Charley's Blog

   Light-bulb brain Link I really enjoyed the first video about human intelligence. I am a psych major and I really vibed with the video, especially with his journey to get into psychology, mine was not at all like his, but it was also similar in many ways. We do measure intelligence in a particular way that lets some fall between the cracks and that's not good, but I also think that we realize that. IQ is a way to test people's intelligence and it often separates and put people in a negative light if they have low IQ scores. The person who invented the IQ test said that they should never be used in this manner and they ended up getting used in the exact way that he was that made him hesitant to make them public. They were supposed to be used as a way to identify kids who may be at risk of falling behind and give them special help so they can stay even with everyone. There are also tests of intelligence besides IQ that look at all sorts of skills and let people shine in ...

 Kafka in a Kafkaesque situation Link I like the idea of constraints. all fields have constraints based upon knowledge and technology and many other factors. these constraints make the writing process a bit easier, for you're not starting from nothing, but the fondation laid by your constraints. the hero formula, but applied to one's own life. Kafkaesque is an interesting idea. a self perpetuating convoluted system, or something like that. it is humorous due to the nonsensical logic within his stories. be sure to engage all five senses. repetition has both the power to aid and to hinder, use it wisely. these notes come from a set of videos about creative writing and style.

   Semicolon comic Link I think it is really cool how language can be viewed in certain ways that lets us try and trace back from whence it came. it is treated in very much the same way as a family tree. and beyond that, we can use it to see where a certain group may have migrated, based upon which words they have picked up. the video about tenses was interesting. It quickly got really complicated, but I feel like french is much more specific about it. we are vague and use a lot of words to describe a specific tense, while french has different endings for all of the different tenses. I like how much work has gone into creating fictional languages. I particularly like how Tolkien elvish split off into various tribes and how the language changed and evolved from there. I love the way that they chose to explain semicolons; they did it in a cool video game esque fashion. here is a link to the language, grammar, and punctuation videos

I watched  two TED talks about stories and storytelling . One of them was about the dangers of a single story. It talked about how it is bad, and how many of us get our information and formulate ideas around a single story. It talks about how it cheapens the people or the subject matter of that single story, and makes the very one dimensional. it is important to know the complete story, or at least be aware that a single story is not the whole story. I am in a psychology class about skepticism, and we talked about this to a degree, it is important to seek out what the entirety of the literature says, rather than just one study that may be providing you with a very biased and unbalanced view of the subject matter. The other video that I watched was about fictional characters and how they effect our emotions. I really enjoyed this video because it was very interesting, and also because it was tackled from a psychological perspective. She talked about how we can become very emotiona...

This week, I decided to do the story laboratory. I watched the crash course videos over mythology, and I really enjoyed them. They make some really good videos that are always fun and easy to understand. The first video focused on operationally defining what a myth is. I enjoyed that they did that, for it is difficult to understand anything when we are all working with different definitions. The two main components that make up a myth are staying power and significance. A story can be called a myth if it is able to withstand the test of time. A story also needs to have a lesson or an explanation of the world, in order to be significant. My largest take away from the videos is of the purpose of myths. Myths are used as a way to explain the world around us. Nowadays we have science to explain the world, but before science there was myth. Making a story in order to explain any phenomenon could be a lot of fun.