HIST 390 Blog

In class this week we talked about the differences between realism and idealism.  Idealism represents that thought that somewhere in the universe there is an ideal that we should strive for.  This ideal in many cases is represented by an ideal God, or gods, and people are seen as the lesser version of this divine and should work towards the ideal divinity.  It can be guessed that idealists tend to be religious.  A realist however, does not believe that there is an ideal somewhere.  The idealist seeks an ideal that touches the soul and is beautiful.  The realist is skeptical and points our that lots of terrible things are not good, and that people often find terrible things to be moving.  Also, the realist believes that we are all just as alike as we are not alike, and that we only like things because they are like something, but not like it.  What I like about these two types of viewpoints is that they describe the same end point, but different ways of getting there.  For the idealist beauty is the divine shown.  For a realist beauty is something we find familiar to us, but restated in a different way.  Interestingly enough, the very different between idealists and realists is the familiarity of both recognizing beauty, but the difference in the perception of why it’s beautiful.

We also talked about the analog computer, and the time periods from WWII to the Cold War in which analog computers were invented and then improved.  A very important figure was Vannevar Bush who created Ratheon missile defense.  He also considers further individual use for sharing information through Memex.  He also thinks that people think similarly to hypertexts, learning and then connecting and jumping to another idea.  We then talked about the evolution into electronic computers from analog computers, and ENAC in WWII as the first digital computer using Thermionic Tubes.  The vacuum tubes used by computers were later replaced by Silicon transistors.  Finally, we talked about the microphone and how sound is amplified, a feat that I always took for granted.  I have a communications professor who likes to talk about old bands he’s seen to our class.  He always says that a lot of these old bands sound better now in concert than they did back in the day because they didn’t have the advanced amplification technology that could fill up massive arenas while keeping up the sound quality.