Midterm: The Electrical Sorting Hat












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Week 2: Math and Art

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From this week’s readings and lecture, I have learned that throughout history, math has always been a part of arts, and vice versa. These two topics have never really been separated. If you look at math itself, it is the study of numbers, combinations, shapes, and symbols, which all are the characteristics of arts (Vesna, 2012). Despite many people believing otherwise, arts is more than just drawing. According to the Dictionary, arts is an expression or application of human creativity and imagination. It is not defined or limited to anything specific.  The Last Supper Another proof that arts and math is interrelated can be found in the history of arts. Artists, dated all the way to ancient Egyptian, to the Renaissance era, possibly even to current day, have used math to either perfect their arts or illustrate their ideology (Henderson, 1984). For example, Leonardo da Vinci used mathematical concepts to produce a perspective, which created the impression of depth and realit...
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Week 6: BioTech and Art

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From this week’s lectures, I learned for the first time that there is such thing as bioart, which refers to a contemporary form of art that uses scientific methods and biotechnology to explore living systems as artistic subjects (Yetisen et al., 2015). While it is interesting and thought-provoking to learn, I find bioart to be a little bit unsettling, specifically regarding the extent that some artists would go for the sake of aesthetic and arts.  Live Bicyclus anynana butterfly with modified wing pattern. In her project, Marta de Menezes modified the wing patterns of live butterflies as her medium of artistic expression (Vesna, 2012). She wanted to make a statement that despite the distinct physical differences, we all are more alike than we realized (Reinert, 2004). However, the experiment left permanent holes in the butterflies’ wings, thus reducing the butterflies’ lifespan (Vesna, 2012).  I just do not think that biomanipulation is acceptable for artistic pur...
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Event 3: The Post-Genomic Condition: Justice, Knowledge, Life After the Genome

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The Event Poster  On May 18th, I went to Professor Jenny Reardon’s “Post-Genomic Condition: Justice, Knowledge, Life After the Genome” lecture at UCLA. She mainly focused on the issues of racial identity, justice, equality and democracy that are embedded within the science field.   She started her presentation by explaining the basics of the human genome and how there are approximately 3 millions nucleotide base pairs that made up our DNA (Reardon, 2018). Then she discussed what it means to “sequence” the human genome. By determining the order of the base pairs, we can observe the variations between species, as well as within species, at the genomic levels (Howard, 2016).  How Not to Talk about Race The Human Genome Project (HGP) that is responsible for this study found that there was no gene for race (NHGRI, 2016). People around the world all share the same gene regardless of their skin color. The only difference is the amount of pigment molecules that ...
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