For our presentation, we organised the class into groups of roughly twelve and asked them to write the sentence "Once upon a time, Jamie was walking down the street when..." . We gave them 30 seconds to continue the story before asking them to pass it to the person on their left, who then had 30 seconds to continue the story and so on and so forth. We then read out two of the stories to demonstrate the ways in which they had diverged from identical beginnings.

Below are four of the 30-40 stories which resulted from the same sentence:

On Thursday, we discussed how many people used to feel that they all had a role to play in the scheme of the universe, but how in more modern times, people started to feel that the individual does not play that important of a role. While I think that some of us might not have the biggest role to play, I think that we all somehow influence the lives of others. Even the smallest, and most seemingly unimportant person can affect the lives of those around them. And because much of the time the effect of that person on the life of another is indirect, as in the person being influenced does not realize it, many are therefore left to think that they have reached their current place in life completely without help or influence.

it seems like a lot of people have been revisiting the library of babel, which seeing that its nearing the end of the semester makes sense i guess.

seeing that so many people were writing about it, made me briefly skim through it in my mind and i realized something. as i remember it one of the strongest reasons people seemed to be uncomfortable with the idea of such a place existing was because it would mean that no one could ever create anything new - because it had already been predestined to exist or already existed in another form somewhere in the stacks of this library.

 We (Marina and Merlin) Led a class activity today, in which we tried to illustrate a particular aspect of the transformation of information. Our goal was to look at the critical distinction between observations and interpretations..

Question:

HOW Can you interpret something created by code and algorithms?

Apo and I performed an excerpt from our skit, "A Natural Disaster," in class as our final performance.

Here is the full description of Apo's and my final performance.

Class Notes for 4/20
Reactions to Lady Gaga:

phreNic -- The image is not necessarily empowering. She's the motorcycle. You ride motorcycles...

m. aghazarian's letters to dead people post -- who is the master and who is the creator when you use technology?

check out merlin's post about a complicated idea involving nanobots

Anymore thoughts on Bloodchild?

Hilary: do others think the interpretation is useful? (humans as technology and technology as humans)

the message is that technology is something you can have intimate personal relationships with; emotions tied into technology