Declaration and progress Jan 2016

Wow, real creative with today's title aren't we?

So I wrote a declaration... After meeting with Amanda and basically conveying that I cannot focus on one thing at a time and I'm not prepared to merely conduct multiple iterations of a long term endeavor, she said basically the most Amanda thing ever to the effect of "Ok just do you then. Y not just do multiple projects? Like one a week. It'll be fun. 😎"

That is what I was thinking about all winter break, (not about how I haven't been updating this thing, haha) and naturally as they stewed and formulated, the ideas in my head came out in quite a flurry when I sat down to get all of them out on screen.  

Here are my six arc projects, or three projects with three separate focuses

Projects

Fix violins

Write a research paper on child development (easier said than done lol yikes)

Petition my city to improve hours of library near where most of the high and middle schools are

Focuses

Taking workshop classes at the San Francisco public library "Mix" in preparation/anticipation for producing music in the future

Growing two tomato plants, one hydroponically and one non-hydroponically, just to see if there's a difference

Working on khan academy for at least an hour every day to prepare myself to aCE THE FRICK OUT OF THE PRECAL CLASS IN TAKING IN FEBRUARY and also KICK THE SAT'S BUTT

There have been roadblocks everywhere, but really they're just opportunities in disguise. For instance, in the violin repair project, one of the problems is that the parts we ordered don't totally fit, but this means I have the opportunity to 3D print some of them out myself at Noisebridge hacker space down on Mission and rekindle a better relationship with 3D printers after the disastrous trying-to-fix-a-couple-of-ancient-makerbots debacle (yay?). But even that whole failure gave me the opportunity to work with Josh as a teammate for the first time, which I must say I am really happy to have had him as a resource. 

I have been reading a bunch of books in the field of child development, such as How Children Succeed, How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and scanning the early chapters of The Female Brain, and The Male Brain, both by the neurologist Louann Brizendine. Learning all the little details of what makes little humans has been a blast, but I've been hopelessly and cluelessly putting off writing the actual research paper thing since I have never written a research paper before and have no real concept on how to even write an outline 🙃😥. Again, it seems I must exercise my explicit asking-for-direct-help abilities if I'm to get any real traction on conquering this research paper. 

Petition is up and running! After about about a week of looking at background stuff and calling the city council about what to actually do, it is written and pretty and up on change.org! You can sign it here. Thanks for your support!

Workshop classes have been going good. Really making me think about going outside my comfort zone. One of my beats will be on The Mix soundcloud soon. 

The hydro-tomato is healthy and says good morning starshine.

Dirt tomato has just sprouted, but was planted a couple weeks after the hydro-tomato.

Still, I was starting to think it wouldn't germinate at all given the cold-ish weather <3. 

Khan academy is infinitely frustrating to track progress on because those people are constantly adding new skills so my percentage in pre-calculus keeps decreasing or staying the same. Of course I'm learning a lot and I'm thankful for the lessons they are providing, but all the same it feels like running on a hamster wheel and it's all I can do not to fall behind. That being said, I haven't been doing as much as an hour every day, but I have been doing it at least a little bit every day, which should count for something. 

I knew I would be a little bit in over my head if I tried to do everything perfectly, but I could never know just how much. Despite my feeble attempts of "keepin' it simple", I've been stressing like a monster, but enjoying myself nonetheless, like if I fail, the only person I'm really disappointing is myself, and I can chose whether I want to be disappointed or if I need to learn from mistakes or just try more or schedule/manage time better, or just hustle harder. It's the opposite of unsettling, but I don't think "settling" works in this context. Comforting? Maybe. Self-accountability and staying true to myself. Yaas.

bye
-sayuri

To be or nah

Hello... It's me..  Okay now that we've got that out of the way

So, here's what its like now: still in seed arc, but now we in full swing of the expression phase, the details of which I will go into in another post following this one, but for yesterday and Tuesday, he vilest band was honking about something else: next arc

Yes, after decided there was just too much to do in human arc for to wait, Amanda prompted us with, you know, a relatively simple little brain teaser question: What does it mean to be human? 

Various members all had similar or related ideas, in our collective brainstorm word vomit session, we came up with the this:

In case you can't read our haphazard impeccable handwriting or just don't understand: it says something

Being Human: what makes us special?
Making mistakes, learning things, birth (death) learn, emotions, Homo Sapiens - biological, (social) interacting with others, metacognition, self awareness, "I think, therefore I am", not perfect - "susceptible to weakness", big brain, opposable thumbs, alive (survival), make decisions based in logic, creative

This is like just an appetizer, Amanda insists, to make it more palatable for us to jump right into thinking super critically about humans when the Human Arc actually starts in mid February. 

I have no objection to this: in fact, the private brainstorm I had the night before, was just as incoherent and inconclusive, and innocuous, but it's a start. 

I also expanded on some of these ideas in a nicer, listed Google doc: here.

Ignoring that I am a teenager and that my worldview and perception may or may not be overtly and naïvely cynical, as well inexperienced and not so fully fledged, I will elaborate on some of these topics that might seem a little less instinctive or natural or intuitive as the list we came up with collectively. 

In regard to the idea "To be known to, on occasion, be afraid or demeaning of members of their own species solely on the basis of the color of their skin", I have been intrigued by race relations and racism for a long time, so I find myself awkwardly trying to relate it to everything I see. Is everyone's experience perpetually decided by the pigment of their skin? Why and doesn't anyone find it so so insane that humans are the only ones that do this? I don't want to delve into it too much in what is supposed to be a lighthearted, "yay we're ahead of the game being intellectual and inquisitive about our origins!" kind of blogpost, but that's is my thinking behind that bullet point.

Until next time,

blorp,
sayuri

SFAI Art School Adventure!

This last Tuesday morning, Violet Band went out on an escapade to visit San Francisco Art Institute, a multi-medium school of the arts.

I'll let the photos mostly speak for themselves, the campus was wonderfully impressive.

This is Colleen. She is a school counselor, admissions advisor, and our tour guide for the day. As you can see, she is pret-ty coool.

 Very Brightworks-y, creative projects all over the place. This entirely wooden pool table, for            example. (Even the pool balls were wooden!)

  Of course, fascinating artworks on nearly every vertical surface.

Even in the cafe, they hold occasional various galleries and installations that rotate out. You can reserve a site and hang your work where everyone will see it. (The school is only about 650 students, including the grad school, so literally everyone will see it.)

It was a very communal and calm, open-source space. You can see Alcatraz from the cafe window, and look out over the city from the ledges outside and see Coit tower on your way to/from class.

 The photos don't do it justice, the view really was beautiful.

Next, we saw the computer lab, where students worked on movie editing, photoshopping, and other 

computer modeling pieces. Other technical equipment was strewn about the room in several stations for their art and technology courses.  

Everywhere, crazy, impractical, counterintuitive wonderfully creative projects at play, challenging everyday conventions of art, everywhere you look someone pushing boundaries. 

(Sorry for the blurryness. Thankfully they also teach photography classes. In fact, according to Colleen, SFAI had the first fine arts photography department in the U.S.)

Their campus houses a spray booth for spray painting, and a small sewing loft.

Sophisticated working equipment in both the wood and metal shops. 

The sculpture studios made it feel like an old, warm museum.

So much diversity in the art. This weird painted tapestry was drying on the wall

They had everything from simple but evocative paintings to pencil-drawn murals on parchment in a glass case. 

I identify with this one.

All of the murals get painted over with white, so sometimes people will try to bring them back to life.

Breathtaking murals in the expansive art library. 

Printmaking, etching, screenprinting, etc. nbd

As Colleen said, SFAI is not a school that hears the word "No" very often, so naturally they got a swanky little recording studio as well.

(This one is right side up, confusingly.)

Oh yeah. and also fluorescent scaffolding in one of the galleries. Just 'cause. 

It was a good day. 

Meanwhile, in the complex world of genetics

Lately, the Violet Band has been exploring some pretty heavy metal controversial genetics concepts and discussing them as we learn more about the subject. We have been reading Mendel in the Kitchen and the other day we listened to a podcast from Radio Lab about a new phenomenon discovery in microbiology known as CRISPR. Standing for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, it is said to be a nearly universal, precise, and cost-effective method of genetic engineering which, potentially, could lead to everything in genetic science from weakening invasive species in at-risk ecosystems to designer babies in a Brave New World scenario.

Listen to the podcast here.


The Mandel chapter that we just read is appropriately named Tinkering with Evolution and explains how evolution in genetics works, and how to introduce a gene from one species, say a fish, into another completely unrelated species (or so you would think) like a tomato, as well as delving into the implied ethical mess behind these practices.

As people have said before, is it really our place to tamper with the fundamentals of nature? Is there a line to be drawn and where do we draw it? What are the limitations of this procedure and can we push the envelope? What could be the long-term effects of one or two little edits? The consequences are still unforeseen, if they exist, which makes all of this pretty murky and difficult to take a standpoint on, especially once you have heard both sides of the argument presented in the chapter, and take a look at the vast history behind the study of plant mutations. 

The podcast did a very good job of explaining the enigma of CRISPR, I can see what all the fuss is about. However, thus far CRISPR has been used in so few practical situations, it's amazing to me that people are already this concerned about it this early in the game. I mean sure, the possibilities are endless... I guess I'm just surprised by the lack of faith people seem to have in geneticists and other scientists to keep the use of it under control and be responsible. Are skeptics expecting another atom bomb? But then again, when has fear of the unknown not been a scary and difficult thing to grapple with? I say the scientific community, proponents and conservatives alike need to put their differences of opinion (however educated these may be) aside and figure out a plan for this kind of technology (and future technologies it could inspire), so we can start to baby step into this and use it to really make the wold a better place. Set some ground rules, get some constructive, contributive conversation going instead of worrying about the speculative implications. 

I find it funny that people seemed to fear bacteria and viruses so much, and now the idea of the tools that bacteria use to defeat viruses, landing in human hands is what is most scary of all, humans utilizing our adaptability and big brains to adopt the defense mechanisms of other organisms, turning them into tools that revolutionize our outlook on life, the endless possibilities cascading into a vague ripple effect that only science and patience will clarify, only time will tell what these breakthroughs hold in store for our destiny or whatever. 

It's Homo Habilis all over again, but perhaps that's a weird human progress thing, we are constantly discovering and rediscovering and transferring ideas to new contexts that, we learn new things every day, we are always being born again and seeing things in a new light, with fresh eyes. But how does one measure such progress? How can we possibly know the right from the wrong in this case? [insert/dump more meaningless conjectural philosophical junk here.]

think about it, until next time

Sayuri out, brb

intro to montreal and living in the real world: an quick update on admitting faults

Since the beginning of the school, Gever has been teaching us "Montreal class", in which we imagine a scenario in which we are college students living with a roommate in Montreal, and how do we juggle finances and feeding ourselves with real food and surviving without (gasp!) parents.

Regrettably, due to my attending a different school during the rock arc, I missed what feels like a very significant chunk of the lessons, but then again so did Cassandra.

At my old school, (obviously) they never taught us how to use and manipulate spreadsheets or how to calculate budgets and plan for the future. As naive as it may sound, I've seen Gever do in a couple of keystrokes in Google Sheets what I feel like it would take me weeks to get the hang of to the point where I could use it practically.

Asking for help in front of everyone is hard and embarrassing to say the least. I confess that most of the time it's difficult for me to focus on the point Gever is trying to make about finances in class when I don't have all the spreadsheet commands and formulas memorized just yet. And it doesn't help that I don't have a job that I could keep track of, an advantage that some of my bandmates have over me even this early on in the game. Montreal class is, subjectively, quite overwhelming and, at times downright hard to swallow and process.

The topic we were mainly focused around last Thursday was the benefit of a bank account and the wonderful concept of interest rates. If I'm being perfectly honest, I already knew the formula for compound interest but the mechanics of the spreadsheets continued to intimidate and frustrate me. It's just so foreign and... not intuitive for me.

Plus we are trying to plan an actual secret-not-secret trip to Montreal which feels totally out of reach and unachievable but I'm still trying to be supportive but its all very internally distressing when I don't know the steps and I feel like dead weight to the team. Useless. Holding them back. A disappointment.

But that's a thing I'm grappling with anyway. Which is harder? Knowing what to do or how to do it? Is it okay to gauge my self-worth by how I perceive my average progress?

Then I remind myself, the only way out is through. And I will get through, even if that means asking for help, admitting that I am struggling, and that I'm a more than bit scared.

stay tuned, space rangers

hello, mendel

So you know GMO's right? like genetically modified organisms?

Like 'em? Hate 'em? Don't really know what they are and not really willing to commit to either side until you're convinced they're worth discussion? Well, look no further friend. 

Tuesday before we were let out, Amanda gave us one final piece of homework: read and annotate the first chapter ("Against the Ways of Nature") of Mendel in the Kitchen by Nina v. Fedoroff and Nancy Marie Brown.

Certainly this flashes us back to the blogpost about last Monday where we looked at the issues revolving around bananas, a huge controversy all its own. The first chapter of the book opened with an introduction to the case of Golden Rice, what was once a huge protest topic for anti-GMO activists. 

Basically the situation is this: A lot of kids in poorer countries eat rice, and a lot of it. Rice, according to the chapter, accounts for sometimes more than half the calories consumed in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, and other countries, and is a staple food in nearly half the world. The problem is, it doesn't have a lot of vitamins and nutrients in it, and developing children don't get enough vitamin A in their diet, which assists eyesight in the early stages. This often leads to a lot of the children going blind before they reach adulthood, with about a million of them dying from the deficiency.

What scientist Ingo Potrykus decided to do with this information was try to put a gene that would tun into vitamin A in the body, into the rice, and after about ten years of deliberation and hard work, he and his colleagues succeeded. Golden rice was created, rice with implemented with the gene that give daffodils their vibrant yellow color, and kids in worse off countries lowered their risk for blindness and respiratory disease due to vitamin A deficiency. pretty cool, right?

Unfortunately, it faced very harsh backlash from people claiming that Golden rice was "a source of genetic poulltion", an abomination and a sellout act. One reviewer of the story even said it was "worse than telling them to eat cake". 

Other accounts in the chapter detailed similarly interesting methods of genetically modifying organisms, including irradiation, somaclonal variation, and tissue culture cloning, which we've seen happen with the cavendish banana. 

Okay, but how is this applicable to real life current events? Well....

The very next day I noticed something peculiar while perusing the ingredients list of a bucket of trader joe's mango sorbet.

The last ingredient! Beta Carotene! Right here in my "natural" dessert! These white people are probably shoveling this stuff into their mouths faster than kids in Asia are going blind because Beta Carotene, GMO's and Golden Rice are being protested for how unethical it is. Oh yes, let a million already disadvantaged children lose their eyesight but don't dare mess with God's plan. God probably has a plan for that army of blind kids to spread his message too, doesn't he. 

Beta Carotene is a gene that turns food yellowish and activates/carries vitamin A in the body. 

Basically glorified food coloring. That is good for you. 

Anyway, if this topic interests you at all in the slightest, I highly encourage you, in fact I implore you, to please check out at least the first chapter of this amazingly, impressively sophisticated and simple book, Mendel In the Kitchen free of charge on google books and if you like it, read along with the Violet Band as we plunge the rabbit hole into the intricate world of genetically modified organisms in our food.

Ladies and gentlemen and everything in between, Mendel in the Kitchen by Nina V. Fedoroff, and Nancy Marie Brown  

thanks for reading

Why vegan diets suck: a introduction to a life (week) w/o meat, dairy, eggs, and honey

Last week Laurel suggested that this week we would go vegan as a band. For some reason we decided this was a good idea.

So, on Tuesday morning the Violet band got an email from our fearless leader with the subject line:

Oberskizzle was out, so she assigned us into four groups and sent us articles about veganism to read via email. So you can imagine how ecstatic Max and I were to find in our inboxes an article entitled:

( we weren't, btw )

Fun fact: Its okay to disagree with stuff you read on the internet. Immediately we started reading it, reservedly and objectively holding our opinions back until we each finished the entire article. We were checking to see if it was an opinion piece, a news article, or an opinion piece that just sounded like a news article.

Right off the bat we noticed quite a few invalid (or at least questionable) arguments laid out in the article. After a brief conversation with Max, sharing our ideas about the article and noting the parts that stood out to us the most, we compiled all of our content, the points from the article, our own reflections, and our counterarguments onto a nice, organized, old-fashioned poster.

Besides winning me some sideways glances around Brightworks, (since I live in the bay area and veganism is becoming increasingly common/popular) this poster was really helpful (at least for me) to organize ideas and present them in a seemly manner. As you can see, the article shared five reasons to not go vegan, each point with its own strengths and weaknesses.

1. Vegans are deficient in many important nutrients.

I'm not going to deny that this makes sense. After all, humans were evolved to be omnivores, so you could conclude that vegans are missing out on at least half the vitamins and nutrients that a meat-and-leaf-eating person would be getting. Arguably, this point highlights that veganism can be just as bad for you as only eating meat. Kris Gunnars, the author of the article, lays down that vegans are missing vitamins and supplements such as B12, amino acids, creatine, carnosine, testosterone, docosahexaenoic acid, saturated fat, and cholesterol. On the other hand, I'm no nutritionist, but would a little deficiency in these substances be all that bad? The real shockers on that list for me were cholesterol and sat fat. You hear so many horror stories about people with high cholesterol and risk of heart disease when you're old and frail that I can't imagine a lack of all these other bits and pieces to be all that vital if I'm being perfectly honest.

2. There are no studies showing that they are better than other diets.

That's also probably true, but again Gunnars' point is iffy at best. To give a very brief summary, he explains the case of the A to Z study, where people eating meat lost more weight that people on a vegan diet, and another study where a low-carb diet did as much for patients as a vegan diet.

He later admits in the article that the vegan diet is more effective than the American Diabetes Association's recommended diet. Hopefully, you can empathize with Max's and my incredulity and frustration when we were only this far in the article.

3. Vegans use lies and fear-mongering to promote their cause.

I can concur that some of veganism's current success is partly fad appeal and trace amounts of peer influences. Still, an unsustainable food source that's slowly but surely destroying our planet is pretty scary on its own. I don't see why vegans would have to do any work to make not being vegan any scarier (climate change denial alert much?). Plus, I feel like the "cause" he talks about is reasonably worthwhile if you break it down. If it's good for the environment, I say it's worth a try.

4. Vegan diets work in the short term for other reasons. 

What this means is that vegans just happen to be healthier because they take in less added sugars, refined carbs, vegetable oils, trans fats, etc. Gunnars claims that this is the reason for their health benefits, not the omission of animal products.

I say 'whatever floats your boat'. If cutting out meat from your diet works for you then cool, by all means go for it. Besides, they put so many crazy things in meat these days, it's hard to measure how much of these harmful substances are making their way into your body, veganism is a really good way to just try to live simpler, if not necessarily healthier. It's also like compensating for the millions of Americans that don't get enough (or any) vegetables in their diet. The whole point is more of a sacrifice to the preservation of our planet and a protest against shady business practices than just the benefits to the individual.

5. No health reasons to completely avoid animal foods.

See previous point.

Again, Gunnars makes the infamous argument that humans have been eating meat for thousands of years, and repeatedly denies the existences of scientifically valid health reasons for eliminating animal products from the diet. In fact when you think about it, this feels kind of the same as point two. But it also kind of feels like all the other points.

I give this article two vegan eggplant emojis out of five. Redundant, mediocre, and ranty, but at the same time it was passionate and a good try.

To kick off vegan week, Jack, Josh and I made falafel and guess what it was delicious. But unfortunately, due to some circumstantial health reasons I copped out of vegan week later that night.

Now I have pretty mixed feelings about veganism, but at least I tried.

Regardless of what some expert has to say, vegan week was, if not fun and enlightening, then at least interesting

everything is interesting.

🍆🍆
The article in question: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-08/why-vegan-diets-suck