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Reflecting upon the video lectures from this week, I found it very interesting to recognize how true it is that most scientific and medical advances are made as a result of war. Usually when we think of prosthetic limbs we think of people who lost an arm or leg. However, with the Third Hand Project that was talked about in lecture, they weren’t replacing any limbs but instead adding addition help. Upon researching this further, the researcher was disappointment with the lack of accuracy that this robotic arm had and its lack of precision when receiving the muscle contractions from the hand. This is how I feel that prosthetic limbs vary whether they are supplementing or replacing a body part. My uncle had a prosthetic hand, because of medical complications when he was born. However, he always was so grateful for everything the mechanical hand could do and appreciated it even if it wasn’t perfect. The expectation that comes with the mechanical hand depends on the...

The topic that I found most interesting in this week’s topics was Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times silent film. I liked this film the most not only because of the comedic capability of Charlie Chaplin , but also because of the socioeconomic commentary about the society in the United States during the 1930’s and 1940’s. This was a time period where industrialization really took off, and a large majority of workers were showing up to factories to stand as a part of an assembly line all day. This was after the Great Depression, so although these people were happy to be employed, they still recognized that they were just seen as replaceable laborers.  Basically Charlie Chaplin shows in this film how workers were just extensions of the machines and didn’t do anything to stimulate their brains, since most of their jobs had been replaced by machines, or in a sense robots. Henry Ford started the assembly line work for the mass production of the automobile ...

The link between math and art is much more prevalent than one may think. The first connection that many people can make is with shapes and paintings, because the more exact you can make angles and shapes, the more accurate your work of art can be. An artist who clearly exhibits this type of work is Ilya Bolotowsky, who specializes in cubism and geometric abstraction. To the right is one of his works.  Another, more conceptual way is seen in any house or building you look at. Any structure no matter how simple or complex uses an enormous amount of math to ensure that all the proportions and measurements are correct. This is needed for the simplest shed and for architectures more like a work of art such as the Sydney Opera House seen below. The most abstract way that I have thought about the hybrid of numbers and art is with the approach of how numbers are incorporated in art as entertainment. This can be seen on adult shows such as Numbers, as m...