"I'm afraid I can't help it... I'm afraid I can..."

[alexr_rwx]

- At the Black Dog, tonight, we ran into a fellow, waiting in line to get coffee, who revealed himself to be a CS postdoc, working on bioinformatics. He was from the Netherlands, and together (gently probing at each other's hackerness), we figured out that with a given scrabble hand, you're never going to have to check more than O(2^7 * 7!) sequences of letters to see which ones are words (it's like less than a few thousand and less than that because it's not really 7!) -- if you were writing the AI player for a computerized version of scrabble. This fellow gets many cool points; he softly explained what he was working on, and he had a cool accent...

- Garrett lomonthang is totally reading Jung and thinking all sorts of lofty thoughts, and maybe he's going to do sculpture-like things at FSU. And we saw Brett, who was playing funky beatZ up in the place at WVFS.

- After we visited Brett, we had tasty pitas and watched the partygoers crowd the streets and the bars. It was surreal.

- What do real people think about? What's a typical conversation sound like at the bars on Tennessee Street sound like? What does anybody discuss in this life? What is average -- and do the people we saw tonight count as average?

Comments

[elysianboarder.livejournal.com]

When I was hanging out one day in Cherokee, a very sweet but not as quick friend of mine began do have this discussion with me.
"Whitney, have you noticed something about yourself. You always end up talking about something that normal people just can't even touch. I mean like you and Anthony were talking about that biology crap yesterday, and when he comes in and teaches you phyiscs, and you're not even in the AP class but you skip our class to go sit over there. That's not normal."
"What is normal?"
"I don't know *begins to thumb through the pages of Cosmo*. Maybe you could think about a shred of make-up."

Normal is an interesting and vague thing. Does that fact make me any less? What about you, Tallahassee kids who sit in the black dog and discuss AI? Are you any less normal for doing it? It's all a cultural thing honestly. In the South, or at least in the south I am from, women are sort of pointed to and expected to be what I deem as "magazine" women. Again there is another common social barrier we see with how men view women. The infamous Harvard comment just keeps that glass ceiling another few inches down. Is the fact that I am a biologist at a very male school not normal? Because of the barriers that people like to place on themselves (I am black, green, I speak in tongues, and the leader of my own religion) it becomes how much can we separate and make ourselves different but drawn to a specific group. How can you be Jane Christian and be normal within the views of that community that is a pin pointing factor. Then again what do I really know, I’m just a female biologist.

[lomonthang.livejournal.com]

A-dawg told me you dont wear make-up.
(an faint scribbling of many many cool points in Garrett's Book next to your name is heard)
groovy.

[reality-calls.livejournal.com]

   In the South, or at least in the south I am from, women are sort of pointed to and expected to be what I deem as "magazine" women.

It's not just the South.  That occurs here in Colorado as well, and I strongly suspect that it applies to pretty much anywhere that's been overrun by what has been dubbed "pop" culture.  As far as I can tell, this isn't a "culture" in the classical sense, but a commercial image specifically tailored to encourage people to buy more products that they really don't need, like the makeup that you mentioned.  In this culture, "barriers" are good because they define "markets" that specific products can be tailored to, though they may have no practical value.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, no one should get too worried about being "normal", especially when "normal" is defined by institutions that are primarily concerned with making money for themselves.

Marketing is one of the purest forms of evil in the modern world.

      "Live from the People's Republic"

[elysianboarder.livejournal.com]

This is a bit of the work I do in my lit class at tech. The study of Globalization and it's effects on the world around can be HUGE. Much of american culture is not defined by a "spirit" or a "sense" but rather is now defined by a product lable. McDonald's for example or any fast food place for that matter is a clear definitive American thing. And the similarities are astounding. Go into any of the resturants, be it here or in Moscow, and you find the same Golden Arches, the same greasy meal, and even the same clown. All a marketing plow that allows them to spread ever rapidly over the world. Offer cheap food and you outbeat competators, offer uniformity and you link with sameness a sort of global "normal", offer american "values" and you have the world. It's the idea that the culture barriers are becoming scurred, outdated so to speak, due to globalization. This is the century that the small business with die, the rights of others ignored for "the common good", and big businesses with bank accounts larger then even the wealtiest country. Welcome to 'freedom and democracy' you're number is 42, you can wait to serve yourself.