My personal inquiries

I never imagined myself in a journalism class before. I never aimed at being a professional journalist, at least not the kind

you see in the image above; that mans looks brave, timely, he looks ready to take on the world and at a moment's notice it

seems like he could follow the wind wherever it took him to his next lead. I remember watching old black and white classic

movies where journalists were pencil chewing, fast talking hardballs who didn't have the time to spare for anyone. I never, ever

wanted to end up personifying those characteristics. But here comes the sharp turn: I just finished Tilley's section in Clark's

book, yes I admit I'm still catching up on my reading and I'm not even sure if its the right edition but and after reading her

concerns about herself as a writer and as a human being I realized that they reflected my own discomforts, wishes and

personal battles in my relationship to the world. When Tilley said that she understood how exactly her articles will not revamp

the world, how it was unrealistic for society to truly change so dramatically I was finally glad that someone and a journalist no

less was honest.

After taking Foundations of Journalism it felt like we were handed the weight of the world. There was so much talk about

democracy, upholding truth and giving the nation a sphere to conduct free speech. I believe in the concept of these ideas but

in reality, riots are squashed too quickly by the same authority who ironically claim to honor free speech, billions of people live

everyday turning a blind eye to injustice, the mentally ill are left to die and the person who was shocked from the morning's

headlines about a man suffering from a hit and run accident rarely ever rile the compassion to visit the stranger in the

hospital. I am of course guilty of these things. But Tilley was right for not expecting a sea of change to occur, and I appreciated

her honesty but in reading her six piece series I realized how rumbles of change could occur. For one thing she gave us an

insight into Dix Hill that was expectedly depressing but surprisingly hopeful. I think it's lovely that reporting coupled with

writing touched with a dose of compassion can tear down mental walls between society and those deemed unsociable.

This class is really hard. I never was asked to go up to strangers and milk reactions out of them. I emailed Professor HC

few weeks ago about my shyness to go up to strangers and to "bother" them. I had always liked observing people but slipping

into a pocket of their life was foreign to me. The first assignment was frustrating because I kept interviewing people who

would make excuses to avoid talking to me. Either they didn't speak enough English or "it was their boss I should be talking

to", I would just stand there overwhelmed with having to find another person to talk to because the previous way brushed me

off. But I'm getting over being scared and I realize that with interviewing you need to be quick and catch your person when

he/she is talking about something that matters to them. Sometimes it's when someone starts using hand gestures and gets

really heated, other times a person's octaves run low and quiet and the emotion of the person is indicative of how the topic

really hit home.

My other difficulty is organization. I've done 2 or 3 stories so far and my notebook is almost 3/4 packed with chicken

scrawl. They're written down chronologically so when I go back to find an idea for an assignment I have to comb through every

word to see who said which quote, how many tables were in the room at the time, what kind of lighting was there, what the

mood of the speaker was etc. It's hard when more than one speaker is talking or you have to figure out how to section off idea

categories. This spiral pattern or turning here to find a tidbit and turning there to locate a name is driving me insane.

actual assignment 1

In a darkened classroom, against the backdrop of an uncooperative projector and a packed group of skeptical physics students Brian Cox gestures to the screen and states simply “It goes without saying that its the most complicated machine built”. Particle physicist Brian Cox was referring to the Large Hadron Collider to which he spoke about at New York University’s SHARP Lecture last Wednesday. The LHC is the world’s most powerful and largest particle accelerator, it circles in a circumference of 27 Kilometers(16.77 miles), is embedded 50 to 175 meters underground and straddles the border of Geneva and France. The LHC accelerates protons and lead ions at 99.999999% of the speed of light and then smashes them together to reenact the environment created right after Earth’s Big Bang.
The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research in 2003 to “understand what the world is made of, what the smallest building block of physics is”. That elementary building block was the “proton soup” produced when the Big Bang occurred. Cox explains that physicists are using the LHC to identify the Earth’s creation story where “we began with a soup of gluons”. In studying the origin of the world’s most basic material -gluons, protons, leptons and quarks physicists can then understand more complex physical relationships between matter. Also the LHC may produce Higgs boson particles, notoriously dubbed “dark matter” because of its presumed presence in the universe despite our inability to have ever seen, sensed or recorded it.
As a testament to the sheer enormity of the LHC, the particle detector that Cox works on ATLAS alone weighs more than 7716 tons and has the computing power of more than 5,000 PCs. The great size of the project hindered the repair process when in September 2008 a fault occurred on the LHC’s super conducting magnets. Brian’s Cox’s lecture takes place on the eve of the LHC’s return, it will be up and running again next month in March when physicists will continue their search for unprecedented discoveries with what Cox considers “the greatest scientific development of the 21st century”.

I found my lecture

Too bad its at 6:45 on the Wednesday this first blog has to be written
Research:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/07/brian-cox-calls-em-like-he-sees-em/

Brian Cox, ex-keyboardist, physicist, 40 year old who looks 30...I'm stoked

a baby is born

and the baby is this blog. for class.