Gravity

I too share the universal love for physics. Wait, the love isn’t universal? Not everyone likes physics?!

Shame on you.

But I find it interesting that no one has a good answer for the following:

What is gravity?

It’s like, the first physics law you learn as a child. You fall off something; you plummet towards the ground. Gravity is literally dragging you towards the flat surface of the earth. In the air you cannot overcome or escape it, yet it’s really quite a weak force relative to the others (you know, forces like frictional, torsional, normal, electrical, magnetical, velociraptor-ical and double-scorpion.)

and physics clearly says Force = Gravitational constant x ( (mass one, mass two) divided by (distance between the two objects, squared) )

but whyyy?

You have two planets in space, they are both massive. Why do they attract each other? Mass is just a thing, it’s solid and ‘heavy’, so what? Why does that attract the other one? There isn’t a medium between them, just space. No molecule bonds to pull or push, nothing of that sort.

My metaphor:

Why do humans attract to other, specific humans?

It just seems so random, there isn’t much of a pattern for who chooses who other than the obvious geographical and logistical restrictions placed upon them…

Bizarre…

Physics in Real Life

So, a vast majority of us have been taught in Physics 30 that, Impulse = mass(change in velocity). This equation has yet to leave my mind, due to gruesome hours of study. However, there is one connection which catches my eye.

Change. Impulse = a change in something. Well…you can’t deny the laws of physics! So, there must be some truth behind this. (I am such a nerd at heart…)

Recently in my life, I have made some rather “impulsive” decisions. Now, I know that all of you are wincing and feeling sorry for me already, but perhaps I don’t exactly regret all of this.

You see, some of my impulsive decisions have allowed me to discover some things about myself, entering into a phase of personal reflection, and I don’t think that personal reflection can ever be harmful. However, I completed these impulsive actions at someone else’s expense. There is the problem.

I’d like to think that all of this was meant to happen somehow. As though, this whole experience was a way to rattle me up a bit and help me to understand that life is short, and we all make traumatic errors sometimes, whether we are proud of it or not. I can be a horrendous perfectionist, so this I suppose “grounded me” a little, allowing me to see that even I am capable of royally messing up.

Yet, the formula speaks for itself. Impulse = Change. Or perhaps can this equation like all others be reversed. Change = Impulse. This is the part that catches me. Are my recent changes in life responsible for me acting upon Impulse, or have my Impulsive actions merely caused abundant change?

I see them as being completely interchangeable. Impulsive actions always result in change, meanwhile change can cause you to make impulsive actions.

I have discovered both of these to be true over the past few months.

So, I suppose it’s true. You really can’t deny the laws of Physics.

Therapy at it’s Finest

Allow me to be direct. This summer has probably been the most ridiculous experience of my life. Never have I experienced so many twists and turns and emotional upheaval.

Yet, at the end of the day, life goes on. Regardless of how profusely I have wished for such an occurrence, time ceases for no one. My resolution? Find a way to take all of your pent up rage, frustration, sadness, confusion and guilt, and transform it all into creative energy. I’m an artist after all, so why not use it to my advantage somehow?

Much to my own surprise, I thought of a project, and along came the Pentax…

I honestly never thought that I would fall in love with photography. I mean sure like any other kid (at least, I presume this is the norm) I went through a phase for a while, taking photos of nothing important with a mediocre digital camera. Nothing exciting. However, my best friend leaving for University inspired me to create a project, leaving me with their camera. Actually, the situational irony was rather fantastic! Considering that I needed a camera and they not only lent me theirs but in their own excitement purchased the film for me too!

So, in my state of creative adrenalin I raced outside, took my first photo, heard the shutter snap… and fell in love. Nothing , can compare to that sound. My heart skipped a beat, a wide eyed grin appeared across my face, and away I went!

I have always been one to see so much depth in the slightest of things. A simple walk to school can make my mind explode with creativity and wonder. I am a romantic I suppose you could say. (Yet, not in the candy and flowers sort of thing, more or less how Anne of Green Gables would describe romance. However, that is an entirely different blog for another day….)

So really, what could be more soothing than to finally present those little ordinary things into something so much greater? Why just see an old crumbling stair case, when you could take a moment with your hand on the focus adjustments and turn it into an image which inspires you to keep going, because you never know what is at the top? Why see a sprinkler washing your car as it waters the lawn, when you can lay on the pavement and capture the water drops sparkling in the sunlight as they wash across the road?

I just think that the ability to take what you see in the world and being able to present it in that glorious form to someone else, is a Blessing. Therapy, at it’s finest.

So needless to say, I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon… Maybe I’ll even post some photos soon.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Let me know!

I took a series of photos when I thought we were selling our foosball table, but the table is still there to this day so I’m not sure what happened to that deal.

mmm, bokeh!

Happy Friday!

I’m really not sure why, but there is something oddly appealing to being stuffed in uncomfortably tight places and trying to play instruments.

Kim is just so happy all the time, it’s hard to be upset and watch this video.

Fear of Failure

I am a perfectionist, this is well known, and for your knowledge I’ll outline some mistakes that I’ve made in connection with this.

The fear of failure:

It got to the point where I wouldn’t even play games that I knew I had some chance of losing at. I’d rather not participate at all than lose at playing it. To be fair, this is a valuable entrepreneurial skill, but in life it’s less of a good thing.

I think, if I could pick anything, these examples would be what I consider my biggest regrets in life. I missed out on a lot of things simply because I was afraid of losing at it. If I could go back, I would just participate and have fun doing it.

In grade six I had a “magic” pen that could write invisible ink and then you could use this other pen to scribble over it and reveal the message. I loved the idea, as a young boy, the stealth, the messages, the codes… it was part of the little boy spy dream everyone has. In any event, I was so enamored with saving the pen for important things (it had a rather small ink tank) that I never used it. I kept it available always, but I needed a very good reason to use it. Then, one day, I tried to write something and it had dried up. I had left it too long, and now it would never be used. If I had just used it while I could…

In my personal experience the fear of losing at something should not define you playing at all. Go for it, if you lose you lose, but at least you enjoyed the game.

“Better to have loved and lost than ne’er to have loved at all.”

People always look at you funny when you’re standing in the middle of the road taking pictures of ‘nothing’, but sometimes I think these are the photos that say the most about life around you.

One Song from a Band You’ve Never Heard of

Mornin\’ – Star Slinger

Not really my usual style, but it’s a pretty happy track for a friday afternoon.

Kind of disco from the middle on there, like Jackson Five or something.

What Video Games Have Taught Me That School Could Not Have (Part I)

I’m such a little troublemaker…

Please note that this is not a justification for replacement, certainly, but a mere observation about my own life.

First, I want to start by describing exactly which videos games I am referring to, although I will go into some detail about most genres. My first and foremost educational video game has to be the simulation genre, also known as the “tycoon” series of games. For me, this was Roller Coaster Tycoon, hands down. One, two and three. With all of the expansion packs. These are the games I lived off between the ages of seven and seventeen. They taught me valuable things that I haven’t found elsewhere yet:

• Money management. My mother is a well respected financial planner, and both parents are very successful entrepreneurs, so I receive a lot of this training naturally through them, but I will say that is’ been magnificent to have the hands on cause and effect simulation of money managing. In the case of RCT, you manage everything from advertising to admissions, paying back loans with interest over time. I failed a lot, but grew better by learning and trying. I learned that you can charge a lot of money for one thing and sell it a couple of times, or charge little for the same thing and sell thousands of them. This can be graphed in the form of a parabolic curve, which I learned in about grade 10 math class, roughly five years after I figured it out for myself playing video games. But other than that and CALM‘s futile attempt to teach finances, we’ve really received no such training in the school system. That’s bleak.
• Supply and Demand. Similar to the above, it’s learning economics at it’s most fundamental level. We started that in about grade 9 social, but really only got into it in grade 12. Me? at least six years earlier.
• Build Order. This is more prevalent in RTS (real time strategy) style games (which I’ll cover after) , but should be mentioned here as well. To build a successful park, you need to start near the entrance with things like merry-go-rounds and small burger stands. Eventually you’ll move up bigger and bigger until you can afford to build a roller coaster. I’ve had many a park die because I blew my entire initial budget on one roller coaster that couldn’t keep up with my expenses with it’s measly ride price. You can’t go all out immediately.

There are others yet, smaller things like business vocabulary (I remember, actually, in about grade 4 looking up the word “scenario” because I didn’t know what it meant.)

First Person Shooters:

Probably the most debatable of them, these do actually have significant advantages that cannot be found in school environments:

• Team building. I don’t mean that you don’t get this at school altogether, but I’m saying that schools (in the academic environment, not counting recess) don’t encourage team work. They call this cheating, and it’s not allowed. Perhaps the most backwards part of the schooling process, since once everyone goes out and gets jobs, they need to be able to collaborate. It’s not cheating in the workplace when you’re all working on the same project for a client, so why don’t they encourage teams in school? FPS games are brilliant for bringing people together for a common goal, typically “capture the flag“. But it isn’t all mindless, there is actually a lot to be said for team strategy in these games. You need to flank and communicate and work together in a high stress execution of plans. School? Very segregated desks with no common goal and no teamwork. Bleak.
• Friendship making. I’m not sure why people see video games as anti-social. It’s different, sure, but it’s hardly anti-social in a day and age of interconnected gaming. There are few games these days that you play completely by yourself; almost everything is socially driven. Interconnection will lead to meeting people, and will lead to people finding other people who they like and dislike, people who can be complete strangers but clump together because they find a common bond – friendship.
• Maturity. OF course there are a lot of immature people in the world. This isn’t video game exclusive. This isn’t school exclusive. Everyone everywhere is immature at that age. But just like the school yard, social gaming gives kids a chance to learn to defend themselves, and also stick up for one another in a perfectly open environment. On the school yard, it’s hard for a third party to break up a fight because they don’t want to be seen as uncool or lame, so they rarely do anything. In a faceless game lobby, people who disrespect others get shut down really fast: “Dude, don’t say things like that, you’re making yourself look bad”. If they continue being rude, the other players can kick him out easily, with no fear of social consequences. This is actually a point where video games are better than the school yard socially. Imagine that, grandma.

Part II to come.

What Video Games Have Taught Me That School Could Not Have (Part II)

If you haven’t already, you should probably read part I.

Videos games, when they first appeared, were very basic; they usually had no plot and featured only one screen of gameplay that was repeated and got slightly faster or more difficult as the game progressed. The game ended every time you played it, completed by entering your name into the high score to try and beat the next day.

Today`s game, by contrast, have multiple characters and much like modern cinema multiple plot lines to follow. More importantly, they are much, much longer. Games now often take more than 40 hours to truly complete, teaching an extreme amount of patience to people who quest to finish the whole thing. It`s a very satisfying feeling, knowing that you`ve achieved and perservered and gotten there. You did it!

I contrast this to book reading. Books are linear. They might have multiple characters doing things across multiple sub-plots, but they never change. The end of the book is the exact same for everyone, it progresses without any interaction or learning on behalf of the reader`s mind. Why do we hold this as the epitome of education when really, it doesn`t take very much brain process to complete?

Completing a modern RPG (role playing game) is an exploring process. It has a very involved storyline that the character can change at any point in the game, effecting the outcome entirely by the end. It might seem like a subtle shift in thinking, but I would argue it changes the amount of brain activity remarkably when you’re forced to think of the consuequence for every single action you make in the game. With a book you can’t hurt it, you just plod along and find out the premade ending eventually. That isn’t teaching you cause and effect for your actions, it doesn’t captivate your problem solving skills at all.

It’s no wonder the average kid dislikes reading. Having a set timeline is incredibly boring compared to making something yourself. There isn’t an accomplishment or achievement to following along a book’s storyline, it takes no skill, no luck, no adrenaline.

I’m not saying books are useless, of course. I really enjoy them, they do have many advantages, but still, give games some more credit. Studies show they deserve it.

Problem Solving and Real Time Strategy games:

One the biggest things I enjoy about video games is solving them. But you can’t really solve an RTS, it’s different every single time. You have to adapt strategy on the fly every second as you learn things. Athough there are very good ways of improving yourself off the bat (see build order) there is very little that can be said that is ‘do this, this and this and you will win.’

RTSs are a social game the way chess is. It’s a mental battle, two (or more) people grinding away at how to gain the upper hand. If you’re playing with more than two people (thus you have another person as an ally) there is a phenomanal amount of teamwork required to manage strategies with multiple armies each.

I’ve mentioned it before, but you do not get anywhere near this kind of mind stimulation, this kind of pure problem solving at school. You don’t get the teamwork aspect at all. Humans are collaborative beings, how they can justify making us go at it all alone is mind boggling.

I would compare homework to the game asteroids. There is no real though process to it, you fly around randomly spinning and shooting until you die. What does that really teach you? Sure, do it enough and you’ll get better at spinning and shooting, but does that help you play Tetris? Does that help you manage resources, money, energy and numerous armies across several planes of mobility while trying to outwit a human enemy doing the same thing in the just released Starcraft II?

I thought not.

The Toughest Job on Earth

Parenting. We have all heard it proclaimed numerous times throughout our lives, that parenting is the “hardest job you will ever have”.

Okay, fair enough. I mean, I by no means am going to claim that this is incorrect. Surely raising a child from their first breath mustn’t be easy. There are so many aspects to it, really. Of course there are the physical aspects; food, shelter etc. Yet, on top of all of that, there are all of the emotional aspects, the morals, the attitudes… these are the tough ones.

In today’s society the mere idea of raising a child is frankly, quite terrifying. I am a young adult, and still the entire aspect of raising a child, since I was little, has done a complete transformation. Or perhaps.. it’s the lack thereof. I see it more and more everyday. The sheer *lack* of parenting. We are beginning to allow the media, and our public education systems to raise our children for us. If you ask me? It’s official, we have become the laziest society of all time.

How could you possibility feel as though you are doing your child justice when taking zero responsibility for them? I see children and feel guilty that they are in the shape they are in, even as a complete stranger to them, let alone being their actual parent.

Now, here comes the question. “Well, Flautist, do you have any children?” I will proudly at this point say that I do not. After all I am only entering into my secondary education. Yet, I can also say with the utmost truth and confidence that I will never rely on society to raise my child for me.

When dealing with technology and the media, the addictive state these kids have entered into is absolutely disturbing. Today it’s merely one in the afternoon and I have already seen a seven year old boy throw an absolutely fit over having to cease his video game activities for a mere hour, to heaven forbid, go outside, and work on some school work to better his mind. THAT is frightening ladies and gentlemen… absolutely terrifying.

Whatever happened to kids playing outside? You know fresh air? The sun? Physical activity? Or striving to better themselves for that matter. Reading a book? Having an actual conversation? I mean seriously.. I shouldn’t even feel the need to be writing this.

Spend time with your kids. Converse with them, interact, play, feed them something other than fat and sugar. Quit being so lazy, take some responsibility, step up.

Again, I am not saying that it isn’t the most full fledged job in the world… but it truly does revolve around common sense.