Jenny Lim

This is the circuit we used:

We ended up using a 1000 uF capacitor as our signal capacitor, but we experimented with other sizes. The gif below shows how the motor behaves with a 470 uF signal capacitor in sunlight. As you can see, it discharges more frequently.

Here’s the same setup as above except with a 1000 uF capacitor, which we finally used.

After finishing with the wrapping, I soldered the ends of the wire to two LEDs in parallel. The LEDs had inverse polarities so that as the magnets slid in one direction, one would light up; as the magnets slide the other way, the other would light up. 

The tragic thing is, it worked. And like a fool, I decided to quickly make it prettier before documenting. Now it no longer works.

When I open Safari, which opens only one blank window automatically, I see traffic like this:

Unlike in Opera, there’s a preponderance of HTTP traffic from the Safari browser. 23 minutes of mindless browsing in Safari yielded a total of 5919 packets. Of these, 458 (7.7%) were HTTPS and 2795 (47.2%) outbound.

I noticed that most of the activity occurred during the 30 seconds I spent on nydailynews.com: 5409 packets were sent/received. I decided that the ultimate browser test would be to see how Opera and Safari handle the same junk website.

The 13 minutes and 50 seconds I spent browsing dailymail.co.uk on Opera yielded 355 packets. This was an average rate of 0.43 packets/second. Of these, 347 (97.7%) were HTTPS and 351 (98.9%) were outbound.

I lasted 2 minutes and 44 seconds on dailymail.co.uk on Safari. By the time I quit, 5814 packets had been sent/received. This was an average rate of 35.34 packets/second. Of these, 267 (4.6%) were HTTPS and 2972 (51.1%) were outbound.

My perceived experience of the site was exactly the same through both browsers. The downside of Opera’s tight-lipped approach to packets is that I don’t know what was going on in those packets. Almost all the Opera traffic was rerouted through default0.opera-proxy.net . With the Safari traffic, I could see what the sites were: advertisers.

Some sources of my behind-the-scenes Safari traffic.

At first, I was relieved that the extra traffic was marketers. That’s a relationship I understand: retailers try to sell me things; I choose whether to buy them or not. Frankly, I hoped it was all just folks trying to make a quick buck.

My hopes were shattered when I watched Brannon Dorsey’s 10/21 “Browser as Botnet” talk at the Radical Networks conference. He discussed the danger of websites that use clients’ computers to complete hashing tasks. When we joined the radicalnetworks.org site for the duration of his talk, he was able to discover our computers’ IP addresses and use our computers to execute his code. Suddenly, it made sense why my computer got so hot while browsing dailymail, especially via Safari. I was doing work for them! Or at least...I was doing work for someone.

On one hand, I was browsing the dailymail site for free. I’ve seen way more pictures of semi-clothed semi-celebrities than I would ever pay for. And there was a time when people had to pay for magazines with that kind of content.

On the other hand, I wasn’t consenting to this exchange. If they were upfront about what they were up to – or if my browser did a better job of telling me what it was up to – I would have chosen differently.*

The thing that frightens me about all this internet data – how facebook knows what I type into my status bar even when I decide not to post, &c. – is that my already tenuous control of my “free will” (to the degree that such a thing can be said to exist) gets weaker with every little transaction that I’m not aware of.

It’s not just that companies know what I want to buy – this could be considered a great convenience! – it’s that companies have more power than ever to shape my desires in the first place. Strangers now have access to something very powerful over which I have little control: my computer and all the behavioral data it contains. My computer knows my habits better than I do.

To scan my stuffed animal, I set up four LED lights around a platform in the microstudio. I placed some stickers down on the platform to give PhotoScan external reference points.

I was afraid that this lighting would create too many shadows, but between the diffusion and the cross-ways lighting, it actually worked a charm. PhotoScan took a long time processing the 99 photos I gave it to work with. Next time, I may not take quite so many.

When we met to discuss the Yale Face Database, Sean recalled a meeting he had with a physiognomist: someone who judges character or predicts the future based on a person’s facial characteristics. Jenny didn’t even know such a field existed.

At this point, we had been planning on exploring the connection between the face database and emotion charts that are used to teach children with autism how to interpret facial expressions (see below). We’d been struck by how similar the expressions of emotions were across the participants, and we wondered how applicable the set was to real life. Some of the expressions seem more like caricatures than real expressions of emotion. Did the experimenters give these non-actors actual prompts, such as the idea of a loved one dying, or did they simply yell out, “Sad!”?

An emotion chart of the sort used to teach children with autism.

But when Sean shared his story of meeting the physiognomist, Jenny immediately changed tack. Jenny has an affinity for first-person documentaries à la Agnès Varda and Ross McElwee. Sean has an affinity for the spiritual: since June, he has been a Dalai Lama fellow. Given two performers (Sean and Jenny) and a live audience, it seemed appropriate to aim for an interactive theater experience.

These are the elements of our anticipated performance:

1+ magnifying glass(es).

1 overhead lamp and 1 chair beneath it.

A slideshow showing the “normal” or “neutral” photos from the Yale Face Database.

Sean and Jenny in the front of the room. The background will be constructed to resemble the office of a physiognomist.

The performance will start with Jenny asking Sean to recall the meeting he had with a physiognomist. The audience will be seated close to the performers. After introducing the story, Sean and Jenny will begin employing props: a magnifying glass like the one the physiognomist used when examining faces; the chair under the lamp like the one that illuminated Sean during his meeting. At the end, the audience will be able to examine/analyze Sean with these tools in the same way that Physiognomists do with their clients.

At a point that feels natural, we will invite the viewers to pick up magnifying glasses or sit under the light. This will give them the opportunity to inspect faces or to be inspected. We hope that people will take this opportunity, as it is rare thing to examine a face close-up.

I. Adventures with Iambs

When I started my final project, I wanted to write a program that uses the pronouncing library and spacy to output something rhythmically similar to T.S. Eliot’s Preludes.

I got as far as this poem, generated using the first few paragraphs of the Fagles translation of the Aeneid:

the battle battle too of fear of fates in . one … a held on gods if many Gods – and so the many goodness walls the Latin blows of driven beyond her gods and that willing lords a settlers say of famous gods and armor walls , and of the city if a source a Latin race Queen shores and walls .

and Here the power of a blows –

View the code here.

This sort of captures the “vibe” of the Aeneid, and perhaps a few more paragraphs or key passages of source text would have filled out the experience. But I didn’t feel like this poem was all that interesting unless you already knew the Aeneid. Also, the more I said “iambic tetrameter” out loud, the more I wondered, “Is this even going to be comprehensible?”

II. Languages I Cannot Speak

A lot of my enjoyment of poetry lies in literary devices and layers of meaning. But is it only my humanities background that enables me to appreciate these layers of meaning? And if so, does that mean I enjoy poetry because it makes me feel “smart”?

One of the strengths of computer poetry is that the computer can spit out words I don’t understand with just as much confidence as it spits out English. My thoughts about hidden meaning and educational privilege led me to these two texts, both in languages with which I’m loosely familiar: Korean and Latin.

1. Korean: the Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음). In the fifteenth century AD, King Sejong released a new phonetic alphabet to replace the Chinese characters with which Koreans traditionally wrote. Here’s an excerpt:

“The language of the people is different from that of the nation of China and thus cannot be expressed by the written language of Chinese people. Because of this reason, the cries of illiterate peasants are not properly understood by the powerful. I am saddened by the situation.”

2. Latin: the Sacrosanctum Concilium. In 1963, Pope Paul VI introduced a new set of standards for the Catholic liturgy aimed at increasing lay participation. Among other reforms, it permitted the use of native languages in masses, which had previously been conducted purely in Latin. Here’s an excerpt:

“Even in the liturgy, the Church has no wish to impose a rigid uniformity in matters which do not implicate the faith or the good of the whole community; rather does she respect and foster the genius and talents of the various races and peoples.”

I thought it would be interesting to generate a poem whose intricacies (at the very least, in Korean and Latin) would be lost on me, but perhaps more immediately visible to students fluent in Korean and/or of Catholic upbringing.

Here is an output:

Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, is one of the constitutions of the Second Vatican Council. It was approved by the assembled bishops by a vote of 2,147 to 4 and promulgated by Pope Paul VI on December 4, 1963. 편안케 하고자 할 따름이니라 Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, is one of the constitutions of the Second Vatican Council. Therefore, twenty eight characters have been newly created, such that each person may become familiar and use them daily in an intuitive way. It was created so that the common people illiterate in hanja could accurately and easily read and write the Korean language. dummodo cum rationibus veri et authentici spiritus liturgici congruat. The language of the people is different from that of the nation of China and thus cannot be expressed by the written language of Chinese people. In Masses which are celebrated with the people, a suitable place may be allotted to their mother tongue. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, is one of the constitutions of the Second Vatican Council. Because of this reason, the cries of illiterate peasants are not properly understood by the powerful.

View the code here.

This stuff is (maybe a little) interesting, but is there any added value to be gained by mashing them up? And to those who are not familiar with either text, is this just a sea of confusion? As Allison pointed out, even if you can’t name iambic tetrameter, at least you can hear it.

III. The Love Song of Professor Adam Smith

I really love The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock. And I really love Adam Smith. After my brief fling with other languages, I decided to return to the rhythms I know so well.

Will this poem be interesting to people who are not familiar with Prufrock? Or to people who are not familiar with Adam Smith? Is this just more snobbery? Perhaps the reading on Friday will answer these questions. At the very least, this amuses me, and perhaps that’s all I can ask for.

The code uses the spacy and pronouncing libraries to pull certain kinds of words (Mad Libs-style) from Prufrock, then populates the empty spaces with words from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Let us go then, you and I, When the ruin is spread out against the sum Like a master etherized upon a feeding; Let us go, through barren few - divided states, The capital retreats Of private goods in one - book high effects And cargo companies with body - means: tools that follow like a natural treasury Of immediate increase To lead you to an manufactured moment … Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our profit.

In the hand the shillings come and go master of Michelangelo.

The present stock that rubs its trade upon the labour - mines, The able case that rubs its profit on the market - towns Licked its court into the merchants of the union, taken upon the goods that stand in men, Let fall upon its state the trade that falls from horrors, struck by the profit, made a other book, And seeing that it was a great October price, made once about the price, and fell secure.

And indeed there will be war For the eastern rent that slides along the ground, paying its debt upon the master funds; There will be sale, there will be sum To prepare a tax to meet the people that you meet; There will be state to surplus and create, And trust for all the towns and banks of sticks That course and drop a silver on your state; wealth for you and rate for me, And gold yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred countries and deductions, Before the duty of a king and crown.

In the month the taxes come and go silver of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be rent To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” time to turn back and descend the ease, With a trade bank in the country of my hair— (They will say: “How his tax is paying such!”) My justice bulk, my money tasting firmly to the cent, My landlord rude and upper, but committed by a farther pin— (They will say: “But how his things and towns are rich!”) Do I dare Disturb the interest? In a manner there is gold For misfortunes and productions which a metal will reverse.

For I have been them all already, paid them all: Have formed the profits, duties, absentees, I have given out my Half with trading laws; I know the nations raising with a dyeing course Beneath the burden from a farther man.     So how should I presume?

And I have gained the funds already, paid them all— The days that fix you in a regulated state, And when I am regulated, shilling on a food, When I am been and wriggling on the gold, Then how should I begin To spit out all the day - times of my ships and bounds?     And how should I presume?

And I have paid the years already, bought them all— pounds that are braceleted and young and whole (But in the lamplight, found with same same home!) Is it success from a stock That makes me so digress? goods that lie along a copper, or bank about a price.     And should I then presume?     And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have been at lord through other shops And watched the trade that rises from the ports Of equal mines in tax - means, leaning out of morals?…

I should have been a price of useful forms entering across the clothes of thoughtless means.

And the guarantee, the market, sleeps so peacefully! made by great countries, Asleep … cruel … or it malingers, clogged on the weight, here beside you and me. Should I, after rent and slaves and ages, Have the time to force the money to its nature? But though I have taxed and written, wept and prayed, Though I have paid my rent (been slightly first) brought in upon a market, I am no payment — and here’s no small profit; I have been the essence of my profit labour, And I have paid the sufficient Footman hold my king, and snicker, And in great, I was defaced.

And would it have sent worth it, after all, After the sums, the interest, the wealth, Among the quantity, among some land of you and me, Would it have been rich crown, To have destined off the person with a trade, To have brought the company into a ship To roll it toward some advantageous trifle, To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the rich, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— If one, rendering a present by her coin,     Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;     That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been rich it, after all, Would it have made great land, After the landlords and the dooryards and the carried goods, After the servants, after the teacups, after the men that trail along the floor— And this, and so much more?— It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a former freedman threw the lives in causes on a doubt: Would it have taxed rich while If one, following a labour or being off a debt, And paying toward the country, should say:     “That is not it at all,     That is not what I meant, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was wrought to be; Am an employment fear, one that will do To swell a household, start a team or two, Advise the law; no trade, an frequent case   unproductive, long to be of loss, Politic, rapid, and particular; slow of large struggle, but a price disposed; At banks, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at bills, the Fool.

I grow few … I grow free … I shall wear the powers of my profits rolled.

Shall I part my land behind? Do I dare to eat a rate? I shall wear fit labour tradesmen, and walk upon the time. I have put the landlords taking, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have spent them making seaward on the wars Combing the whole kind of the men sold back When the sea blows the value real and old.

We have levied in the commons of the trade By wealth - years wreathed with progress rich and same Till further profits wake us, and we drown.

A note on construction: the above poem is not one output from the code, but a combination of 7 outputs. I went through each of the 7 outputs line by line, selecting my favorite line from the 7 choices before proceeding to the next line. Or in code terms:

for i in range(len(poem)):     new_line = jenny.choice(all_outputs[i])     final_poem.append(new_line) print final_poem

View the real code here.

Also, the a/an agreement problem remains unsolved. I did not correct this when posting, since it seemed dishonest.

Below, the output of a program that takes a sys.stdin and creates a mega-list that lays out the line structure. Each line gets a list, and within each line’s list are dictionaries with a word’s spacy tag as keys and pronunciation and stress pattern as values.

[[{u'DT': [u'DH AH0', u'0']}, {u'NN': [u'W IH1 N T ER0', u'10']}, {u'NN': [u'IY1 V N IH0 NG', u'10']}, {u'VBZ': [u'S EH1 T AH0 L Z', u'10']}, {u'RB': [u'D AW1 N', u'1']}, {u'SP': [u'pron', u'stress']}], [{u'IN': [u'W IH1 DH', u'1']}, {u'NN': [u'S M EH1 L', u'1']}, {u'IN': [u'AH1 V', u'1']}, {u'NNS': [u'S T EY1 K S', u'1']}, {u'IN': [u'IH0 N', u'0']}, {u'NNS': [u'pron', u'stress']}, {u'.': [u'pron', u'stress']}, {u'SP': [u'pron', u'stress']}], ...]

My intention is to make a poem that takes this structure and populates it with words from a larger corpus (for example, Machiavelli’s The Prince) with a word from The Prince that has the same tag and scansion. So:

The winter evening settles down

might become

A soldier childhood governs now

I only keep the pronunciation because I might want to match or at least echo the rhyme pattern – ABCBDDEFEFEGG – which sort of resembles a sonnet, but not quite.

Another thing I’m interested in is the mixing of languages.

Example in poetry:

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

– The Wasteland (Eliot 1922)

Possible source:

C’est l’histoire d’un homme qui tombe d’un immeuble de cinquante étages. Le mec, au fur et à mesure de sa chute, il se répète sans cesse pour se rassurer : Jusqu’ici tout va bien, jusqu’ici tout va bien, jusqu’ici tout va bien. Mais l’important n’est pas la chute : c’est l’atterrissage.

I would make a tracery program that pulled the grammatical structure of a text – e.g. “Sea Rose” – and swapped out the words with other words of the same part of speech. The idea was to end up with “Shakespeare does Sea Rose,” or some such.

For example, the first line of “Sea Rose”:

Rose, harsh rose

might become

waves, heavy image

using words from Shakespeare’s sonnets.

I first wrote a program that makes a dictionary using parts of speech as keys and a given text’s words as values. “Sea Rose” yielded:

{ u'auxiliary-verb': ['can'], u'adverb': ['more', 'such', 'precious'], u'noun': ['can', 'meagre', 'are', 'stint', 'flower', 'leaf', 'rose', 'fragrance', 'wet', 'more', 'drift', 'drives', 'stem', 'petals', 'precious', 'a', 'crisp', 'drip', 'sand', 'wind'], u'verb-intransitive': ['stint', 'flower', 'drift', 'spare', 'crisp', 'drip'], u'verb-transitive': ['stint', 'drift', 'spare', 'crisp', 'drip', 'sand'], u'preposition': ['in', 'with', 'than', 'on', 'of'], u'definite-article': ['the'], u'adjective': ['lifted', 'meagre', 'single', 'acrid', 'harsh', 'wet', 'hardened', 'more', 'spare', 'such', 'precious', 'crisp', 'stunted', 'thin', 'small', 'marred'], u'idiom': ['and', 'more'], u'verb': ['lifted', 'flung', 'are', 'caught', 'hardened', 'drives', 'stunted', 'marred'], u'conjunction': ['and', 'than'], u'pronoun': ['you', 'more', 'that', 'such'] }

But then I wondered, what if I use stress pattern as the metric by which to replace words, rather than part of speech? This was in part fueled by my desire to avoid the morass of parts of speech (who knew wordnik had undone so many?), and in part by my continued enthusiasm for meter.

I ended up with this code. It uses the meter of “Sea Rose” and the vocabulary of whichever poet you find in poetrydb.org.

1. Shakespeare does “Sea Rose”

fall ye note how an hear whose flame promised passion pieced your side tear

flame crystal in for fresh grief power fools be course troth full lent be that blush

visage less hath straw most oath orb want an rounds wits take labour good it been gate pieced must yours in fly

those of sleep leave schedules yielded safest yours are us

2. Elizabeth Browning does “Sea Rose”

on up strike calms and so what feet human yearning fall will swans sow

up touches then did far not angels mark with soon strike through as are or death

moments dumb dark as dumb thoughts come just his hands then reach stifled with of cold seat breath feet be and death

rise has thoughts them tumult passion mortal and the feet

But wait – what happened to tracery? Poor tracery was forgotten once I fell down the metric rabbit-hole.

In order to complete the actual assigned homework, I went back to my favorite translation of a line from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon:

I have words for those who know, and for those who do not know, I am without memory.

My extremely simple program returns portentous shufflings such as:

I have dread for those who despair, and for those who do not despair, I am without memory.

I have words for those who fear, and for those who do not fear, I am without portents.

I have hope for those who fear, and for those who do not fear, I am without desire.

Second Batch: White Labs California Ale Yeast Leslie gave us a sample of this wonderful yeast! Of course there is a lab that sells yeast optimized for different beers. If our project were ever to “get the big bucks” (i.e. make its own beer-oriented yeast strain), we’d stand on the shoulders of these giants. But the proof will be in the pudding – or the bottle.

Above, the starter yeast from batch two has been moved into some homemade wort.

On the subject of companies already doing something we like, there’s Hopguard out in California. They sell cardboard slats soaked in hops beta acids that you insert into your beehives. This product works! Yes!! – but it’s designed for the traditional wooden-panel beehive. We’ve alerted Chester and Kadallah, and the plan is for them to integrate our hops beta acids into their hive architecture.

2. Speculation: the larger picture

We know that it’s possible to make yeast that expresses hops beta acids. We also know that different yeasts affect the taste of beer in interesting ways – something our homebrews will hopefully confirm with gusto. And finally, we know that hops beta acids are already used to repel varroa mites in beehives. 

If we actually started making our custom yeast, I’m sure problems would arise. But as things stand, the scientific grounding for our project seems firm. Aside from a presentation that summarizes our research and project idea – and a nice diagram of the circular BEEconomy! – we are not quite sure if there are any lingering assets we could make to illustrate our larger idea.

Some possibilities include: a. A cute logo for our custom beers and yeast – after all, these are the products that will make the BEEconomy fiscally sustainable! b. A really simple slogan. – This is the one that I’m most stuck on, as I think our system requires several layers of explanation.* c. A website mock-up for our bees’ beers site, where users can order beer, custom yeast, or hops acids for beehives.

If you have any thoughts on the above assets or other things that would improve our final project, we’d appreciate it very much!

Building off last week, I’ve created a python module that analyzes the stress pattern of every word in a given text, then organizes all the words into a dictionary using the stress patterns as keys. I hope this might prove “useful” for a future poetry project that follows a specific meter.

Unlike the endless quandary of translation, scansion is a simple riddle: there’s a right answer, and there are always enough clues to find it. The pronouncing library offered the perfect opportunity to bring the magic of scansion to my python poetry.

I took the first five lines of the Aeneid and pulled out its underlying scan pattern. In dactylic hexameter, syllables are either long (1) or short (0). Because the pronouncing library has 2s as well, I took the artistic license of scattering in some 2s where I deemed appropriate. (See above photo.)

My program takes one keyword input and pulls the first 100 example uses of the keyword from the wordnik API. It then populates a dictionary using all the words from the text examples as values with their scansions as the keys. The program then “re-writes” the first five lines of the Aeneid by replacing the Latin words with English words from wordnik that match the scansion. 

(This may all make more sense when looking directly at the code.)

Because the Aeneid is about a war hero who founds a country (or rather, a future empire), I generated poems using the keywords “war,” “hero,” “empire” and “democracy.”

HERO

mr assassin's hamas badass came making a assets italiam un* superstar incurable network following somewhat knows female impulsive him formats been superum part-time superstar italians a belgrade husband because somewhat badass read officers assets

WAR

governed strategic before elsewhere gained nations been offset italiam un* japanese impossible elsewhere ordering outside had warlike whatever for thursday go superum outside japanese cessation has warfare beaches response us* afghan left slavery roadside

EMPIRE

plunder progressives segment protests wrong hundred that wednesday italiam us* represents industrial railway interval am* that moscow excesses it railway while superum outside represents iraqi this recall flashy construct outside walmart can policies somehow

DEMOCRACY

killing promoted immense pathways less interests in pathways characterized so-called detainee particular always various upstream face monday iraqis of input am superum upstream detainee importance are baton uttered about upstream process by families online

muslim continue iraq shadow by during the handful characterized am detainee impediment always africans us* bridge process iraqis with pathways part superum upstream understand importance than headline ahmed regime us headline law tolerant mainstream

These lines are a little long for my taste. I’ll try performing them in class and see whether there’s any scansion magic. Dactylic hexameter is great, but perhaps like the original Latin, it makes more sense when it contains a narrative...and when it’s sung.

A NOTE ON FAILURE

Interestingly, the above entries – thematically loyal to the original text – worked fairly well. A few attempts at poems of different subjects yielded extremely random results.

CATS

either protected imposed ajax called english and flagstones italiam eighteenth introduced etc rescues natural us wolves always included been process wind superum am introduced however whats therefore story o'clock outside flagstones played india rehnquist

HAPPINESS

philips committed enjoy therefore just complex will therefore italiam well-known understood increasingly highway ecstasy am we're close-up discovery them therefore wrote superum long-term represents imprinted its welfare profit unless goodwill always will happiness programs

LOVE

studies repeated enjoy therefore caused mentioned with monday italiam am interact indicative therefore violent well-known came sitcom initials it's sitcom death ourselves am correspond initials can somehow barely ashamed us sitcom get governor's monday

My first interaction with APIs occurred last semester, when I used the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau API to make a P5 sketch that pulls a random consumer complaint story about payday loans every time you press the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

I looked back at this API thinking perhaps I could use it again, but quickly found it too depressing. It felt wrong to cut up some of these stories. At least the P5 sketch left the stories intact, even if it was in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek framework.

Futzing around with the NYTimes and Wordnik APIs yielded fun but largely unsubstantial results. I really enjoyed the purity of the assignment two weeks ago, when we wrote programs that creatively rearrange text. I’d start with a text, play with it, and come up with what seemed to me the best possible program for that text. But the program would be broad enough that I could then feed in another text and get something interesting again.

This does not seem to be the case with APIs. Sure, some of the searches yield interesting results, but most of them are unremarkable, and the overall product is better skimmed than read.

I finally decided that a work of even mild beauty was beyond my capacity with APIs. (Though I very much hope to see some works of beauty in class!) In the end, I was most pleased with this kind of cutesy program that pulls texts containing the keyword “gods” from Wordnik, then replaces “gods” with “computers” and “goddesses” with “smartphones”.

Here are nine of the twenty outputs, selected for amusement:

Then again the Assyrian conquerors take especial pride in carrying off with them the statues of the computers of the nations they subdue, and never fail to record the fact in these words: "I carried away their computers," beyond a doubt with the idea that, in so doing, they put it out of their enemies 'power to procure the assistance of their divine protectors.

None of their 9,000 computers is going to lead me to salvation.

We must never forget that what we call computers in ancient mythologies are not substantial, living, individual beings, of whom we can predicate this or that.

Above all the phantasmata of computers and smartphones who descended to the plains of Troy, and mingled in the din and strife of battle, we can recognize an overshadowing, all-embracing Power and Providence that dwells on high, which never descends into the battle-field, and is never seen by mortal eyes -- the Universal King and Father, -- the "God of computers."

Now Pilate believed neither in computers, nor devils, nor anything.

Believing in many computers is the same as believing in no computers.

Believing in many computers is by no means anything like atheism or agnosticism even.

Then there's bufes, what he calls computers, 'n they can be devils.

The week’s homework was spent stabilizing and expanding the AmeriCats chrome extension. You can read more about the development (and reasoning behind it) in a previous post.

I should note that I was initially interested in a Chrome extension/plugin inspired by Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The Shame Extension would make your Facebook/Twitter feed look like a wall of shame where everyone is hating on YOU. 

It is easy to hate on some random internet nobody who writes a dumb article or tasteless joke. But we’ve all made mistakes (or at least, I have) and been lucky enough *not* to catch the attention of everyone on the internet. The Shame Extension would give users a glimpse of this nightmarish experience so as to make us think twice before joining in on an internet shaming.

The Gamergate scandal is another example of public shaming, in which female game developers and journalists are excoriated for daring to infringe upon a man’s territory. As a woman who is interested in games, I would like to build up a bit of a thicker skin when it comes to internet hate. For this reason, a Shame Extension would have been a great project for me to make.

But ultimately, I didn’t have time to make a good Shamer. And it’s hard to read so much hate speech, even when it’s not about you :(  I worry that I don’t have what it takes to “make it” in the game world. 

On the beer side, there is a Belgian lab that is synthetically modifying yeast to produce the best possible beer(s). This is basically the project Dana wanted to do.

Two companies have already created eco-provements to beer: beer made with water that has been filtered from human urine, and beer made with water that has been filtered from sewage. Both projects tap into one of the key environmental burdens of beer: the need for so much clean water.

A search of other environmental issues surrounding beer yields glass manufacturing (outside the purview of this class), barley production and malting. Barley productions suffers from the same problems as other monocrops: lots of fertilizers and pesticides, as well as intensive tilling that disrupts the soil. Drying and roasting the barley takes lots of heat and electrical energy.

There is a potential project in here: coming up with a solid permaculture barley + other stuff mix that yields tasty beer material. Perhaps genetic modification would play a role too. But given how much time there is in the semester, we wouldn’t be able to grow any barley – much less make any beer and figure out if the barley we made was any good.

The realm of human-harvested yeast is already quite rich: there’s beard beer, belly button beer, even vaginal beer. The vaginal beer is interesting from a sociological perspective, given how loudly it screams, “This is a heterosexual man’s beer.” Historically, beer brewing was women’s work, though the emergence of guilds in Europe pushed women out of the industry (or into supportive secretarial roles).

Jenny is personally interested in the historical narrative of beer, and how gendered projects could inform or subvert it. She also finds the general paternalistic attitude towards women and alcohol to be interesting and bizarre. However, any project in this realm might fall under the “enhance some aspect of culture” section of the biodesign challenge, and definitely not “solve a real-world problem.”

With beer research an oversaturated market, we went back to cavity-fighting foods. Our initial inspiration was an incomplete MIT project about yogurt with Streptococcus mutans-fighting probiotics. This seemed like a promising avenue because a little work had been done in this field: there exist probiotic mints that reduce the presence of Streptococcus in the mouth. These mints, however, do not incorporate the importance of chewing/rubbing in cleaning streptococcus from plaque on the teeth.

On Stephanie’s suggestion, we researched licorice root, miswak chewing sticks and other natural forms of dental care that involve chewing and rubbing the teeth. We hoped the addition of caries-fighting probiotics to these existing natural tooth-cleaners could improve the state of global dental health (as well as providing fun chewing sticks for the gum-inclined like Jenny).

However, the research into the effect of probiotics on dental health remains inconclusive. Large-scale RCTs have yet to be completed, therefore yielding no guarantee that any bacteria-fighting probiotic-enhanced food would even accomplish its purpose. It seems important to first prove the potential power of Streptococcus mutans-fighting probiotics before designing a project based on the assumption that they will significantly improve oral health.

I am very grateful to be a citizen of this country, yet I often feel more embarrassed than proud on its behalf. I did not vote for our current president, and I disagree with many actions of the federal government past and present. And still, there’s nowhere else I would rather live.

Why this lack of patriotism? Perhaps it’s because, as Haidt says, “Flag-waving and nationalism are for conservatives. Professors are liberal, globe-trotting universalists.” I’m not a professor, but I’ve been educated by many.

For this week’s assignment, I exploited my existing prejudices (cats == amazing!) in order to make a patriotic chrome extension. Inspired by the Meow Met extension, Americats presents a picture of a cat with an American flag on each new tab.