3rd Beloved

  About a year ago I was browsing through YouTube when I came across a video on my recommended titled “strangely familiar places with unnerving music.” I ended up clicking on it to be greeted with discordant chords of synth music alongside images of empty stairwells, airports, parking lots, and rooms full of toys and other trinkets of childhood. All the images a sense of familiarity as the title foresaw but also brought forth a sense of something being very off. It was not quite terrifying, but left me uneasy and questioning why these images provoked such a response.  I looked into it more, learning that such sites were called “liminal spaces.” A liminal space in an anthropological sense is a period of transition in a person’s life between one event and another. Think of it as almost a purgatory, ambiguous and disorienting. I think one liminal space in all of our lives was the period between March 2020 and August 2020 in early quarantine. It was by far the oddest transition al...

  I generally steer away from my own personal experiences in blogs. Something about people telling me that once I start on talking about my experiences I usually spiral into a rant about something entirely different. Though since this is the last blog post for this class, I might as well, right?  I always used to call nostalgia a useless emotion. But I ended up writing a blog last quarter on the psychological reasons as to why it exists. See, nostalgia makes you sad and makes you feel like there’s no time you’d rather be in but now. But I’d like to think that reminiscing is what gives things its meaning. If we go through life without reflecting on what happened, things seem to go by too fast and eventually become too blurry in our memories. Sometimes a little sadness is good for the mind. If you’ve ever watched the movie Inside Out you’d know what I mean. This last weekend, in a haze of nostalgic yearning, I looked through an app called Google Keep that I would write short...

Memories of the Fallen   They say that when you die, there actually are two deaths: "when [on]e is buried in the ground and the last time someone says [one's] name." How do you remember those that came before us or have fallen? With us moving into Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried  and how the legacies of the dead, both "enemy" and ally, live on in our minds, the memories of the fallen are as relevant as can be. How do you remember somebody that was killed in a foreign nation ? That was the question for the thousands of soldiers stationed in Vietnam, with their squadmates killed and their bodies lost. How does one truly immortalize  the dead, when all you have of them are memories and nothing else? People have their own methods, but all seem to fade with time. Stories are the most common, with a select few becoming as well-known as LT. Cross in The Things They Carried , but most are lost. Yet these legacies are the most important part of the war: tho...

Image Credits: https://francescolelli.info/tutorial/neural-networks-a-collection-of-youtube-videos-for-learning-the-basics/ Human beings learn from observations and our knowledge comes from our memory of past observations and experiences. As Ben Dickson explains, “Your biological neural network [reprocesses] your past experience to deal with a novel situation. For example, we know that an apple is an apple because of past experiences, where a similar-looking fruit was an apple.  In CSP, we recently learned about Neural Networks, which are a key aspect of Machine Learning. Neural Networks enable machines to learn and develop their own algorithms, rather than relying on a computer programmer. I found it fascinating that this relatively new, complex technology is largely inspired by the basic structure of the human brain and the biological concept of memory. Essentially, Neural Networks are used to train a computer using a large dataset of examples, so that they can recognize trends a...

      I recently came across a new creative idea widely followed in the fashion industry (commonly associated with Virgil Abloh); it is called the 3% rule. The concept of the 3% rule is that when creating something new, you only need to change the original product by 3%. This creates a common association behind all the pieces and removes the pressure to create something fully original immediately. Artists often feel a need to come up with big ideas quickly, but in reality what we call "big ideas" are just small ideas slowly building off of each other to the point wherein the end there are only very few similarities between the latter and the former. Even when you look at the evolution of humans, the earliest human beings are so much more different than us. However, when you look at the evolution of humans, you can see that the changes to their structure are little and subtle. Slowly, these subtle changes turn into something "distinct."     There is this saying t...

The B.C Rich Warlock This last blog post really stumped me. As usual I had no idea what to write nor did I have the motivation to unearth a memory based study from the depths of the internet. However, when it comes to memory, I have some significant memories from sitting at this desk in my room. Distance learning was quite a unique experience, and often times I find myself thinking it'd be so much easier to just have to be in Zoom calls all over again. I had time to do things and my memories of doing other things really revolved around one specific hobby: playing guitar.  I love music but probably not as much as one who practices it should, as I only manage to really get around to practicing every so often and for an hour or two at best. However, over the course of my many years playing the instrument I've had many memories revolving around it. It first started when I decided I was too bored of the piano and wanted to play guitar, a much more appealing instrument to me. I fiddl...

Avery Sun     Week 16 11th Grade Memories                  For the last blog, I’d just like to share some memories I made this year. Some of these may seem extremely random, but this year went by in a blur, so if I even remember it, then it's significant.  During the summer, I volunteered with this senior at our school (it was a big group of people), and he had no idea who I was, but I saw him at maze day near the station where they assign you a locker. I was given a locker in that one hallway with the trophies between the 300 and 500 wing, but the door was locked on both sides The people giving out lockers were adamant about showing me to my locker so I had to wait for almost 10 minutes for them to get the door open. During that time, I wanted to say something along the lines of, “Hi, I’m Avery,” to the senior but it felt really awkward to do so, so I think I just ended up staring at him for ten minutes (which is arguably...

Sahana Narayan - Week 16: Happy Birthday – 5/18 [11:03 AM ] Today is my birthday. And like all my other birthdays, the day often brings back memories. Memories of the past year, memories of past birthdays, and memories of past me’s. It’s not always the most fun memories. It often feels like this occasion brings out all your emotions on the most extreme level. As I write this, I think about the time I cried the whole day on my birthday simply because it was raining. I also recall the time I sobbed because my dad told me to take out the trash, even though it was my birthday, and that obviously makes me exempt from all my duties and responsibilities as a human being right?  Over the last two years, I have tried to perfect not getting emotional on my birthday. It starts off with making plans. Plan out your day exactly. What meals you’re going to eat, what clothes you’re going to wear, what homework you’re going to do. This makes sure that you won’t be caught off guard with a meal th...

via Unsplash When it’s not mixed with an unreasonable amount of sugar and saturated fats, chocolate is actually quite a healthy snack. As part of a healthy regiment with a controlled diet and consistent exercise, chocolate offers several health benefits. Among its widely accepted associations with reduced inflammation and lower blood pressure , chocolate is also surprisingly beneficial to memory. Here’s how it works. Purer dark chocolates with higher cocoa concentrations are rich in flavanols. Dietary research has found correlations between flavonoid consumption and antioxidant activity, resulting in improved blood flow, which suggests that it may be beneficial for brain activity. Specifically, cocoa flavanols can increase blood flow to the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. This structure acts as a “preprocessor” of information, playing a critical role in creating memories, and is particularly vulnerable to aging. Therefore, the memory decline presented by aging is mitigated through ...

      Lakshmi Manasa Maddi - Week 16: Evolution in Language As our world is evolving day to day, and getting older as time passes by, I have increasingly understood the importance of acknowledging the origins of our land. The proof that goes the most back in time is found in the lands of Iraq, where an artifact named Kish Thus was found ( Nowak ). After archeologists conducted deeper research, they found out that Sumerian was considered the first language in existence to date ( Nowak ). Over time, this language was replaced with Akkadian as the most popularized language spoken around the time period of 2000 BC ( Nowak ). This led to the emergence of many new languages appearing such as Hurrian, Palaic, Egyptian, Sanskrit, and Mycenaean Greek ( Nowak ). With languages following a cycle of repetition, they have grown, “mutated” and died into being “reborn” into a new form of themselves ( Nowak ). Although languages are really old, it has been scientifically proven that the...

 Some call him the greatest basketball player to walk on Earth: others simply call him the Greatest of all time. The legacy of Michael "His Airness" Jordan is something one has to witness to understand.  His greatest years were on the Chicago Bulls, where he would lead his team to six championships in just seven years and cement his legacy as the greatest basketball player of all time. He would retire for a second time, ending his career on perhaps  the greatest high an athlete can achieve: on top of the world and undefeated 6-0 in the NBA finals. Yet Michael Jordan would return to basketball after his second retirement: the midnight years of his career would now be beginning, a injury filled and depressing two years. Most people do not consider these miserable two years as part of Jordan's legacy, for an ailing and old superstar doesn't bode well with the nearly superhuman stories we are told. This begs the question: why do people not remember these two years? It ha...

 Avery Sun Week 15 Muscle Memory                Muscle memory has been the one thing helping me survive a good amount of my extracurriculars, but at the same time, it has been lowering the quality of my performance as well. For every single one of my piano exams, rather than memorizing the notes of the song, I let muscle memory completely take over, and I was so dependent on it to the point where if I even focused for a split second on what I was playing, it would disrupt my muscle memory and I would have to restart. The same thing happened when I tried out for the badminton team this year. I hadn’t touched a racket for around 3 years, and I got a feel for what I was doing through muscle memory; but because its been so long, my form and footwork are very incorrect and its hard for me to correct it because the wrong moves are ingrained in my body.  So how does muscle memory work? In an Oxford study, researchers used MRI scans to trac...