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I found Shaw's reflections on connecting to learning to be quite relatable. Especially as a college student navigating an overwhelming wealth of crucial information both on and off of the internet, I find myself losing track of a lot of it. However in many ways the measure of the humanity of our information ecology is subjective. Especially today, the internet is most definitely one of the greatest learning tools. The way we consume content is personal and so also is the extent to which one might find that content consumption is and does inherently feel like learning. I would argue that thanks to those tools and resources one may access through an internet connection it is indeed possible reflect on books read months apart, for example, by using your favorite search engine to look for a book summary or creating a running list of favorite quotes though which you could then easily run a word search on at any moment. I think this also leads into why software development is interesting: its essentially the process of approaching problems such as the humanity of internet learning and developing a concrete set of tools to navigate the issue. Another interesting idea that myself, Tindar, and Mikayla discussed is the idea that today links are more than the presence of an anchor tag. Be it a hashtag or the decision made from a search engine, when we consider the internet and how not only sites but ideas are linked, we may find that they are more interconnected and two-way than we may have initially thought.

Entry #2: Reflections on the Internet

2/7/22

When I first learned or encountered the idea of servers, search engines, and even websites as interactions between computers I soon realized that the internet was not what I thought it was, but never took time to reflect on my new perception of the internet. When I was much younger I would have said the internet was similar to a program that my individual computer runs locally, but that is clearly not the case, in listening to "A History of the Internet" by Laurel Schwulst I resonate with the conceptual overview of the internet as being a group of computers in many ways, but I know that it is much more complicated than that. Especially as technology advances so also does their become more a spectrum of how much of a machine access the internet, helps to run the internet, or simply stores information which through another device is then transported to the internet. In ECE 206 learning how simple circuits such as a SR latch are fundamental building blocks for more large scale memory store such as SRAM or a register file further cemented an idea that I also found pretty found and that is also mentioned in the aforementioned talk which is that the Internet IS physical. Even though I always find that creating a website or putting content online may be referred to digitizing something or putting it in a virtual space, changes information correspond to physical changes such as a change in current or voltage. So also then I have come to realize that in many ways digitizing resources may for example mean for me not having to buy a physical textbook, and yet on the other hand I am using and changing the internet and dispelling an amount of energy and power that is much more difficult to trace. Given these thoughts seeing the article on the environmental toll of Netflix confirmed my shift in perspective on the internet and the importance of resource efficient algorithms. Another concept that I have not thought about more intentionally but definitely observed is the idea that increasingly many platforms are incorporating feeds on the landing or main page of the website. Listing to Anil Dash discuss this in his "The Web We Lost" was interesting as the talk was almost a decade ago, and yet newer sites and especially apps spend a lot of time personalizing and showcasing the feed throughout the user's experience. Companies with web-/app- based products that have feeds that draw and keep the users attention are both common and incredibly successful. I found the article to Reboot the world to also be incredibly interesting. I wasn't aware that the app mentioned in the article (called Ashley Madison) existed. Given that the app was made to facilitate affairs, I can only imagine the consequences of the data break. Today data breaches or more common and right now many big companies have so much more data on us that its harder for a user to consider and fully consent to the various processes used in collecting our data. Even though many companies go the extra mile to empower the user to understand the data being taken from them the largest tech companies today fail to in many ways and continue to profit off of the wealth of information that have at their hands.

Entry #3: Links Links Links....

2/14/22

I found Gordon Brander's paraphrasing of Gall's law to be both hilarious and incredibly pertinent to the more technical challenges I have had to face "Simple rules produce complex behavior. Complex rules produce stupid behavior." Whether its approaching a bug or thinking through a complex implementation realizing how to break down a problem and sort of model my idea and test it through print statements is essentially how I debug a lot of issues. Breaking the problem down to its simpler fundementals allows me to further appreciation the language/structure I am working with while also somultanously reinforcing Gall's Law. Given that I one some level have seen this idea in a more technical sense I had not thought to apply this to the web, in particular the structuring of websites. Once again, I am being reminded that harder/more complex isn't always better. Learning about thow many features we use todau from hashtags to comments can be thought of as a link or implemented through links is incredibly interesting and new perspective for me. I hope I get to put this revelation into code at some point, but until then this article has inspired me to pay closer attention to how crucial features lend themselves to linking.

Entry #4: Discovering the 72 Seasons

3/13/22

The concept of 72 seasons is simultaneously an intuitive and perplexing idea for me. Having grown up in Southern California in LA where changes in weather consisted primarily of less or more rain and less or more clouds, when I think of my memories I sometimes am not sure what season they occurred in unless I also remember what month the memory was from. Spending most of my time commuting to class and than receiving instruction in the class for a majority of the year I do not have as many memories that connect changes in life to the changes of the seasons or at least not at the level detail provided by Nippon.com's 72 seasons guide. Some of my favorite seasons are Niji hajimete arawaru (First rainbows from April 15th to 19th), Kawazu hajimete naku (Frogs start singing May 5-9), and Taka sunawachi waza o narau (Hawks learn to fly July 17th to 22nd). Being able to determine time with these signs means being in touch with and witnessing the miracle of nature and these seasons bring to mind vivid colors and the joy of watching life flourish. After watching the cycle of life repeat itself every so often it makes intuitive sense to use these signs to help tell time, and yet when I think back to my childhood in LA it seemed the "seasons" were more determined by my schooling than nature.