.::Fingel's Cave::. Exploring the art of Fingeldom.
11/19/2007
Final video update
I went for one more Downhill session this weekend, and added a few more clips to my mountain biking video. This will probably be
the last time I update it. Thanks to Jack and Sam for filming. Enjoy.
Went for an amazing ride yesterday with a local guy who showed me some of the good stuff. Bikers only trail! I updated the video I'm making on the MTB Mt. Ashland page, check it out.
MTB page updated
Sup Y'all. Hope you all had a good weekend. I went for a ride with some buddies up Mt. A as usual. Awesome riding of course, this time someone brought along a camera. I put together a short video of some riding, you will find in on the MTB Mount Ashland Page. Enjoy.
The Best Prank Known to Man
Here on Forest floor 1, we like to take our pranks seriously. We are in a constant state of war. Everyone is on their toes, everyone is watching their backs. We are warriors.
This weekend the battle turned in favor of Mike, Alex and I.
The method was simple. We bought 4 packs of poppers that contained 4 bags of poppers each. We then removed the rocks from all of them, and separated them into piles - undoing what the unfortunate child labourers in China did to make them. I then wrapped these piles in pieces of a plastic bag and closed them up with scotch tape. These were our bombs. The biggest one, MOAB, was placed inconspicuously in the hall and watched. Soon enough, Kainoa came by and picked it up, it promptly exploded in his face. The noise of 2 1/2 packs of poppers was deadening. We were hysterical. But we had better plans for the next 3, I took them into the bathroom and placed them very carefully under each toilet seat. An intense 45min passed while nobody had to use the bathroom. Eventually Shane, the guy with the ridiculously loud speakers went into the toilet to relieve himself. We listened, and sure enough there came a huge "BAM!" followed by "WHAT THE FUCK???" We were absolutely in stitches. It worked perfectly. Shane came out holding his ears. The next to victims were Myles and Trevor.
We also had some fun that night setting up tripwires with confetti poppers.
All materials were purchased at the local dollar store:
7x Packets of shredded white paper.
5x Bottles generic Elmer's Glue.
1x Black face paint.
Preparation was a mess, I had a few people douse me in glue and then stick the paper on my upper body and legs. Bathroom looked like a sheep had been sheared in it. One guy got 2 blow driers to help speed up the drying process. Once the paper was stuck, I applied the black facepaint to make the unibrow.
The costume was unique and looked pretty cool, but it had some obvious downsides. First of all, it was an absolute fucking mess, with paper and glue all over the bathroom, plus I was shedding for the rest of the night, leaving a trail of shredded paper wherever I went. In fact this turned out to be a safety measure. As I walked downtown sober, I left a perfect trail of white paper for about a half mile. When I walked back quite inebriated, I had absolutely no trouble retracing my steps back to the dorms. Another downside was that it was pretty darn cold, being outside and not moving wasn't the greatest time. Yet another downside, either nobody knows what a Yeti is or it just doesn't look like one, which turned out to be alright because I met a few people just trying to explain what my costume was supposed to be. Surprisingly it was not itchy or uncomfortable to wear.
Happy Halloween all!
CARNAGE!!!
Wow what a weekend! It started on Thursday, with my whole hall getting busted, and one of my friends, Mike, getting an MIP - from a real police officer! Turns out that on Monday our entire floor has a mandatory meeting with the head RA, most likely to discuss the fact that everyone is at risk of being evicted to other halls if we don't start behaving. That behind, my buddy Berret and I had a killer weekend on the bikes. On Saturday my dad stopped by on his way to Canada, and we all drove to the top of Mt. A and went for a run. It took us almost 3 hours to ride the whole thing because we kept stopping to do different jumps and tricks that we came across. We discovered an AWESOME new single track mountain bike trail chalk full of man made stunts and drops. Check out the Mountain Bike Mt. Ashland page for some more pictures. The biggest moment by far was when I dropped a man made bridge, I stood at the bottom of it and it was up to my eyes, plus because of the bike trajectory down hill it must have added up to about 7 feet of awesomeness. Then came...
Sunday Berret came over and we sat around for a few hours watching bike videos. Of course we got a little pumped up, and it was a nice day, so we hopped on our bikes and headed downtown. We ended up stopping at the skate park, where we had some fun, met a new riding buddy, and I fell riding in a bowl and fucked my ribs up. However, the show stopper, by far, was Berret. With the spirit of Brian Lopes pumping through his heart, he charged a quarter pipe at full speed and attempted a 180. Maybe it was the spirit of Bender instead, because Berret hit the pavement hard and broke his collar bone. He also got a nasty wound on his torso that looks like something entered and came out a little higher up by his ribs, where another red oozing wound is located.
I accompanied him to the hospital and he'll be okay, back riding in a few weeks I'm sure.
A nice way to wake up
I had a pretty rough night, minus the details I went to sleep really early and woke up late. When I opened my eyes, this was the first thing I saw:
I have to say it gave me some hope for the weekend.
Collective Knowledge
With the rise of technology, mankind has been able to communicate faster and more efficient than ever. With telecommunications, its possible to contact nearly anyone or anything, anytime, to get any kind of problem or question answered. This technology has given birth to a new phenomena, called collective knowledge, that allows anyone to get information about anything and use it as their own. This kind of power should be encouraged in our schools, not looked down upon. Schools need to change their view on what cheating is, in order to keep up with current trends in society.
It used to be that in order to research information, you usually had to go to a library and read text that was written, owned and copyrighted by an author or a group of authors. This means that if you were to copy any text you found exactly, it would be called plagiarism. The information was coming from a single source and could be traced back to its origins easily.
Today, information is available from many different sources. The libraries still exist, and copying from them is still plagiarism. But there is a new kind of resource emerging on the World Wide Web. Its called collective knowledge, shared information, or as some would put it, anonymous garbage put on the web by non credible sources. An example of a place to find such information would be Wikipedia, where anonymous users can upload and change “encyclopedia” entries that any other users can view. Information found on such site is not copyrighted nor does it come from a single source. Its called public domain and anyone, anywhere can access it and use it as their own.
In a way collective knowledge is its own entity, imagine a box in the middle of a school that both takes papers and prints them out. All the information that goes in is anonymous and can be edited by anyone else at the same time, all this information is free for anyone else to use. The information that comes out is the truth, but a different kind. The first person to write a paper about the T. Rex and put it in the box had the right idea, but he got a few dates wrong. The first person to edit the paper, changed some of the dates to be correct, making the whole paper more correct, however, he made some spelling errors. Eventually the third person comes along and fixes the spelling errors, and this keeps happening indefinitely over time. What happens is a truth emerges, but not one from a scholar or scientist, but as a kind of average truth of what most people say is true. Sometimes this can be better than an “official” truth , sometimes worse, but usually it is the same (because most people believe in people's opinions who are held to be highly educated or knowing in their field). Now imagine this box in the middle of the school is accessible to everyone in the world instantly.
Because this kind of information doesn't come from any single source, thus cant be owned by anybody, it really is owned everyone and thus anyone copying it and using it as their own is not plagiarizing. Schools need to realize this, and not punish for using information got in this way. In the future, tapping into the collective knowledge will most likely be the dominant way of accessing unknown information, like a second brain owned by everyone. The fact is schools cant stop people from using this knowledge, because its impossible to prove who created it.
Although we have a long time to see where this new technology takes us, one thing is for sure, schools need find a way to embrace it fully or risk becoming another casualty of the relentless march of time.
Big News for a Big World
After just one glance at the cover of The New York Times front page from July 17th, 1922 put next to the front page of July 17th, 1988 one thing is certain: The world was once a smaller and simpler place. On the 1925 newspaper, I count a total of one international story, hidden in the top left corner in a small box. Its titled: "Rich Germans Burn Bonds To Get Them Reissued Abroad." Its barely four paragraphs long and it details how wealthy Germans circumvent a exporting securities law by burning the bonds and having them reissued overseas. The rest of the articles are of National relevance, with titles like "Debs calls Unions to 'Fight Together'", "Battle in West Virginia" and "Auto Bandit Dying Shot By Policeman; 2 Others Wounded."
However, the front page of New York Times July 17th 1988 reads the complete opposite. There is only one story of National relevance, its title "Key Issues Remain After Breakdown of Albany Section" is about frustrated lawmakers in upstate New York. The rest of the articles are about International issues, most notably uprisings in South America. The titles read "Contras' Military Leaders Poised to Take Dominant Political Role", "Peruvian Guerrillas Emerge As an Urban Political Force" and "Waste Dumpers Turning to West Africa."
Why did the public eye change its focus from inwards to outwards so radically? What effects does this have on our society today? Although there are many reasons that could explain this change, one stands out most significantly: the rise of telecommunications.
After several failed attempts, the first transatlantic cable was laid from Foilhommerum, Valentia Island, Irealand to Heart's Content, in eastern Newfoundland in July 1866. This bridged the gap between Europe and America and Information could now travel from one continent to the other in a matter of hours, instead of weeks. Of course this was considered a major achievement and the project's financier Cyrus F. Fields, became a hero. He was even given a print referring to the cable as the 8th wonder of the world.
Fifty Four years later in 1920 the submarine cable network looked a little different. There were now several cables spanning Europe and America and the technology had improved, ever so slightly. There were very few cables connecting to anywhere else in the world. This meant news coming from Europe that carried urgency could make it into the US newspapers, but not much else. Most of the articles that made it into the daily newspapers was still about national issues.
In the present day, there are thousands of submarine cables attaching every continent on the globe to anywhere else in the world, and transmissions are nearly instant. Anyone has access to telecommunication technology as opposed to just a select few in the 1920s. Comparing a submarine cable map from c. 1928 and one from 2007 shows why. Today, news agencies have access to stories around the world, and naturally they pick the ones of most significance, or shock value.
In 1925 a story about a maid killing the woman she worked for made the front page of the New York times. Today, a thousand maids would have to kill a thousand wives in order to make the front page. This is because out of so many events happening in the world at once, the news agencies only want to publish the biggest ones, and this reduces the chances of a national story making it into a newspaper.
I believe this filtering of information has effects on our society. Today many people feel that the world is out of control, horrible things are happening now that have never happened before, and that we are all in imminent danger. Individuals are becoming smaller and less significant. Our fears are becoming more large scale, wide spread and inescapable. Because we hear about mass murders and large scale wars every day, something as simple as an armed robbery which made it on the front page of the New York Times in 1925, would be lucky to make it to the last page today and thus it isn't important. People don't fear robbers as much as they do nuclear annihilation.
I feel that today people are more connected with a general view of the whole world, but they have less of a precise vision of the immediate reality around them. I believe this to be an inevitable and necessary result of progress, however, I think that it would be beneficial to our society if news agencies would put more importance on national stories. A balance needs to be achieved that allows us to be aware of global issues, while still remaining attached to our home.
My Roomate
My roomate has somehow pissed of the man above, or else has really bad luck. Incredibly seemingly random horrible things have happened to this man. The great thing is how lightly he takes it. I've compiled a short list that I will probably update either out of new discoveries or because I forgot some at the time of this writing.
1) Has been stabbed in the leg with a butterfly knife by someone he didnt even know. The man just ran away and didnt attempt to steal anythig.
2) Has been hit by a car crossing the street and had to get lots of stiches.
3) Five of his peers have died. Two were close friends. One died from Lukemia and the other from a ski accident. The one from Lukemia had an open cascet funeral that he went to when he was 12 years old. Because of this I get a little nervous at times.
4) He is partially blind.
5) Because of number 4, he is really clumsy, and since University has started, he has fallen down the stairs once, fallen out of of a car once and faceplanted on the pavement, fallen out of his bed once.
6) He gets really gnarley nose bleeds at random times.
7) He has been tazered by a police officer.
Hes probably the coolest roomate I could have asked for, really unfortuneate for a chill guy.
