Final Blog
For this blog prompt, I am not sure if we were supposed to speculate the relationships between the two articles or within each article. However, the only significant relationship between the two is that they both have relationships as the focus.
The first article, 'Fab,' by Neil Gershenfeld, was very likely my favorite article the whole semester! It was a fascinating topic, and it made me want to go to MIT so I can create something in his class. I'm not sure that I have ever spent a great deal of time on what I would make if I had a personal fabricator, probably because I never imagined one could exist. I feel that after reading this article, there are whole other worlds out there, that I don't even know exist. This article has encouraged me to 'think outside the box.' Hearing about the different kind of people who take the class, and the different reasons they decided to join, it is fun to imagine what else will be created by the students and other users. I wonder though, what could happen if a personal fabricator got into the hands of someone corrupt. I am torn between wanting them to be available to the public, but maybe it is safer for the public to not. If they can have the assurance of what is being made, and by who, maybe we could stop destructive things from being fabricated. However, maybe it can be argued, especially by the users, that the good outweighs the bad. A good example of 'the good' is the idea of creating a machine that creates machines, that can be sent over to the under-developed countries instead of sending separate machines.
He said, 'They [the fifteen or so faculty at Center for Bits and Atoms], all like me, never fit into the artificial separation of computer science from physical science.'
I have always separated the two sciences. The statement, 'The universe is literally as well as metaphorically a computer,' became much more apparent while reading the article. I new that computers and the technology associated with them were a significant part of our lives, but I never really thought that the world is in fact a computer. I think that this is because I didn't know what computers were made of. Now that I know more about computers, I feel this statement is quite true.
This is an image of Neil Gershenfeld from http://www.kurzweilai.net/bios/frame.html?main=/bios/bio0020.html?
The second article, 'Silence and Light,' by Louis Kahn, was an extremely hard article to follow. It was as though someone wrote out his speech. It included 'you know' over a dozen times, and the sentences didn't really flow. I think if I had been sitting in a lecture with him making a speech about the same topic, I could have come out thinking 'wow, what a cool guy!' However, the way he described the connections and relationships between his definition of silence and light made very little sense to me.
I think that he made connections to many things in the world with his definition of silence and light. For example, 'Light to Silence, Silence to Light cross in the ambient sanctuary Art.' Then, he made the connection between Art and Nature. He also made a connection to Architecture, with examples about the columns. For a big part of the article was the topic of Universities. With this, he asked students to 'think in terms of the university as though it never appeared, as tho it isn't here. You have nothing to refer to, just the sense of a place of learning, and undeniable need:...' Then, he summarized, I think, what a response of one of his students.
This is a photo of Louis Kahn from http://www.greatbuildings.com/cgi-bin/glk?http://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm?ShortId=21829
