Passion Project Update #2

In the past two weeks me and Neeha made lots of progress. Since we have the creative freedom to take this zine where ever we want it, we had many things to create. We've made three mini zines, one painting, and a drawing. Also a very exciting thing that I managed to do recently is contact another zine maker in Georgia. She is going to send me her zine, and very soon I will send her Onism, the zine Abhishek, Trinity and I made last year.

Passion Project Update

This semester, Neeha, Trinity, and I are working on a zine. We are planning to make this zine more cheerful and spontaneous than the last. So far I'v made 3 paintings and one collage with Neeha. Trinity is writing an article and we have decided the title of the zine.  I'm proud of how much work has been completed and excited to work on much more.

Jeremy Rifkin's Empathetic Civilization

In our GT class we discussed Jeremy Rifkin's thoughts on empathy. He argues that human empathy is beginning to extend to all of life in the biosphere. But I think that empathy is limited between different people.  Not everyone is capable to imagine the extremes of putting themselves in someone else's shoes. Depending on that someone, we can only feel a limited amount of empathy. For example, it will be easier for a student to feel the empathy of failing a test than it is for them to feel what a cancer patient may be feeling. Some feelings are easily reflected upon while others are not. It tends to be easier to empathize with people who are experiencing something we have may have already experienced. The possibility of global emphatic consciousness is idealistic. Although convincing, there was no proof that increased empathy could save global problems. The world's most pressing issues such as global warming, poverty, and disease have many more factors that are unaffected by human empathy.   I don't think we can extend our empathy to the entire human race well enough to make an impact.  Empathy allows us to feel what others feel to some limit. But is that enough to make a change? "The problem comes when we try to turn feeling into action. Empathy makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action." (David Brooks)


Brooks, David. "The Limits of Empathy." The New York Times. The New York Times, 29 Sept. 2011. Web. 28 Sept. 2014.

"The Empathic Civilization | Jeremy Rifkin." About. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2014.

Passion Project Update

So far I think our passion project is going well. We have a folder with a decent amount of work in it, including paintings, collages, and articles. We also have the cover made with a set title. The only obstacle I really faced in the first 2 weeks is, I didn't know much about zines. This made it difficult to think of exactly what to include in it or make for it. But after talking to Doug Wainwright about his zine and how he created his I felt a lot better. He told us that it didn't really matter what we put in the zine and to just write/create whatever came to mind. Since then I have discovered many different topics to write about and tons of things to include in the zine. A list of things that we still need to do includes distributing the zines to other zine makers (I'm just going to call them that) and actually assembling and printing the zine. We also have to create a few more pages for it. Some future obstacles include getting it printed and distributed.

Passion Project Update

I have changed my passion project slightly from my original plan. My original plan was to create the 3d human anatomy all on a software and be able to put it on a website. I knew how hard it would be to accomplish this, but what I didn't expect was my interest in the software part to fade. The good news is that over the past 2 months, Usha and I collected a lot of information on the anatomy and never put too much time into the software. This means we never wasted anytime on that so we can change that portion of it. Im thinking of pulling in my strong interest for art into it. Instead of making a 3d virtual human body, I will now create a clay model of specific human organs, an outline of a skeleton, and with the help of the school's 3d printer and the engineering teacher, I may even be able to print a 3d human face. I have all the research done so the remaining weeks will all be spent for creating the organs. It will be difficult to create these parts, but what I learned in the past 8 weeks is that I need to have interest too keep going with the project. So what I have now that differed from the original plan is the strong interest in the sculpting and creating the organs. I lacked interest in the technology, that was part of my original plan so I have confidence that this project can be done!

Randy Pausch: The Strange Outlier

I actually had no idea who Randy Pausch was until the day we were assigned this. I found him on a website that had the top 10 most inspirational people of all time. Even then, the brief summary that told me how he "brought childhood dreams to life" and "inspired thousand" didn't really convince me he was an outlier. That is until I read his book, The Last Lecture. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had about 10 tumors on his pancreas. He had merely 4-6 months of good health left. He has 3 children with his wife Jai Pausch.  He's a strange outlier. What makes him strange is that he realizes his opportunities and his luck and he creatively crafts into a lecture .He talks about how he won the "parent lottery".  In the book Outliers this is what we learn as concerted cultivation.  He talks about how he had parents that opened him to knowledge and information, and that's majorly why became what he is today. In one specific quote he captures a perfect example of concerted cultivation "The instinct in our house was never to sit around like slobs and wonder. We knew a better way: open the encyclopedia, open the dictionary, open your mind. " Although this can be arguable it shows the way his parents influenced his learning.Randy Pausch mentions that his parents always bought the world books every year. He would spend hours reading them, intrigued by the endless articles and countless stories. I believe this is where he first was supplemented and later improved his analytical intelligence. His creativity was also provoked by his parents at a young age. Halfway through high school, he asked his parents if he could paint his walls. He wanted to splash his imagination onto them and painted an elevator with 30 floors and the quadratic formula and a rocket ship. Any other parent would be worried about the resale value of the house but not his. He later said this is what him led him to take part in a Disney Virtual Reality Project. He became a disney imagineer and got to help make it.  He was open minded just like his parents. He did something in his childhood that most of us are too stubborn to do. He accepted and pulled from others ideas. If you really think about it, most of us will firstly barely listen to one of our peers ideas and going to the point we actually pull and create from that idea is almost non-existent. We are a lot more opinionated then we realize. We maybe open to a higher authority ideas but do we really listen to our peers, our equals? One of the quotes from The Last Lecture ingeniously tells us how Randy Pausch could trick his peers into being open to his ideas and thoughts. "If you dispense your own wisdom, others dismiss it: if you offer wisdom from a 3rd party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable". This quality and talent is one of the factors in why he is an outlier. I also can classify this quality of his, as practical intelligence.
Of course all these things contributed to him being an outlier but the major things that sets him apart from the rest is obviously his actual last lecture. As I watched his lecture, the liveliness and tone of him could have not been better. Knowing you only had months to live, how would you react? He explains how he had achieved his childhood dreams. The tiny ones that we forgot about. The dream of when I would be tall enough to ride a roller coaster (although I barely am at the minimum height allowed now) or the dream of when I would lose all my baby teeth. He talks about all the things we had already subconsciously achieved and then goes on to his adulthood in where he was able to take his dreams further. Its that recognition he showed to all his work that really impressed me. We tend to forget all the work we do before reaching even the smaller goals. In the modern day, we are so busy and  we don't take the time to step back and realize how far we have come.And all the appreciation he showed to his past. That's what made him an outlier.

Joyas Voladuras - Alone

We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not

child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.

This quote makes me realize how alone we really are. It makes me think of no matter what we can never be fully with someone. Just like nobody can read your thoughts, you are chillingly alone when you die, and if there is any where you go, you go alone. This niether makes me look at life with optimism nor pestimism, but with reality. This shows not how we maybe alone physically but how we are alone internally. Another quote that expresses this thought is the one below.

"A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone; and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode."

This quote also shows the reality of our being and how were alone. This thought has occurred to me before. I remember being 6 years old and staring at the corner of the room, letting my mind wander about our being. It was weird. Both quotes sum up all my long thought about being alone.