So maybe I was wrong...

So this time, shockingly, I'm going to talk about something positive. Even more surprisingly is that what I'm talking about in this new light is technology. I recently had a very illuminating experience. I went to an all-out camping bluegrass hippie festival. And no, it is not the kind of illuminating experience you probably thing I'm referring to. Yes, I was offered some questionable substances, but it was not about that (completely) but rather that the grass was green, the air was beautiful, the music filled everything and existence really did seem like the easiest most non-complex and relaxing experience one could ever go through. I even went so far as to wonder.. machines? Who needs them? And thinking like an overzealous reactionary (or a hippie) that maybe its time to go back, that our compulsive consumerism, capitalism and "progress for progress sake" was coming at a great cost to the environment and humanity, that maybe human beings do need to go back and appreciate the finer things, like nature I mean. I'm telling you, my brain was very relaxed. Or, as my friend put it, on vacation. It took one writhing hippie on the ground wondering alternately about "water leprechauns, fire popsicles" and the logicalness of agnostic solipsism, and one justifying his drug abuse as a function of evolutionary empiricism "it's just like... we are meant to live for the experience... thats what its about" and lots of overhearing in various renditions/contexts but essentially the same form "music is good man" followed by "totally" more times than I can count, (not that they all put it in those words, some said "its pretty awesome" or talked about Descartes instead) for me to snap out of it. Yes, music is good, nature is good, but it is technology that made the fact that you can be camping out in the middle of a field listening to electric guitars possible. It's great to be dirty and out in the open and feeling like part of the earth, being all about the brotherhood of man and peace and love (although I did find it kind of ironic that they had a VIP hippie section and private shows... i guess its more like "peace, love and elitism") but after 3 days without toilet paper or showers or a proper bed, you begin to appreciate the small comforts of contemporary life. Not to mention, when one man just came up to me and out of the blue demanded I attempt to explain the meaning of life, the purpose for doing anything, I couldn't help but feel indignant. "How do we know that we exist?" He asked me. "Well how about life has meaning and a purpose cause people give it meaning and a purpose, cause they work hard, cause they try to explain, create or discover stuff while you're here being a braindead assh*le you freaking lawn gnome. Well maybe you don't exist but other people live in reality doing stuff. For other people." I wanted to say. But I didn't. I just smiled, said "totally" and walked away. Oh well. No I'm kidding; I actually tried to explain my views on rationalism and my personal take on Descartes' second meditation when my friend pulled me away (WHAT ARE YOU DOING??). Anyway, while I was alternating feeling like a crazy hippie and a somewhat normal (or at least one standard deviation form the mean) individual that was just out of her environment, I got to reflect on all the wonderful things that modern society offers. Yes, it's awful, there is a lot of damage to people and the environment, and it is no small thing; we are essentially rational animals, which doesn't make it easy to disregard the evidence of social darwinism, but I believe ultimately the values of humanism and rationalism will converge/overtake the supposedly self-interest self-machination of the system and result in a more egalitarian society. Technology itself will help too. The answer is not to stop and do nothing. We can't anyway. Maybe it is true we do things just because we can. Vibrating touchscreen, virtual videogaming, robotic surgery? Men on the moon?? (What are they doing outside of this planet??) I have a problem explaining how electricity works. How about a copy machine? How about a TV? How can it just.. receive.. waves, signals? And turn them into.. moving pictures? It just blows my mind. Don't even get me started on computers. Or the skyrocketing evolution of cellphones. Let alone how people who come up with them adapt/modify these wonderful apparatuses so that the average less-than-brilliant individual can use them without having any idea how they work and not feel like an idiot. Oh yeah, and to improve our quality of life. I don't want to sound condescending, I enjoyed the festival beyond belief, and had some interesting (to put it mildly) conversations, I can respect the ability (do I say drive?) of these individuals to preserve a lifestyle that believe more fulfilling than dull robotic monotone reality. But there are so many things going on, so much to know, so much "progress" (whether it is actually good or not who knows, I guess we'll find out) that its impossible to conceive how people could get bored sometimes, or want nothing to do with it. Life has so many fascinating aspects/dimensions to it. It has so many diverse creatures. (and I saw a lot of creatures this weekend). I enjoyed watching and appreciating the wide range of things a human being can... turn into. How "simple life" can really be joyful. That we don't need these many "things." That we adapt to them, to their creation, are somewhat manipulated into consuming them until they become indispensable. Like if somebody attached a 3rd arm to us for a while and then took it away. You didn't need it before, but now it's hard to live without it. Thats how technology is. But now, before I start sounding like a hippie again, I'm gonna go take a niiiice long shower and then go to bed while listening to music. On my computer. Oh material comforts.

Google? Not.

So I'm going to complain again. I've been taking a social network analysis class this quarter that deals with, predictably enough, the formation and evolution of social networks (!) and how these have recognizable patterns which make up the complex structure of the analyzable nature/mechanics of social interactions... blah blah. Anyway. What I'm about to complain about has nothing to do with this class. It has to do with the fact though, that, while learning about this complex science of networks, a science that apparently underlies the functioning of everything in the world, including your grandma, we also learned about the structure of web networks, and coincidentally, how they are connected to each other by short pathways, like people, eerily similar to the 6 Degrees of Separation theory, and how, because of everything being connected to everything else, everything being relatively close to everything else by virtue of these connections, analyzing and understanding networks permits us to locate central actors in these networks by virtue of an iterative assessment of the connections they possess, which allows central actors to be identified fairly easily within any network (including the web).. which, in turn, makes search engines like Google be able to identify relevant pages by degree of their connections to other relevant pages (cross-citations, links to this page, etc) which makes Google a very efficient (dare I say miraculous) way to look for everything from "green warts on your left elbow" to "song stuck in my head" to "why doesn't anyone love me?" and get pretty much the answer you were looking for. Its like.. God. Anyway. The reason I'm raving about Google and ranting the length of a short novel is to then, in turn, express my befuddlement and bewilderment with the Northwestern search engine. WTH is up with that thang? After years of having examples of highly efficient search engines, WHY have they not been able to engineer/copy the functioning of something that actually passes for a search engine and not, well, a search thwarter? Why when I look for, say, "jstor" it gives me a list of a zillion legal articles that have probably been extracted from jstor but no way to just ENTER jstor. let's try again: "jstor ONLINE ACCESS". Nope. But do you want legal services? "shuttle service" you mean CTA transportation? "spac hours" Learn to Sail at Northwestern? "theater building" I actually got martial arts training and the Kenneth D. Forbus Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, Fundamentals of Computer Game Design. True story. Don't even try anything as complex as a full question like "where can I get food?" You'll starve before it gives you the address of the building with a cafeteria thats prob 2 blocks away. It just don't work man. They are many ways to locate "centrality" in a network, including reach, degree, betweenness, eigenvector (the iterative approach described above) which, as explained, easily detects "hubs" and/or centers of high connections and activity, aka prominent pages.. which if used in this context would save us all a lot of trouble. Whoever designed this to find things in the web really needs to learn more about how this web actually WORKS... but that's just, like, my opinion.