We read A Mind at Play by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman for this week. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but this was the most boring book I’ve ever read. I started off reading it and then I listened to the rest because I spent 17 hours in a car this weekend going to Tennessee and back. I thought I would fall asleep at the wheel. When in the passenger seat, I was going in and out of consciousness.

I got much more from the lectures this week than I did from the book, and I don’t think the book supplemented my learning in a meaningful way. The lectures were very interesting and I learned a lot about a subject that for a long time seemed very untouchable for me. I could never begin to wrap my brain around how the internet worked until viewing the videos and listening to the lectures this week.

Signal to noise ratio. The obvious explanation is trying to get a radio signal and there being static (noise) that makes the signal to noise ratio less desirable. The everyday example might be the signal to noise ration from a professor. We want to know how to get an A in the class, but the professor does all this beating around the bush, which to us is noise (not me though…I love hearing about the learning process for the class).

We learned about Bell Labs. In the book we heard about a very interesting and ahead-of-its-time concept used at Bell Labs while Shannon worked there. Management was not concerned with what would be useful in the next year or five. They wanted big ideas and radically advanced thinking or experimentation. Things that maybe wouldn’t be possible for another 10 years. This is so fascinating to me. I love this idea and it makes me so happy to think about Bell Labs doing this so many years ago. I am going to New York in three weeks and I’ll definitely walk the High Line to see the old Bell Labs building.

Boolean Algebra. Using “if/then” questions to break up information into answerable questions using ones and zeros. This was mentioned in the book too. Something about left-handed people and/or blonde-haired people. This is the idea of applying philosophy to math. This Boolean Algebra can be applied to electrical circuits to make things happen. This is revolutionary.

We watched a video of Claude Shannon debuting his mouse in a labyrinth, “Thesus.” This is super cool because the mouse goes one way and it either works or doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it flips around and tries again until it can go forward. What’s especially cool about it is it will remember what to do and can get to the end no matter where you place it in the labyrinth. If you change part of the maze, the mouse adapts and corrects, then continues with what it knows. It rewrites the plan based on what worked last. Super cool.

Later in the week we discussed the stages of amplification and eventually packet switching, ARPANET, Hypercard, WWW, HTTP, HTML, Mosaic, and Yahoo. Even if I don’t understand these topics deeply, I am glad I at least have some sense of how the internet came to be what it is today. I am mostly interested in the Hypercard revelation and how this made the direction of browsing information up to the consumer.

I was thinking about mentioning Wikipedia, but someone beat me to it. I thought about how I can click different words and go to a site that is not necessarily the most linear progression from the previous page. It’s not like I go to Wikipedia and then go to “Animals” and then “Birds” and then have to flip through every bird in alphabetical order until I get to sparrow. Then if I want to know more about the digestive system of a sparrow, I can just use links within that page and I don’t first have to learn about other things that I’m not interested in just because someone formatted the information in that way. It’s non-linear and totally in your control.

I don’t understand how the world wide web is a subset of the internet and not another term for it. I’ll look into it. I thought they were synonymous.

I like learning about HTML and I think it would be cool to play with. Now we have templates set up to make our own websites, but someone has to code for that. I think it would be cool to learn about it, but it might not be worth my time. I have lots of other things to learn about. I guess I’ll leave that to the computer scientists.

This week’s lectures were really cool and interesting. I also love the videos explaining how information is broken into bits and given instructions on how to be put back into place by the receiver. I also never thought about how if one path of info is down for some reason, your message will be sent through another route. Amazing.

That’s a brief description of this week’s topics, but there’s a lot more that I’m thinking about. I’m excited to get started on our music project and see what I can do!

-Jessi Russell