Post 2

Kidd The Cheese Monkeys 

I found to section about Left to Right the most engaging part of the Kidd The Cheese Monkeys excerpt. Many times in Western culture, the left to right phenomenom/hierarcy is taken for granted. Often, individuals fail to think about the processes and reasoning about why so much of what we read, write, and display is organized in this way and I thought that the way this excerpt made that point, with the analogies and whatnot, was interesting.

I thought that the section on Top to Bottom was the problematic. The author described Americans as wanting to “begin in the depths of something and climb our way upward.” First and foremost, I don’t believe that the ideal state for many Americans is to begin in the depths. Secondly, I think that when people are exploring things, they’re more interested in finding their way out, not upward, so they know where one thing ends and another begins, to be able to better understand something.

Hickey’s The Heresy of Zone Defense

What I found most engaging about Hickey’s The Heresy of Zone Defense excerpt was his Jackson Pollock reference. I liked how he mentioned the rule that Jackson “civilized his violence,” through, which was that it’s ok to drip paint. I thought it was interesting how the author both showed how this applied to his life, and went on to mention how by the time he enrolled in a university, it had become widely accepted that  if you didn’t “drip paint,” you had no soul.

The section I have the most trouble with in this article is in the beginning, when the author credits Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s defense for making Erving’s shot both necessary and possible. In a sense, the defense did make the shot necessary. It did not, however, make the shot possible. Even without his defense, someone could make the same pass and take the same crazy maneuvers that Erving took to make the shot. While Kareem’s defense is what led to the shot happening, it could theoretically have been thought up and done without the defensive presence.

Weschler’s Uncanny Valley

The most insightful part of Weschler’s Uncanny Valley article to me was the section on the complexity of lighting when animating simple things like milk. Typically when I think of animating or creating digital images, I think about the stuff the article mentioned in the beginning, like replicating something very complex such as a face. I don’t think about things as basic as milk, but it makes sense that the soft, transparent texture would be very difficult to work with since it’s hard to figure out exactly where light goes and comes out after it hits/enters such an object.

The section I had the most trouble with in this article was then the authour asked, “

Such visions, however, raise a further question, and in some senses the very question with which we began: is such an ambition even conceptually possible? Will anyone ever be able to digitally replicate a human soul?” This questions is a little ridiculous in my opinion, because it’s not hardly even agreed upon what a soul is, let alone whether or not we will be able to digitally replicate one. It seems to me there are better or more specific questions the author could have asked.