Lion Dance and the Sublime Art

Seeing all of the different schools perform their own unique brands of lion dance at the competition that Brown so graciously hosted got me thinking about what lion dance inherently means as an art, and whether we're losing that semblance of our tradition as an art form when all of our performances are so commercialized, standardized, pieced together depending on the needs of our clients rather than finely crafted from the ground up as unique works of art.

Perhaps my thinking's changed a bit since I started engaging in more "street art" esque endeavors. For when one does street art, there's a certain beauty in the effect of the sublime: when viewers pass by their art, and see it in action, they inherently understand the art as art, and their unique experiences and interaction with art in a totally unpackaged, unprepared, spontaneous environment define a special and superlative artistic connection. It's perhaps this aspect of self-discovery that makes this art so great: audience members have no expectation going in, discover the art for themselves, have their own unique interactions and experiences, and yet come out with no doubt of the artistic merit at hand.

Take for example, my current project, where I place pinwheels inside the New York Subway system. It's a completely unexpected installation for most of the viewers, and the first reaction will be: cool, what's that? Suddenly, the train comes into the station, and the backdraft from the fast moving train blows all of the pinwhels, and it becomes immediately clear what the pinwheels are there for--suddenly, something as simple as a few pinwheels inspires an awe, a eureka, an unspoken understanding: a feeling of the sublime.

Or take for example a light bulb exhibit, by the name of Little Bomb (if I recall correctly) I saw at Brown's Liss building, right after eating dinner with Brown's and Worcester's troupes. Here was an entire room with different lamps and lights with different lampshades sitting on a grass covered ground, all of them connected to a couple of power strips in the off position. Maybe the exhibit wasn't active, which is why they were off--I'll never know. What I do know, is that when I turned them all on--when I tripped the "little bomb", the room bursted forth into an explosion of lights and colors. That art, and now my own unique experience with it, that too inspired a feeling of the sublime.

Perhaps this, too, is why I was so inspired by my dream about Penn Lions. This was a rather ridiculous, crazy dream probably in part brought about by my general lack of sleep and by the fact that I had just fought a hard battle with exhaustion on a long drive back from Rhode Island, but yes, I did have a dream where I watched Penn's lion dance troupe perform. If you want all the details, feel free to contact me personally, but a big part was they somehow spontaneously transformed rice cakes into noodle soup, and then proceeded to serve this noodle soup to all of their audience members. Impossible, yes--for sure. But to be watching a lion dance, where suddenly food spontaneously generates before your eyes, and then you eat it? What could possibly be more sublime?

Can we do this with actual lion dance (and not just the lion dance of my dreams, hah)? Certainly the answer isn't in commercialized, standard shows in a client-oriented environment. Not that those shows are inherently bad, but they lose out on what I think of as the utmost pursuit of and achievement of, the pinnacle of art--you can't really have a sublime lion dance show when the expectation is set, when you have a contract written, when everything is stipulated clearly between parties.

Or can you? What exactly is the limiting factor here? Is it the contractual obligation in the first place? Given that pretty much none of our clients limit us in any way with performance restrictions, should the artist-client relationship here be limiting at all? Isn't this exactly the situation that I exalted in my earlier post, "Haircutting the Artist-Client Relationship"?

The impact is twofold. Either a contractual obligation inherently preempts and detracts from sublime art, or in my laziness I have allowed the art form that I so dearly love devolve, and what I'm doing is losing those aesthetic qualities that make it great art. Most likely a bit of both--but of course it's the latter that is so scary.

Perhaps all is not lost here. After all, the audience's collective gasp of surprise at the exploding lettuce, completely unanticipated, even by some who are aware of lion dance tradition--is that not a sublime moment present in all of our shows? The unique interaction--indeed, it is no stretch to call it a unique story that the lion forges with each audience member during the "play with the audience" portion--are those not some of the most sublime moments in art, in the most distilled sense? So it must be possible, then?

I ask all of you, then: what is it that would, for each of us, represent the utmost success, the pinnacle of lion dance, not just from a technical perspective or even an emotive one, but a purely artistic one? Given that we hope to pursue the sublime in our art form (which itself could be debatable too), what kind of project could that be? And I mean, I'm not trying to downplay any of our achievements as lion dance groups thus far. I'm merely asking, apart from technique, given our current abilities, what can we do to maximize the artistic value of our tradition? How can we engage with our art form, and our audiences, in a new, novel, and yes, sublime way?

Well, we got what, 5 weeks to do it, so let's get cracking!

Blood, toil, tears, and sweat

Well, after this weekend, I can finally cross that first one off the list of things that lion dance has had to offer - oh, it's offered a lot of that first one last weekend, for sure. I certainly hope future lion dancers who get in that lion, affectionately "The Red Commie Wagon", don't mind that I was bleeding profusely in it. If anything, it adds to the character and history of that lion, eh?

And so, my last lion dance competition as an undergrad member of Columbia University Lion Dance comes to a close. Though I could not bring home to New York the title, I am eminently satisfied with how the weekend proceeded. I mean, I went to Brown, did tons and tons of lion dance, met many new people through an activity that I love, and enjoyed a meal with new friends and our genial hosts. Oh, and plus the Canadiens spanked the Bruins, and we still had 7 hours of the car left to go joyriding. Ah, c'est la vie!

Thinking back to the very first lion dance competition that Columbia hosted recalls quite the fond memories. I was but a freshman then, forever an upstart, incessantly bothering, goading for us to set up a competition. After all, what else would we do with all the time after our regular lion dance season? Actually work on getting better? Pshaw! I fondly remember constantly bothering our president at the time to go and contact other schools, preferably via phone or even in person (as she did end up doing with Cornell!), but with all of the doubt in the world as to whether this would work. Will other groups come? Could such an event succeed?

We were so focused on the planning and the organization, and so pleasantly surprised at just how many people ended up coming, that we didn't even think to work on practicing our welcoming set--and boy, did it show. Nevertheless, I will be forever happy that the event was a great success, forever thankful for all of the schools who came out to perform, forever proud that a broad, collegiate lion dance community could, and would exist. I will never forget Yale's tiny contingent, who couldn't manage to bring anything but themselves and needed to borrow all of our equipment and yet then proceeded to wow us all with a forward roll--something that back then, based on our collective reactions, none of us had ever seen before. Still to this day, we call our method of switching head and tail the "Cornell Switch," a nod of respect to the school that taught it to us.

And I will always point to that competition as a watershed for our own group, too, in terms of what we thought we were capable of. My captain turned to me, her usual smiling face both clearly filled with excitement and nervousness, and said, "Wow, every group here besides ours can do headsits and supertowers!" We held on to our fiercer, more traditional style, and broader, larger movements, on to our organization and origination of the event and our lack of practice time, but those badges of pride and these excuses could not hide my inner feeling that our group was being outclassed.

It wouldn't matter for long, though, as it soon became evident, through the group workshop segment of the competition, that many of these tricks were things that we were capable of, that we just never even thought to try. I landed my first headsits and shoulder stacks that day, both with traditional Columbia partners and with performers from other schools. I even completed my first forward roll with a Yale performer, as the Yale guys not only showed us how to do it but graciously offered to try it with us, with someone they've never practiced with before and only met on that day. I learned why every group had sashes besides ours--you kind of need them to actually do tricks--and thus sashes quite quickly became an important mainstay of our equipment bag. Seeing all of these other groups execute all of their fancy acrobatics, and then learning quickly that these were things we, too, were capable of, pumped all of our collective adrenaline, made us so excited for lion dance, so excited to bring our performance to the next level, so excited to practice all that we had learned that day, and then some.

My biggest regret in this regard is not hosting this event again in 2011. Those old enough will remember there was a gap year, there, before Penn then hosted the competition again in 2012. I really didn't think much of it before, but looking back: why didn't we host it again? Why didn't I, personally, fight for that competition, like I did freshman year? I certainly hope it's not a sign that I'm losing my willingness to goad, to bother, to incessantly upstart--I better not be losing my edge. In any case, I am very thankful that Penn decided to bring back the competition in 2012. Looking back, I could not be prouder.

Now, I look at this last competition through a different lens than the first: 3 years ago, I looked forward to all that I'd learn and improve upon in my coming years as a lion dancer. 3 years later, I can only reflect on what lion dance means to me: what the art has had to offer, what the people have to teach, what the community has that makes it special. I can only think about what will happen next: how my relationships with all of the people that I met will grow, how I can continue to embrace the tradition even after life makes it more difficult to do so, how I can truly connect with lion dance as an art, and share that art with all those around me.

I'll have more to say about that in the next post. For now, let me continue to reflect and reminisce, and, as I get in the lion dance head for the final weeks of my time as a Columbia university Lion Dancer, let me embrace the final, fourth item on that list that this great art has to offer.

Sweat? Absolutely. Toil? No question about it. Blood? In quite profuse amounts. Tears? Well, as the end of the year approaches, so they will come.

Bridging the worlds of art and reality

I want to address this post to a short conversation I had with my friend over dinner. I've always been a proponent of the idea that leaving a paper to write the day before it is due is not a big deal, so long as you spend time thinking about what to write in advance, since the actual writing part is merely execution and it is the crafting of ideas that takes time. She responded that this method would work so much better if what came out on the page was anything close to as good as how it was in her head--in essence, that the execution is just as, if not more difficult than the creation.

I responded by pointing that dichotomy--of the world of art, stuck forever in the artist's brain, and the world of reality, never matching the perfection that is the world of art--that dichotomy and the inevitable isolation of these two worlds is one of the defining natures of art and the artist. Indeed, this impossible pursuit of perfection may even lead to greater beauty, as we consider how the artist resolves the difficulties that the real world brings. Either way, this impossibility, this knowledge as the artist that our works will never truly equal their greatness in our mind's parallel artistic world, is part of what makes artists so tragic.

In essence, I found a way to change the conversation topic from "well, I can't actually write like you say, on the day before, because I can't execute" to "well that's what makes art beautiful and tragic". Like the political science major I am, I didn't answer her concern at all, and instead talked beautifully about a very related topic and suddenly we're having a discussion of art and the artist instead of how hard our upcoming humanities paper is, without anyone noticing. Indeed, that's perhaps the most notable thing: that I didn't even notice myself! I'm only writing about it now because it came across my mind in retrospect. For those of you who have asked me how I direct conversation (you know who you are), feel free to take note.

But that's not the main topic of my post today. Instead, I want to add to, and slightly change my approach to the relationship between execution and creation in art.

As I look back, my friend was right: given that we cannot ever truly capture what is in our minds to what is on our papers, my policy of last minute execution and constant focus on creation probably isn't best. Instead, what makes a great paper and great work of art is not only the deliberate attempt to realize the impossible bridge between the two worlds of art, but also, and perhaps more importantly, directly tied to how this process of realization continues to inspire and alter our creative tendencies.

See, if our only goal is to take the work of art that exists in our minds and graft that into the real world, we are doomed to fail. This is what I was thinking when I discussed the inherently tragic nature of artists over dinner. This, also, isn't the best way to go about making art. Instead of trying to graft one world onto another, we should be trying to meet somewhere in the middle--and crucially, we should be taking in, learning, and getting inspired in new ways in our attempts to do so.

The isolation of the artist's mental world and the physical world around him isn't what makes art tragic; rather, it's what makes it so inspiring and powerful. For in our attempts to replicate in the physical world what we see in our mental ones should not result in a frustration over the inability to create a perfect replica but rather should result in new inspirations as we realize what we are capable of doing in the physical world. For, just as it's true that in our mental worlds we are unbounded by the rules of reality, so it's true that in the physical world, we have access to an ability that we'll never fully have in the mental world: the ability to try things out and experiment, to see how they work.

And so now, while building upon the seed of the idea that we crafted in our unbounded yet firmly theoretical mental worlds, we can experiment with different options and methods in the physical world--experimentation that inevitably will inspire us further, perhaps change our ideas in our mental worlds, but certainly develop into a piece of art wholly different from what we originally thought of in our minds: wholly different, and just as, if not more beautiful.

Addendum:
Indeed, I actually wrote essays (and do my art) in this fashion too; I just didn't articulate it as such in the conversation, and really didn't realize it until I started thinking about it explicitly. When I'm writing a paper, an essay, even this post, I just have a very general idea, and then new ideas about specifics and such come to me as I see and process the words in the document I have just written. Entire paragraphs of my writing sometimes appear simply on a whim based on my reactions to what I have previously written; the section about directing conversation in this very post, for one, was not planned at all.

On a micro level, this effect is even stronger: I certainly don't plan out sentences, let alone any sort of structure besides a most general idea of what I want to write about, yet my essays end up structured fine and the sentences flow to my satisfaction. I think this is because it is only natural for us to continue developing our ideas and marry the creation and execution processes; truly, this ability to create on the fly is what makes art wonderful. It also makes it rather difficult for me to do any heavy editing or to add in any new thoughts that I have at the end after I read over what I write. Given that this post is for myself and not for a grade or anything, I was lazy about it and just put these added thoughts into this addendum rather than trying to retroactively work them in.

Science, Religion, and Art

A post that won't be as good as my last one. Sorry guys.

 

I used to be obssessed with reason. There was a reason for everything, a clear process to do anything, and an inability to explain nothing. Oh sure, there were things that I didn't understand, that the world didn't yet understand, but the operant word here was yet--given enough time, everything would stand up to the scrutiny of reason. Understandably, I was militantly atheist. I rejected religion on face as running completely contrary to the heart of science--by believing something that could not be tested through scientific scrutiny, I flew in the face of the fundamental pillar of science: falsifiability. Science and religion are incompatible, I proudly told myself (and anybody else who'd listen); they're based on completely divergent fundamental beliefs.

It's hard for me to say whether I still think that way. Nothing's really changed in the way science is done to make me change my views, and I certainly don't know enough about religion to make an informed change of heart based on current religious developments. I did realize, though, that there's more at work here--more than science vs. religion, faith vs. reason.

For instance, where does art come in here? I realize that art straddles this divide, and can fight strongly for either side of this battle--indeed, I haven't yet written about this, but I believe that the creative design solutions often used by people to solve scientific problems are great examples of art. One of art's most powerful characteristics, for me, is the universal appeal of great art--there's something that connects the human fiber of us all, some sort of universal human experience that allows people of all different backgrounds to appreciate art on some level.

Yet this idea of a universal human experience presents many of the same problems that the idea of god does, in terms of conflicts with science's basic pillars. How do we know that we are all connected just on basis of being human? We don't. Where's the factual proof? There is none. Is this a falsifiable claim? Well, I certainly can't think of how we could falsify it--I'm not sure I'd be satisfied with a psychological explanation. And yet, this is at the heart of what makes art great and powerful. We can identify with the works, feel the emotions, understand the art--maybe not in the same way, but certainly with the same degree of impact.

I used to blame religion for much of the suffering around the world. I pointed to historical examples of bloodshed driven by religion--clearly, in a world of atheism, in a world of facts and reason, we wouldn't have all this. But now I realize: just as much as religion has been responsible for terrible events in history, so too has it been responsible for great ones. If anything, it's emphatic of the power of people united in belief, and not the good or bad that can come of it.

I continue to maintain that the best scientists--indeed, and the best economists, lawyers, doctors, and politicians, the best gamers and athletes, and probably tons of other types of people I'm missing here, but this post is about science--are also artists. They need to be, in order to be the best: they encounter in their work challenges and problems that only human ingenuity can solve, and it takes creativity and artistic talent to do so. Perhaps that's the real takeaway here: we all need a bit of everything. It takes a creative mind to be a great scientist, and perhaps--be it faith in god, gods, or simply faith in humanity--it takes a little faith too.

Hair-Cutting the Artist-Canvas Relationship

你想怎样剪?

I had just sat down at the local haircutter's, after hanging up my coat and awkwardly failing twice in the process. It was a Chinese-owned haircutter's shop, of course; as my mother would say, the "foreigners" would not, and indeed could not understand the shape of a Chinese man's head as well as a Chinese haircutter who would have ostensibly been working on Chinese heads for as long as I lived. That "foreigners" had no qualms about visiting a Chinese haircutter didn't seem to factor into the reasoning here.

你想怎样剪?

The question, for my non-Chinese readers, means "How do you want your hair cut?" I had already prepared a response to this question--however she thought would look nice, me being the opposite of an expert on matters of fashion--and with that, she went to work. It made me realize, though, the implications at the heart of this question.

Haircutters are, in a way, the most tragic artists. Most artists have to consider the relationship between their art and their audiences; haircutters, though, have the added relationship to their canvases. In a way, haircutters have the opportunity to craft the most unique art--each canvas is different in the most beautiful, most human way, and each work of art is complemented by each individual canvas's distinct human characteristics. As an artist trying to encapsulate human interaction, and indeed, the universal human experience in my artworks, haircutting thus fascinates me in how it innately embodies this concept: just as a painter needs a canvas to craft a work of art, so a haircutter needs a person's head as a canvas to create art, but in this latter case, the canvas, too, actively plays a human role in determining the nature of the end product.

And yet, her question to me was:

你想怎样剪?

Embedded within this question is an assumption of a business-client relationship, rather impersonal and certainly not as beautiful as the artist-canvas relationship that I had been thinking about. This is why I earlier referred to haircutters as the most tragic artists: every day, they work with countless different canvases, all differing not only in the shapes of their heads but, more importantly, in the shapes of their personalities, each of which will add to and work with the artist haircutter in a unique way. And yet, the way almost all of these interactions go is a ceding of artistic control from artist to canvas, from patron to client. All of the posters and images at a haircutter are reflective of this: they show pictures of other people and other people's hair, for their clients to pick and imitate. Some of the great beauty of this art comes from the fact that both artist and canvas, patron and client both contribute to the art, but the business model necessitates that the haircutter cedes all artistic control to the client: how does the client want it cut, not at all how the artist thinks it should be. They are the most tragic artists, for having such a wealth of uniquely different canvases at their fingertips, and yet be wholly unable to tap the artistic potential of the vast majority of them.

I wanted to tell her this: tell her to cut my hair any way she wanted to, that it was a canvas for not just her art but for our art. I wanted to tell her I didn't care how it ended up looking, so long as she was satisfied with it. I wanted her to, for one of the many clients she had every day, finally have an open canvas. Perhaps for the better, as perhaps part of this artistic and human experience is that it innately arises and needs no proselytizing on my part, my Chinese wasn't good enough, and so when she asked again whether things were going all right partway through, I simply responded with 你觉得怎样好就怎样剪: roughly, "Cut it how you think is good".

At the end of the haircut, she handed me a mirror and asked if everything looked ok. I asked her if everything looked ok to her, and she said yes. Nevertheless, as I got up to leave, she insisted on making a few final corrections. Perhaps the idea of pride in her work on this open canvas was not lost in my inability to convey complex ideas in Chinese.

Either way, I'm happy with my haircut. I'll flaunt it proudly, knowing that nobody has the same one--for even in the rare case that someone has my head shape, nobody else has my unique character, and certainly nobody else can replicate the artist-canvas relationship that my haircutter and I shared.

I'm happy with the art on my head right now, and I hope she is too.

Reactionary Gun Rights

So this latest shooting in Connecticut, and my response to others' responses to it, have gotten me to think about reactionary gun rights. I think I was a bit aggressive in my pro-gun reaction, just as perhaps others were a bit aggressive in their anti-gun reaction, and that probably isn't the right way to go about this. But before we get more on that, let me go over my position.

 

For one, it's probably too easy for someone to buy a gun legally and sell it second-hand to someone else illegally, although that will be a tough problem to fix. It's also pretty problematic in light of the recent event, where the rifle was purchased legally, but used by someone else to commit the atrocity. I think there needs to be stronger licensing, and I wouldn't mind reasonable gun registration. I also think we need stronger background checks, mental health checks, more range time, and more training. Ultimately, I think I am fairly committed to safe gun ownership.

 

Here's the problem, though: most people who are supportive of the measures that I outlined above aren't committed to safe gun ownership. They're committed to curbing gun ownership, and that's my problem with much of this regulation. Gun registration is fine unless we're using this registry as a stepping stone to tracking down gun owners and going for a gun grab. More background checks and stronger mental health checks are fine unless we're using this as an excuse to make people wait longer for their licenses. More range time and training is great too, so long as these are paid for opportunities for gun owners, rather than barriers that must be overcome with private expense. Our policy should be committed to, and even encourage educated, safe gun ownership, and I'm totally in agreement with that. It's just that usually, this isn't what the policy is aimed at; instead, it's aimed at discouraging gun ownership by any means necessary.

 

But that isn't what this post is about. This post is about my reactions to others' reactions to the CT shooting, and it's made me realize, in a strange way, why people are paranoid of racism and the "white, heteronormative society". Bear with me here, because this is a pretty tenuous link, but it impacted me a lot.

 

See, when someone posts about CT and starts discussing gun control, I immediately feel the need to, as a gun owner, jump into the conversation and debunk anti-gun rhetoric. But the thing is, the policy issues being discussed are probably ones that I agree with, based on what I just posted above. Really, what I take issue with is that, among most of the people I know, gun ownership is not the norm. Instead, gun ownership is viewed as some sort of "why would you ever want to do that", and that provokes a reactionary response from me because I see this as a sort of "me vs them" fight, where I'm being otherized as a gun owner.

 

And I certainly don't think it does great for my case to come out and respond in a reactionary way; that probably just makes me look like an even kookier right-wing nutjob (even though my own political leanings are much farther left). Given my own policy in regard to AAPI issues of just "laughing it off", I really should stay consistent and focus on having a reasonable conversation on the issue.

 

And I'm seeing how tough that is to do, now, and more understanding why something like otherization is such a big deal. The real best way to further the pro-gun cause, in my eyes, is to make people understand that guns are no big deal, that gun owners are reasonable, cool people that are just like everyone else, and that they are responsible and won't just go nuts, just because they have a gun. Similarly, in my opinion, the best way to further the AAPI cause is to show people that Asians are cool people just like everyone else, and that getting offended and complaining only serves to enforce negative stereotypes of Asians being uncool. This whole experience, though, made me realize just how hard that is.

Outlook Messaging

Ok I suckered myself into doing another design post.

This time it's also about Windows mail, although now they updated it and its called Outlook instead. Nice! @outlook.com is a very aesthetically pleasing address, that is much more professional than @hotmail.com and even @live.com. I am happy.

I'm also really happy with the design in general. It's pretty, it flows consistently with a Windows 8 desktop background and really looks unified, and there's tons of great features (that actually work and aren't shitty betas like the Google Labs stuff), like split pane inbox/message viewing screen, Facebook chat integration, sweep, and yes, folders! I can't wait until Microsoft builds in Skype integration, that would honestly make Outlook mail far and away the best webmail service (it's objectively the best right now, not biased, but this integration will just make it super super clearly the king).

There are some things I'm not so happy with, though, and foremost among these also has to do with the Facebook messaging integration, just like with their Live mail client.

Here's the problem:

Outlook_messaging

The messaging sidebar covers the message body text (this message is from my junk folder and is someone trying to pull a Nigerian scam, lols). It doesn't even cover that much, and honestly it wouldn't have been that difficult for Microsoft to design it so that the text margins shrunk when you opened the Messenger. Even if it didn't do that, why not at least make it so that I can scroll the message body text to see the part hidden by the messenger client?

Nope. Instead, in order to actually read my emails, I need to close the messaging sidebar, read the email, and then reopen the sidebar to go back to messaging. It totally kills any multitasking ability. Fortunately, the sidebar doesn't take any time at all to load or anything; it's just annoying to have to keep clicking to get rid of and then reopen it.

MSFT, you guys got a winner here. Don't let stupid shenanigans give anybody a possible excuse for not using your product.

I wish I could major in problem solving

Because honestly, that's what I'm taking the most out of college so far. All the concepts you learn, the books you read, the specific technical details, they're all unimportant. I'm going to need to relearn the specifics as they apply to the company I'll be working at next year anyway, through their own training program.

Really, the important things to learn in college revolve around preparing your brain for the problem solving of the future. Especially coming out of a nice Ivy League school, I feel like I have some sort of responsibility for making the world a better place, and that entails solving some problems. The technical details of each problem vary, but the problem solving core is what is important to address.

This addresses the heart of human innovation. Before, tons of stuff got invented because the problem solving was very self-evident and anybody can participate. Now, there are tons of technical barriers that prevent non-specialists from participating in the innovative and problem-solving process. This is something that is very important to address--human innovation will be driven much faster if we can compartmentalize what the true problems at the core of these issues are, and strip away all of the technical nonsense. Just look at how fast gamers were able to find the shape of the AIDS protein on fold.it, compared to more specialized researchers.

The big problem with majors and college educations dedicated to teaching someone a specific major is that it implies that these technical barriers are acceptable, and perhaps worse, encourages them. I guess, of course, you need people with the specific technical knowledge in order to break down the barriers and make things accessible. At the same time, encouraging people to specialize too early reduces amount of time people can be given a general, comprehensive background on problem solving. There's an important balancing act to be made here.

That's ultimately why I feel like, at least for some schools, the only major should be problem solving. Obviously for more vocational backgrounds, you need that specific skills-based education, but in a liberal arts setting, people should just be given comprehensive, diverse educations to encourage them to develop their problem solving mentalities. Technical specifics are mostly all covered during grad schools anyway, and people should just start specializing afterward.

Maybe I'm biased because I'm still not ready to specialize and still want to explore all the different things you can do in the world :P

PS
So yeah, sorry about not doing another post about design, this is just what I thought of. I'll probably do one more ideas-based post like this one about my faith in humanity, and then the one after that will be design-oriented. Although this post is basically about education design :)

Hmm, wrong link, time to press the back button

But wait, it's not working. I just pressed the back button like 10 times on a website and I didn't go back or anything.

Ie_back_button

Oh, hello there, silly ad that won't let me go back.

I don't know whose fault this is, if it's IE's fault or the webpage's fault, but this is a pretty big fucking deal. In this specific incident I searched something, clicked a search result, and it wasn't what I was looking for. But hey guess what? I can't even fucking go back to the list of search results because I can't hit the back button. And the usual strategy of right clicking the back button to go back multiple pages at a time is useless too because guess what? The past like thousand options to go back to are all the same page with like one ad removed or something silly. So your website provides me with useless information AND makes it hard for me to leave and get back to where I was to find more useful info? Super fail.

Again this might be IE's fault, but I'm blaming the website right now because I go on tons of different websites with tons of ads on them and this only happens with a few of them.

This isn't even some rando site, it was like the Guardian newspaper's website or something that I thought was legit.

Problems with Hotmail

First off, I really like Hotmail's UI, and am glad that I made the switch from Gmail (especially in light of Gmail's current UI, which I find rather irritating). I love being able to see the email conversation in the bottom pane and seeing a list of inbox messages in the smaller top pane, and most of all I love the combined functionality that folders and labels have with each other! There's no reason why you should only have one or another.

 

But there are a few things that really bother me about Hotmail's UI. They're small things that can be corrected easily, but small things add up, and these really wouldn't be that difficult to fix.

 

First, hitting "Reply" to your own reply to a message someone else sent you makes you reply to yourself.

I know that sounds kind of confusing, so here's what I mean. Let's say Joe emails me about lunch tomorrow. I hit reply and say "that sounds great, let's meet at noon". Then I hit send. Then I realize we didn't decide on a place yet, so I hit reply on the message I just sent (which is now the top, most recent message in our conversation) and I write "what kind of food do you want to eat?"

Makes sense right? Except in this case, the "what kind of food do you want to eat?" message gets sent to me, and not Joe. This is kind of silly; why would I want to message myself in a situation like that? All they need to do is set it up so that if the reply button results in a message directed at myself, it gets directed at the recipient of my last message instead (i.e. Joe). Not that hard, would make much more sense.

 

The next thing is a bit more irritating because it happens more, and because I can't just avoid it by hitting "Reply" on the previous message. The problem is with the Facebook chat integration; here is a screenshot.

Hotmail_facebook_chat

So the problem is that here I have 3 different Facebook chats open, because I'm chatting with 3 different people, but now that I'm done chatting with all of them I can't ex them all out simultaneously. Nope, I have to do it one by one.

This is made even more irritating by the fact that there are already buttons on the side that let you minimize all three of them or pop out the entire chat, so it isn't even because of the aesthetic reason that "oh we don't want these buttons outside the individual chat tabs because they look bad". No, there happen to be other buttons outside the individual chat tabs that look fine, they just didn't include the most useful button. Silly.

 

When I was thinking about this post I had a third UI thing that I had problems with, but I forgot it. In any case if I find it or any other UI problems I have with Hotmail I'll post it here. Currently though Hotmail is not without its faults it's certainly a huge improvement over Gmail.