Dead trees in a giant, empty white room. They reach toward the ceiling, materializing out of two blocks of industrial wood. Their barren trunks extend upwards from their square bases. Short, cut branches poke out in all directions. A small plaque says that they were chipped out of huge planks, ring by ring, until the …
The Search for the George
As a part of this course, our professors wanted us to get lost in London and learn about the city’s history, culture, and people. A small group of us did get lost, but probably not in the way Re and Steve anticipated. The night we were to see our first show of the block, The …
Interpret
Interpret, 6/21/2013 We interpret marble statues interpreting people from the past in long hallways, interpret the twitch of a lip and the murder of an instrument interpreting the words of a dead playwright interpreting people from the past under the evening sunlight, interpret images and jewels and dioramas and sidewalks and it all leads …
Ecological Restoration Week 1
Well, the first week of Ecological Restoration just ended! We have two professors, Marion Hourdequin, a philosophy professor from Colorado College, and David Havlick, her husband, a geography professor from University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. We've already read a lot of material, from ecological articles trying to pin down a technical definition of “ecological …
Miracolo a Milano
The last couple days have introduced a bit of levity to our material. As we learned last week, neorealist films focus on real life, everyday experiences of average people - usually the underdog - and often addressed World War II and contemporary social justice issues. Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan) is another film by De Sica, …
Neorealism
In the second half of the week, we shifted our focus to the post-World War II reaction to fascism, exemplified in a cinematic and literary movement known as neorealism. Neorealist directors like Rossellini sought to strip away the artificiality of propagandist films of the previous decades and explore not only the effects of reality - …
Italian Political Cinema
As a Romance Languages major who chose Italian as one of my specialties, I'm lucky that the few upper-level Italian courses we're offered are so interesting! Many, like this one, are cross-listed courses, so I get to take class with not only Italian students (it's a pretty small department - the few of us overlap …
Machine Learning: Classifying Films
In the era of netflix, there's a wide array of available films to watch online. One of the features that made Netflix so successful was its ability to recommend new movies. This ability is equivalent to answering the following questions: If a person likes a particular movie, what are some similar movies? If a person likes a …
Menorcan Excursion #2
Elementary Chinese
好久不见！(Translation: Long time no see!) I’m back blogging for CC, but this time I am not blogging about a grueling 400 level Environmental Science class… This time I’ll be filling you in on a class that is difficult in an entirely different way: Elementary Chinese. And my name is no longer Margo Davis. In this …