Shaping Perceptions

The intentions of both Curtis and Neidich are surprisingly similar when you pare them down to the basic idea. Both photographers wanted to change what they thought of as a negative public opinion about Native Americans.

Curtis was being paid to document the vanishing culture of the Indians. This allowed him to try to change the public view of Indians from violent and lawless people to a noble people with their own distinct culture. Unfortunately, in order to change public opinion, he went to the other extreme of the opinion spectrum and created the ideal Indian culture. He removed all traces of western culture from his photos and paid the Indians to pose in costumes. Even though it is now known that a lot of what he ‘documented’ was false, Curtis transformed the Indians’ image from the violent savage to the ‘noble’ savage.

Ironically, Neidich had pretty much set out to partially undo that change. He views the ideal Native American culture as something that detracted from the actual culture of the Native Americans, and as a contributor to the sanitation of history. He wanted to educate people about what actually happened in interactions between the Native Americans and the English settlers. He mostly did this from the Indians point of view. He used staged pictures depicting Native Americans being shot or similarly injured by the settlers. Neidich doesn’t want to deny that the Native Americans had a proud heritage, but he wants to acknowledge that they were as flawed as we were, just less powerful in the end.

I prefer the works of Neidich because they are trying to bring a more historical prespective to the fore. He doesn’t claim that his photos were actually taken back then, but he does try to make them more true to the facts.

Excuses

Answering prompt 2) McNamara asks, in the film, “How much evil must we do in order to do good? We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it….I think the issue is, in order to win a war should you kill 100,000 people in one night, by firebombing or any other way? [U.S. Air Force General Curtis] LeMay’s answer would be clearly ‘Yes.’” What do you think? Were the firebombings of dozens of Japanese cities “justified” in the context of WWII? Was the dropping of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) “justified”? Were these strategies, as McNamara advises in war, “proportional”? Did the ends justify the means?

Saying that in order to do good you may have to engage in evil is an excuse. The ends cannot be said to justify the means because then there are no boundaries on human behavior. You cannot reasonably say that the ends justify the means, but only up to a certain point because that point is not measurable and basically lets a person who is savvy enough do anything they want. As McNamara said, if we had lost we would have been persecuted as war criminals. Then how was it justified?

So long as people believe that up until a certain point the ends can justify the means they will also believe that humans war by nature and that human nature cannot change. That we will always have war. And so we shall. People can always say, invading this country will have this good result for me so I can justify the loss of life and resources to the war, or similar situation. People will not go through as much effort to exhaust all diplomatic options because sometimes war is just easier. I don’t believe we can change human nature, but I don’t believe war is in human nature. I believe humans are just too lazy to engage in political pussyfooting for long periods of time. The stress is too much. The idea of war, to relieve the stress and to end the pussyfooting becomes more and more attractive as time wears on.

Disclaimer: Of course, I have never taken a psychology class and I have not really studied human behavior. I may be totally wrong about human nature, but I may not be.

On Test Taking

My AP physics teacher would occasionally give us advice about how to do better in the class, and one thing he told us was a method he used in college for studying for and taking tests. The first thing to do is study to your heart’s content up until 48 hours before the test. Then you stop. For the next 48 hours you do not study, you do not think about the material. Do something else. Then, in the hour or so before the test, you go over the material and see what you do and do not know. Then, when you take the test, you go in, prop your feet up, stick a lollipop in your mouth and take the test.

The method behind the madness is this. According to the information he had, the human brain takes about 48 hours to assimilate things. So if you stop studying 48 hours before the test, your brain will be able to assimilate all the information. When you go through the information to see what you don’t know, you are setting yourself up to be able to skip the questions you know you don’t know so that you can get to the ones you do know. Then if you have time afterwards you can go back to the trickier questions. The final piece of advice you don’t have to follow exactly, the principal is to be relaxed. When you are freaking out you are going to forget things. If you are relaxed you will be able to remember all the things that you know. Freak out while you are studying if you want, worry after if you want, but be calm during the test and you will do better on it.

Open mouth, insert foot, chew slowly

Foot in Mouth Disease: A disorder of the brain in which the connection between the higher thinking centers of the brain and the mouth is severed. This can lead to a condition known as diarrhea of the mouth and to sometimes amusing, but often unfortunate social discomfort. This disease is present in most humans and flare-ups can be triggered by lack of sleep. The use of caffeine in combination with lack of sleep is almost certain to trigger this condition.

Ah, college life. So many things to do, so little time. Consequently, sleep often gets neglected (at least in my case). Trying to stay alert in classes, the masses of the sleep deprived turn to caffeine. Unfortunately, this can lead me to feel lucid when in actuality I am not. I tend to run off at the mouth at the best of times and this combination does not help. I don’t mean to say that I talk trash or anything, but I tend to just jabber on about anything that comes to mind without thinking about if what I say is appropriate, necessary, or even logical. It is lamentable. I try to take into consideration who I am talking to when I am talking to them so that I don’t offend them. I think it is a bit rude to do something in front of someone that you know they find offensive. So basically, I need to learn to think before I speak.

On another note, when I googled foot in mouth disease I kept coming up with Foot and Mouth Disease, which is a cattle and other hoofed animal virus. Finally I found a reference to my kind of definition, ironically in another blog. Here it is.

The fifth symptom in Hallowell and Ratey's Diagnostic Criteria for Attention Deficit Disorder in Adults is foot-in-mouth disease.

5. Tendency to say what comes to mind without necessarily considering the timing or appropriateness of the remark.
Like the child with ADD in the classroom, the adult with ADD gets carried away in enthusiasm. An idea comes and it must be spoken—tact or guile yielding to childlike exuberance.

Thank you and Goodnight.

Addition of Alkenes: The Formation of Vicinal Dihalides

I am so happy that I am finally learning new stuff in my Organic chem class. We have been going over the basic stuff and I have been bored out of my mind. Today though we started going through the mechanisms of different types of Alkene addition reactions and it is really interesting. I love learning about chemistry and I'm glad that the class is more learning based and less memorization based than I had thought it would be. I mean, sure, you could just memorize the 100 plus reactions that we are going to learn during the course of the semester, or you can do as he suggests and actually think about the material, make connections, and be able to come up with those reactions from information that you know. If you know the characteristics of a set of reactions and you have learned the concepts behind the mechanisms of the reaction then you should be able to infer the mechanisms and predict the products of almost any given reaction. For instance, I had known about Markovnikov's Rule, but I just learned about the anti-Markovnikov reactions that occur in the presence of peroxides. It is very useful information because if you know the mechanisms you can set up reactions to get a specific structural- or stereoisomer of the product.

Also, I am so entertained by the fact that I can sit in the balcony for that class. I guess that says a bit about me, but being easily amused makes my days much more fun than they otherwise would be.

On Blogging

This blogging assignment becomes more difficult the longer it goes on. I am quickly running out of topics to write about. So I will try to list some topics that may be appearing in the future and you all can tell me if you think that they might be worth writing about. This really reminds me of The Cat Who… books where the main character, Quilleran, who writes a column for the local newspaper catches some flack from his editor, Arch Ricker, for doing reader submission columns. He calls it a copout, and it sort of is but if Ms. Hickner wants me to write another blog instead of this one all she needs to do is comment or e-mail me and I will write another blog. So, on to the list!

Why to wear Pigtails

Puns

My favorite book(s)

Several of my favorite movies (we’ll call it summary practice)

Movie quotes

Inspirational quotes

Anime

Mercedes Lackey

Gardening

Purdue University

How to ride the bus

Insects (name one I’ll write 200+ words on it)

Anyway, seriously, I have a hard time coming up with topics and I love Scifi books and bugs, so if you want a description of one, just drop me a comment and I’ll try and blog it later that week. Plus you have to write a few comments every week anyway, right? So it is like a bonus for both of us. Lol Have a great night folks and I’ll see what kind of responses I get.

Feeding yourself without the meal plan

When I was deciding where to live this year money was a real factor. Finally I found Hilltop. Initially, the idea of having my own kitchen attracted me, but when I learned that I didn’t have to have a meal plan I knew it was the perfect for me.

Cooking for myself is a lot harder than I initially thought it would be. I do know the basics of cooking, but I am much more experienced with baking. The first time I made spaghetti, for instance, it turned out really weird tasting. It was edible, but barely. I have a few cookbooks, but I need to learn how to judge what kind of spices to use and how much to use when I make things. Another problem I have been having is finding time to cook. It takes me a long time to do things and I have only an hour between classes to eat lunch. I have been falling back on the old peanut butter and jelly. I don’t mind because I love peanut butter and I have home made jam, but it does get tedious after a while. I don’t even have time to cook Ramen! For dinner oftentimes I am too tired to cook real food or I am eating at Earhart for work. Not that I’m complaining, I guess, but I have all this yummy food in my room that I want to cook, and I can never find the time to.