Escaping Flatland by Tufte

The way the article started out was interesting with the comparison of dimensions between the frog and the frogs skin. "Even our language, like our paper, often lacks immediate capacity to communicate a sense of dimensional complexity." This sentence was very thought provoking to me. It made me think about how when we know a language fluently it is just what it is. After awhile there seems to be nothing special about it and it is more simple than complex. When trying to learn a new language, the complexity comes out a bit more.
The image of the stereo illustrations was intriguing to me. It is cool to see how the side by side images fuse together. In addition, I found that my eyes jumped rapidly back and forth between the images instead of just focusing on one or the other. Once the article began talking about Galileo and sunspots I honestly lost interest and found myself not paying as close attention as before. I decided to watch the video clip.
The visuals that went along with this video helped to captivate my interest more than the article. It was different seeing all of the subways and maps with various lines and colors all over them to distinguish various things/patterns. I really enjoyed looking at the map of all of the McDonalds around the US. It was funny because when I first saw the map I thought about how intriguing it was and then I saw the caption that is was illustrating all of the McDonalds and I just laughed. It is fascinating how any piece of data can be made into an art. The visual below also stuck out to me because I want to be an elementary school teacher, and a lot of the time people do not realize how much is going on in the brain so early on in life. This visual really gets the point across.

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Post-Modernism

"The explosion of new communications technologies and the continuing fragmentation of cultures into thousands of little cultures has forced us to view our world as simultaneously expanding and shrinking." This sentence really stuck out to me from the Postmodernism introduction reading. This got me thinking about how technology affects the world today. Due to the expansion of technology we are able to communicate around the world and gain information about other cultures with the click of a button. This expansion is happening at the same time that face to face communication and real experiences are becoming much less. I think this is what Post-modern theorist, Jean Baudrillard, was trying to get at with "The Death of the Real." "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, which in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of stimulation....

Colors- Radiolab Podcast

This podcast begins with the discussion of Isaac Newton trying to discover if the color is within or outside the mind. Most people know his experiments with the prism, but I did not know that he stuck something into his eye to try to discover the answer that question. I find this disturbing and interesting that he would choose to do this. Eventually, his experimenting led to the findings of what we know today. I thought that many of the points that were made in this podcast were very interesting. It surprised me that all humans/animals see different variations of colors. Dogs only see blues and greens. They do not have the cone for red. This one cone that they do not have adds such a limitation on colors. On the other side of this, sparrows can see more than us. They can see ultraviolets. In addition, butterflies have 7 photoreceptors, and a mantis shrimp has 16, while humans only have 3. Also, I thought it...

Visibility by Italo Calvino

The beginning of this chapter, Visibility , deals with the topic of Dante, and the way that he describes the cycles of Purgatory. It also talks about the aspects of imagination and high fantasy. I read Dante's Inferno back in high school for extra credit and from reading that I can say that book included various aspects of symbolism, metaphors, and eloquent language. Imagination and deep thought were necessary to be able to understand more than just the gist of the story, especially due to the complex ideas and descriptive thoughts. On page 83 of Visibility , Calvino describes that the poet has to "imagine visual content of metaphors he uses to facilitate this process of visual evocation." I believe this is necessary not only for poets, but also other writers, readers, artists and others when trying to depict something visually. He then goes on to describe the two types of imaginative processes. One that has to do w...

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