licensed skydiver come in from my left and slightly above us. The next moments I’m not sure I will ever know exactly what happened but as I recall I heard my friend yell something, which as best I can tell is impossible because of the 120mph winds, and he pushed off me. When I looked down what I saw could only be processed by my brain as a Pterodactyle. The fourth skydiver had some how managed to fall past us and was directly beneath us, to make things worse he had some how started to deploy his main parachute. I managed to miss the parachute but was kicked in my left shoulder by the fourth skydiver throwing me into an uncontrollable spin. My friend had bounced off the top of the fourth skydivers main parachute collapsing it and nearly knocking himself unconscious, had he been knocked un conscious I’m sure his automatic deployment device would have worked and pulled his reserve parachute for him keeping him from falling all the way to the ground. The fourth skydiver had to cut away from his main parachute and pull his reserve. This story goes on for quite a bit more but the point of it in the end is we were all ok with only a few bruises.
So while this may have terrified you into never jumping out of an airplane I hope it has does the exact opposite. When that minor accident happened I had only 22 jumps logged. Because we all had gone through the USPA’s certification process and we were all comfortable with what we were doing, we each acted appropriately, our gear functioned properly, and we all are still active jumpers. With the exception of the fourth guy, we haven’t seen him back at the drop zone since the day this happened, and we still have his main canopy. With a the right equipment, the experienced staff, and a good drop zone skydiving can be safer than crossing a street in a crowded city. So young and foolish, or old and just looking for something to prove you’re still alive, go online find a drop zone near you and have some fun.
Rush
by John on Jul.05, 2009, under Random Rants
What drives us to do anything in life, is it other people or simply the a feeling that we are searching for. I would tend to say it’s a bit of both, I believe that everyone is driven by something different in life and yet it all boils down to one simple chemical reaction that we are all looking for. The kind of music we listen to the kind of things we do, the people we tend to be around, all of this is driven by that rush of extacy that we get when we do the things that we enjoy. So while some of us like to jump out of airplanes at 10,000 feet above the ground, SCUBA dive on the reef around the Florida Keys, and Kayak in the Boundary Waters, I’m a bit of an outdoors enthusiast if you hadn’t noticed, other people might not find any of those activities so appealing. So I guess the question is, how do you know what turns you on. Is it some how hard-coded into our genetics, is there some subconcious desire that draws us towards the things that rock our world, like a physical attraction? Or is it learned, is it something that we have to discover through trial and error? Again, I can’t settle on one answer so I’ll settle on both. It would seem easy to believe that while somethings we are drawn to there are other things that well simply put “don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” But I think there’s more to it, there are people who no matter what situation they find themselves in they manage to have a great time. I think those people have learned the true secret to happiness. The sad part is, it’s no secret!
If you can learn to let the little things roll off your back, ignore the things that bother you and emphasize the things you enjoy you are going to be 10%, yes that’s a scientific number, happier than you would if you focused on those details. Next, be vocal, those people that are quiet off in the corner often find themselves uninvolved and tend to miss the moment, talk, shout, yell, whisper; whatever happens to be appropreat at the moment but interact with the environment around you. Last but not least, be positive, you can make any situation more enjoyable by becoming a master of spin.
That rush of life is self perpetuating, if you can get it started it takes allot to stop. So pull yourself out of that rut that you find yourself in every day and go, enjoy life!
Studentopia
by John on Mar.06, 2009, under Random Rants
So my last post got a bit off topic and wound up being a random rant based on my admiration of my father and my distaste for my brother. To bring things back on point I wanted to discuss the recent results of the Government of Student Body (GSB) elections and the general apathy of the student population at Iowa State University. I’m not really sure where to begin because I find that there are so many things wrong with the education system as a whole. Students often learn so much more through hands on application of concepts rather than through falling asleep, i mean taking diligent notes in class. But seriously as I sit here in the back of my MIS 330 class looking at the monitors off all the other students in the room I see that 4 maybe 5 of the 20 present students are actually paying attention to the professor who admittedly says we should already know all of the stuff he’s talking about but it’s in the syllabus so he’s got to teach it. The other 15 students are tapping away at their keyboards, myself included on other things such as facebook and twitter. In all reality 14 students, the guy sitting just in front of me is snoring ever so slightly with a newspaper rested on his lap with his feet kicked up on the table in front of him. Now don’t get me wrong I believe that Iowa State University is an outstanding learning institution that is light years ahead of some of the other big 12 schools; it’s just that I’m not sure the classrooms are always the place where the students learn the most. I’ve learned far more about network design and security from hands on application in 6 Cyber-Defense Competitions hosted in Dr. Jacobsons lab aptly named Internet Scale Attack Generation Environment or ISAGE – pronounced Ice Age for one reason or another. I’ve learned tons from my MIS 432 class where we were put into design groups, picking one large information systems project per group; spending my entire semester focusing on the class centered topics that surround that project. The point is a large number of the students in this class are sitting on facebook and twitter which brings me to the GSB elections. The GSB elections were run as a 48 hour online election hosted by the Iowa State University Department of Information Technology, Web Development, under the supervision of the GSB election commission with some input of some other important department whose name escapes me but they do something with making sure survey results are maintained and valid, which apparently is a big deal at a research university, who knew. Any ways they started at midnight Monday, I decided that I was going to run for a senate seat at that point in time, kinda late in the game but hear me out. Basically when I started my vote I noticed that no one was running for the business so I figured that I’d write my name in. With a slight push from a friend I decided that I’d let people know about this and I’d post my newly found campaign on Facebook and Twitter basically asking for votes through my status, not really saying that I had any intentions of doing good, sometimes the exact opposite, but saying that I’d be happy to accept the position if I won as a write-in candidate. As you know how the story ends… I won, not one but two senate seats. So what does this say about GSB. I’d start by saying there’s a problem, first and foremost there are too many seats on the senate, while I believe whole heartedly that the best decisions come out of the greatest pool of people voting in an orderly manner, I also believe that when there’s a 20 way tie for the Campus Town senate seat each of the candidates write-ins with one vote, probably their own. So how can GSB change, for starters eliminate the housing seats, base senate seats solely on the schools within the university. I think it also needs to work to make its face more public, of the 27,000 students that could have voted only 2,500 did (these numbers are rough guesses based on my knowledge of the election and not on actual published figures). The point is as I sit in my class and listen to the conversations of those around me I hear people saying things like, “well I’ll vote for you and you can vote for me and we’ll have enough votes to win”…”the elections were last week meat head.” The first guy was right all they needed was two votes to win some of the senate seats, and neither of them knew when the elections were. I know I’m going to have to spend a significant amount of time as a newly elected senator just trying to figure out what the hell a GSB senator does.
GSB aside lets get back to the fact that I won only by posting to social networking sites my candidacy. What’s wrong with college students that they need Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Word Press, Google Latitude, amongst other things to stay connected with the peers they work with every day. I know for a fact that I spend more time communicating with my peers using text messaging and various web based communications platforms on my BlackBerry than I do communicating with them face to face. So what are we losing here, are the students of today going to be able to work with people face to face in the workplace of tomorrow; and worse are they going to have to? As we become more and more plugged in we’re losing the ability to interact with one another, and yet ironically we’re also losing our privacy at the same time. Right now by reading this blog you know more about my internal thought process than my parents, by going to my personal profile on various social networking sites and my own personal portfolio you can learn everything about me, on top of that somewhere on the web using Google Latitude you can know my exact GPS location based on the GPS receiver in my cell phone. It’s so wrong and yet we’ve become so comfortable with every aspect of our lives being completely within the public domain that it doesn’t seem to phase anyone. We have learned to expect information to be thrown at us faster than we can absorb it, we need to know everything about everything and be able to find any bit of information in seconds; some would consider this a good thing, giving us the power to make more informed decisions faster, but is that really right? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question, as a product of this culture I can honestly say I wouldn’t know what to do if I couldn’t access Wikipedia any where any time.
Generations
by John on Mar.06, 2009, under Random Rants
So I sit here in Starbucks with my nose stuck high in the air as I sip my Carmel Macchiato wondering to myself what the hell happened to me as a child that makes me think this is a good idea, what’s worse is I have an answer, and I’m ok with it. All things aside I look up to my father with more respect than he’ll ever know, the man keeps a level head in any situation, he’s intelligent, never rushes into any decisions and yet he’s decisive. As best I can tell he’s done well over the years however my father has done a fantastic job of sheltering my brother and I from his financial situation, to the best of our knowledge he has enough to support us in whatever endeavor we may want to take while still maintaining a comfortable life of his own. This is where my thought process takes a turn, I start to think about the differences, or more so perceived differences between my brother and I. As a family we never shared much of anything often driving separately just to avoid sharing a car ride, ok maybe it wasn’t that bad, but the point is we didn’t really know one another any better than if we were co-workers who had been working the same dead end job for the entirety of our lives. So to get back on track, my brother is an individual who as best I can tell doesn’t take after my parents as much as he is a product of my parents, he exemplifies the less appealing stereotypes that plague our generation.
My brother has taken advantage of the fact that my parents have been successful, and in doing so he’s never had to do anything for himself. He is currently an 18 year old freshman in college who has never had to work a day in his life, barely finished high school in the top half of his class of roughly 600 students, and thinks that a bad day is one where he finds himself faced with the red circle of death on his xBox. Now don’t get me wrong, and if my brother were reading this he’d be all over pointing out the fact that I’ve had the world handed to me by my parents; I’ve totaled 3 cars, I’ve been given three laptops, my parents have paid for four of my eight semesters of college and I’m sure they’ve given me far more money than I can possibly imagine. That being said I’ve worked 6 jobs in the past 4 years, for two years I held the title of President of the Venturing District for the Des Plaines Valley Council in the Boy Scouts of America serving the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, I’m an Eagle Scout, I’m in the Naval ROTC, and most recently I won a seat on the Iowa State University Government of Student Body Senate and joined Sigma Alpha Pi, the National Society of Leadership; and that’s just the highlight reel. Basically what I’m wondering is how can someone be so content with not ever doing anything of value with their life? I mean sure I guess that brings in the question of what constitutes value, I find that working, doing things to help others, make a name for myself, and better society as a whole is something that constitues value; and sure its possible that one day my brother and all those kids out there like him will find themselves putting their mad xBox skills to use, or maybe he’ll get that dream rock star gig, but in all reality that’s probably never going to happen. Now I use my brother as an extreeme case but even in my current Job at the Iowa State Daily I see students who can’t make a decision for themselves, they need someone to walk them through every step of every process. How are these people going to become the future leaders of our country if they can’t even decide on what font to use without someone telling them that it’s ok? Again, probably a bit of an over dramatization, but the point remains, WTF generation. Something needs to change, my generation needs to wake up, start making informed decisions of their own, and if they make the wrong decisions accept the concequences and learn from it. If you need to ask what decisions you’re already wrong, all decisions, from what kind of coffee should I drink this morning to what are we going to do about our nations conflicts overseas. Think about it, that’s all I’m asking.
Table Walk
by John on Mar.04, 2009, under Observations
I figure this might be a good place to start this blog as it was a random thought that occurred to me yesterday evening while I was shooting pool at one of the many local bars. My observation was simple, everyone has their own specific walk which tells you a great deal about their mindset in whatever they are doing. It begins simply with me, I’m sitting against the wall holding a pool cue waiting to take my shot… great my turn and I’m left with nothing. I slowly approached the table, dragging the pool cue along the floor eyeing the table looking desperately for a shot that might save my game. I spot something that might work so I call it, slowly line up the shot; of course none of the actual shot has anything to do with me walking so I’ll skip straight to the point, I made it! Not only did I make it but without trying I lined up another perfect shot, again and again I repeated this process for a five ball streak. The point, between each shot as I went to position myself for the next glorious shot, I moved with such haste and authority, without even thinking about it. The intense look of concentration on my face, the quick sharp movements. It was on my last shot before the end of this rally that I realized what I was doing, I had such an authority about me, maybe deserved but probably not, more so just taken.
So I looked about the bar, had anyone else noticed my excitement between shots, no; but what could I notice about them. One girl in particular was approaching a guy she obviously had a thing for, slowly stepping toward him, drink in hand with a smile on her face, taking each step crossing one foot over the other; she wasn’t moving quickly towards him like she had a purpose for going to him and yet she wasn’t moving slowly in a manner that would indicate she had no intention that she would ever get there. More so she was teasing herself, taking her time to get to him, building the anticipation of arriving next to him at the bar. Another guy at the bar obviously wasn’t feeling very well because as he made a dash for the bar his steps were short, one foot in front of the other placed with a careful intent, he was mindful to scan the room ahead of him looking for anything that might hold him up from getting to what was in his mind a well defined destination. Several other individuals were in what could best be described as search mode, wandering aimlessly about the bar in no real defined pattern at a casual speed, not particularly drawing any attention to themselves but obviously looking for something, not that I’m sure any one of them knew what that something was.
The point I think I’m trying to get out of this is that you can tell a great deal about a persons mind set be it confident, concerned, confused, happy, or sad just by they way in which they walk. To tie this all up in a final thought I fear the day that Segways become available to the masses!
