Generation Gap: It's the Parents' Fault

Well, it's Thanksgiving break and nothing else to do except chill out and update my blog. That no one reads. But hey, I can handle that.


Today we're going to talk about the Generation Gap. It's the phenomenon that people claim occurs between generations where neither one understands the other.

We can blame it on several different factors. For starters, we can always blame society. The children of the younger generation are growing up in a completely different atmosphere than the older generation. Makes some sense. After all, your younger formative years influence you a lot. If you're bombarded every day with concepts and ideas of what is right and wrong, that has a huge influence on your life. And if these foundational ideas are different than what your parents were exposed to, then it's no wonder than their world views will be slightly different.

We can also blame it on the kids. After all, the older, wise generation were kids, and then grew up and matured and now know better. However, the naive little ones still don't get it and think they're the rulers of the world and these different views clash creating a rift. After all, what teenager isn't just a bit too cocky.


However, I posit a huge factor that overshadows all of these. It's the parents' fault. That's right, I just pinned it on those bastions of knowledge and maturity.

Let's think about this for a moment. As a very young child you idolize your parents. It is their house, they set all the rules, you never see them cry and they hold absolute power over you. In fact, they seem neigh incorruptible. They are the Alpha and Omega of your universe. However, slowly, we start to see the cracks along the edges. Finally, one day, we realize just how mortal the parents really are. They are flawed humans like us. Even worse, they have some serious problems, problems that we see that they don't seem to even recognize. Worse, we figure this out before they realize we know, so they think their wills are still dominating the landscape. In response, the children begin to wonder "why do they think themselves so high and mighty."

Thusly the cookie crumbles. Thoughts of rebellion creep into our minds. Subversion creeps into our habits. And since the parents stay blind, they don't know what's suddenly happened until it's too late and the rift is established with now way back.


Then there's the stubbornness of the old. Let's face it, they're really, really set in their ways. They refuse to change their behavior. They refuse to learn new technology. They think the olde way is best, and there's no way to get it through their heads that iPods are the coolest things ever and that texting is the communication of the future. Or that they should stop repeating themselves every five minutes to try and get a point across. Nope. Even worse when they are ridiculed, they know their idiosyncrasy, and then just shrug it off and say they're too old to change. Bull. No wonder you can't stay in contact with the younger ones if you can't keep up with the times and have to ask for help to add an attachment to your e-mail every single time you want to send one.


So yeah, it's all the older generation's fault.

TL;DR Metric

How to tell the forum you're viewing isn't super serious? Or, at the very least, filled with people who aren't seriously invested in trying to make life/the game/logical thinking/etc. better?

Step 1) Post a lengthy well-thought out detailed post about some component.
Step 2) See how many people just go "tl;dr"
Step 3) Higher score = moar fail.

The Secret to Learning Tricks

As you get better and better at a subject, you start to develop intuitive tricks to make your life easier. For example, many people know that multiplying something by 9 is easy. Multiply by 10 and subtract itself once. Or, how about multiplying 2 digit numbers by 11? You could do the 10+1 or split the digits and the middle digit is the sum of the outer two (don't forget to carry if required into the 100s digit).

While these all seem fairly common knowledge, there's a serious flaw with trying to teach these "tricks". That is when you try to teach the trick but don't give proper foundational knowledge of why it's a trick.


Returning to the multiplying tricks, the real reason these work is because multiplying is effectively shorthand for multiple additions of the same number. Without that foundation, these tricks may appear as magic. To the uninformed, these tricks are true just because. Sure they help out in a test, but when it comes to applying the concept of multiplication to other problems (like multiplying by 12) they may falter. The trick has become and answer, not the shortcut to the deeper underlying system.


This problem was recently accentuated when a friend still at Mudd posted a question about STEMs. It's a class that deals with signals and systems and moving between time and frequency domains due to sampling and a host of other things. One of the concepts is that when you sample something, you could be seeing a lower frequency of something much higher, but you're not sampling fast enough to notice. It's called aliasing.

Say you have a 1Hz signal, amplitude 2. When you sample it, in a perfect world, you would see spectra at the +1Hz and -1Hz in the frequency domain, each magnitude 1. However, say you sample it at 2Hz. Assuming we sample perfectly in phase and see each peak and trough, the sampled data could have come from say a 2Hz signal. Or 3Hz. To show this, the students are taught that their spectra lines in the frequency domain are shifted. So, the frequency domain will have spectra at the +2Hz and -2Hz points, the +3Hz and -3Hz points, and so on.


Here's the problem. They were taught that to do this you essentially copy and paste the spectras in regular intervals. So, you take the +/-1Hz signals, move it right by 2Hz, and you get a +3Hz and +1Hz spectra (magnitude 1). However, the students thought you add these new spectra to the original spectra, resulting in magnitude 2 spectra at the +/- 1Hz positions. This is weird. Now, if we "reconstruct" the signal, we have a 1Hz amplitude 4 signal? Whoa, where did that come from! I thought we started with a 1Hz amplitude 2 signal! GAAAAAH!

You see, the trick took over instead of intuition about what they were doing. In reality, the aliasing effect they were doing when moving the spectra around doesn't involve adding in the way they thought it did. The fundamental idea is to show that this could be a amplitude 2 signal with a variety of frequencies, but we don't know them because we sampled too slowly. The extra weird addition step broke things. Sure you add the spectra in general, but not in the way they were applying the trick.


Similarly, a course I'm currently TA-ing is EEC180A at UCDavis. It involves digital circuitry. There is a special kind of code called a Hardware Description Language (HDL) that lets you effectively write code for how you want your circuit to work and the computer will figure it out and implement it for you. This is a really cool trick! Saves you lots of writing and figuring out the optimal gate set up.

However, they first make them build very complex circuits using wires and physical gates. This is to build the intuition of how to design a circuit. At the end of the day, the HDL has to translate what you wrote into circuitry. If you improperly code something, maybe the computer will figure out a way to make it work functionally, but it will be a mess. The correct way is the use the code as if you were designing gates and wires. Again, the trick saves time, but fundamental understanding of what is going on inside is crucial.


That isn't to say we can't black box things. Since you are reading this, I'm sure you're using a computer with internet. Do you really need to know how the trick of pushing a key on the keyboard works? Or how your computer sends messages to servers and gets this blog? Or the way your modem protects you from hackers? Nope. We've simplified it to so you don't have to.

Then again, the moment your special simplified streamlined trick breaks, do you know how to fix it?

Am I a Gamer?

Let's look at the facts for a moment.

• I have the ability to break team balance in a number of games
• I have participated in several 24 Hour gaming marathons
• I organized these 24 Hour gaming marathons
• I played for a few seasons in the pro league of a game
• I tend to muse about game balance, game theory, and good vs. bad game mechanics
• I've played nearly every genre of games and enjoy them all
• I have over 170GBs of data in the Games directory of my computer as of this post
• I understand l337-speak
• One of my first questions about a living space is about the quality of the internet (after stuff like rent, sanitary-ness, etc.)
• I have run dedicated game servers (with remote admin powers and mods)
• I have introduced and gotten other people addicted to particular games
• I post on game development forums with ideas and advice about the design of their game
• I have done mapping for a game
• I have tried to balance and optimize above mentioned map to enjoyable playing experience
• I actively look for mods that will increase the longevity of using a game/game engine
• I have bought games with the express purpose of playing a mod for that game
• I have completed full games of Civ4, Fall from Heaven, Sins of a Solar Empire, and more (for you non-gamers, these games typically take several play sessions for mere mortals)
• I have completed single-player campaigns in a single day, only stopping for food and biological needs
• I dig up old games to play from time to time (and not out of boredom)
• I built my computer to play modern games
• I enter betas to test out games before they're released
• I have a game list of games that I own but haven't played yet
• I have not completed the campaigns for several canonical games
• I do not play World of Warcraft
• This past week I've played about 10 hours of games total, and that's a binge
• I hate level grinding and 100% completion runs
• GameFAQs guides have allowed me to progress in some games
• I have yet to fully complete a Final Fantasy game, except Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced on the GameBoy
• The only game mediums I've owned are GameBoys and PCs
• I almost never spend more than $30 on games per month
• I rarely pre-order something unless it's a wicked deal
• I didn't play StarCraft until late High School (it originally came out around my middle school years)
• In many games, I'm considered a noob.

Hm.

Trevin Standard

For those of you who don't know, I probably should have been diagnosed with ADHD or OCD or some other random mental trait that makes me... weird. Or I can blame it on my parents.

I was thinking back the other day to some stuff back in High School. Let me first say that I, overall, didn't enjoy High School. I survived, and had some cool times, but overall is was a bit of a drag. But, one of the few shining things of that time was the Band. The Royal Wilson Marching Alliance.

I am a male flautist. This means I play the flute. I found out after I picked it that it was considered a "girly" instrument. However, that just made me mad and I set out to prove them wrong. I'm still not an epic flute player, but I can hold my own.

In Band, this meant I was one of the few male flautists. I also ended up being the only senior in the section. As such, I applied for Section Leader and got it. And now we finally get to the point of the story.

I would often use the phrase "Trevin Standard" when talking with my section. Often it was in the context of "that was good, and maybe up to Mr. Chang's standard, but that's not Trevin Standard." Basically, I set the bar high and kept it high. This was for everything from playing to memorization to rhythm and drill abilities. If you weren't performing at the top of your game, I called you on it.

Some would say that I was quite the tyrant. I mean, we're talking about a nearly unobtainable level of awesome. While I felt I met my own standard in some areas, even I didn't live up to all of them. When the section started to grumble and ask what was the ubiquitous Trevin Standard that they never really got to, I explained that it was being the best, being so good that I wouldn't ever have to worry about you again while you were here in the Band. I think that they respected this and since I set the same standard for myself, they continued to work hard.

Why would I set a standard that even I couldn't quite achieve all the time? As I said in the beginning, I'm probably OCD or have slight autism or something. The result is that in everything I do, I always evaluate myself, often quite harshly, and think of ways I could do it better next time. As a Tour Guide I would constantly re-run through every line I said and tweak the bad ones, all the while optimizing the route for each set of parents and pre-frosh. Every speech I have given has been re-worked in my mind many times before and after I give it. Heck, I analyze how well I ran Powerpoint for a worship service.

It's an odd thing being your own worst critic. In some ways, it's very beneficial. You get better, you strive towards perfection. However, there is a major downside. You start becoming very critical of everyone else as well. You start to think that everyone else isn't up to par and should be trying harder. Worse, you start to think everyone is judging you for every move you make. You start to make rules of conduct to make sure everything goes perfectly. You develop archaic systems to optimize anything. You can see how stifling this can become.

Recently at our Church retreat I began to realize this problem. Sure the Trevin Standard in itself is not bad. However, I started to let it run my life, to tighten a noose around my neck with each passing day. It got to the point where when driving down the freeway I would consciously be concerned about what all the other drivers around me thought of my driving. Again, being a safe driver and trying to do better isn't bad, but this was starting to impair my ability to drive effectively.

The person who prayed for me about this called it the Fear of Man. A crippling soul crushing fear of judgement and opinions.

I've since been working on breaking this. One particular area is to offer my services for more visible roles. For example, I used to have a rule that the only reason I should be in the spotlight is if I had to. I never would volunteer. However, during that same retreat, there was a call for testimonies. I knew God wanted me to get up and tell people about my problem, but that old rule was fighting. You're not eloquent enough. You're not spiritual enough. You're doing it for the praise that is sure to come afterwards for facing your demons. Better to work on this quietly and come out when you're cured.

I finally mustered the courage to get up and give the testimony, and of course the outpouring of sympathy and empathy came. However, I wasn't prideful. As one of the pastors later said, sure you get some praise, but the message needed to get out and it can help others realize their own problems and begin healing for them as well.

So, the Trevin Standard still exists. I'm still very critical of myself and others when asked. However, I have resolved to never let it run my life.

idle....

Yeah, I know, I haven't updated in a long time.

I'm thinking of re-posting a revised mini-essay I made for a forum I follow. Basically dealing with the concept of the control point economic model for games, its usefulness and tendencies. For you non-gamers out there... sorry?

The other idea floating in my head for a while is a lovely expository on the Generation Gap. However, I was thinking of taking a little spin and blame the parents for propagating it. =]

The real problem is these take time to craft, and since school has resumed for me I'm currently suddenly without much free time. Plus, I'm a TA for a class, which means homework grading and preparing to officiate a lab section. On the other hand, I'm making pretty pictures in the Graphics course.

Primer

According to Google Analytics, I have had 1 visit. And It was me checking the formatting of the blog. Woohoo!!!!

Anyways, this little post is a way to organize my thoughts. Here I am posting a bunch of labels that I am thinking I might use. So, if you're interested in what all these labels might mean, here are the explanations.

Categorization

• current event - let's face it, my life isn't all that interesting. I'm no Rex Morgan where everyday something new and exciting and probably deadly is happening, and trying to soap opera my life would be miserably painfully long in written form. Plus, the last three days of my life can be summarized as mostly eating, sleeping, and perusing internetz/gaming. HOWEVER, on the fun chance that awesome-ness occurs, this blog might see a post and this label shall be applied.
• op-ed - this will probably be the majority of the posts. Random opinions, observations, analysis, that kind of stuff. Think of it as potentially enlightening musings about the world around us.
• school/work - these should be obvious.

Extras

• internetz - should I include something from the internet that I find interesting, be it video, comic strip or etc., this label will be applied
• wall-o-text - this is applied to a post of extremely long length. So, it is either deeply detailed and insightful, or rambling. Considering the law that every person thinks of themselves more highly than they should, it's probably rambling.
• not super serious - I prefer to be a bit snarky and satirical. If something is written for the benefit of entertainment or in a particularly funky style, this label will be applied. If you try to quote me on something from a post labeled with this and try to argue that I'm wrong, I will shrug and ignore you.
• games - it could be game theory, or about an awesome game I've played recently, or a review, or complaining about game development and where the industry is going.... you get the idea. Other labels might appear pertaining to stuff like music or movies or (heaven forbid) POLITICKs as well.

I'm sure there will be more labels that will pop up in the future, but for now enjoy this little quick sampler.

Wassup

This is the new blog for me.

There wil occassionally be updates on random stuff whenever I feel like it.

Here's some of the ideas floating in my head:
-Current Events (both personal and not)
-Observations/Musing
-Random YouTube videos

So, stick around (or run away screaming).