Cool product!

Seppo sent me a link to this product today:

The braille screen works with electromagnetic or piezoelectric principles. When the current or voltage goes through every array of six stitches, the resulting rise and decline gives birth to braille. The product scans the original printed matter, then translates the images into analog electrical signals with an optical-to-electrical transducer. Finally, it translates the analog electrical signal into a digital signal.

That’s so rad!

My MIT senior thesis was on a “refreshable Braille multi-line display for the blind” — sort of a computer screen for electronic content that displayed in Braille. It was also a piezoelectric based system.

The big challenge with Braille systems at the time was that it was both costly and challenging to create a consumer-priced electronic display that displayed more than one line at a time. Having more than one line is really important for the ability to scan text rapidly to find what you are looking for, which experienced Braille readers can do as easiler as seeing people can with written text. However, most refreshable display systems generally only show a line or two, because the parts are expensive. With a scanning mechanism like this, I am not sure if it can do what we hoped to do with full-page displays, but this is an awesome product nonetheless. I wonder how much it goes for.

There are a lot of cool gadgets for people who could use them, but a barrier is cost. When creating products like this, is particularly important to keep the prices down, down, down.

Me & Black America

I am very pro-black. I say that the way I would say I’m pro-women, pro-Asian, pro-Latino, etc., which is to say, I am not pro-black over all other races/subgroups, but supportive of the socioeconomic and political advancement of black Americans so that we as a country can create parity among the different groups. Perhaps what I mean is more that I am black-positive.

But in particular, I point out the fact that I am pro-black because I think it’s less obvious than my pro-women, pro-Asianness. Because, well, duh. Hahah. And because I think there are specific roots for my black-positivity.

Unlike many of my peers and friends, I had a lot of black teachers when I was growing up. Several of my homeroom teachers were black. Everyone’s favorite teacher from my elementary school as the super nice, super pretty, super cool art teacher, who was black. My music teacher, who taught us all the difference between ‘melody’ and ‘harmony’ as well as a ton of civil right movement songs, was a kind of gruff, been-a-teacher-forever-don’t-let-me-see-you-goofing-off black womaan. You either loved her or hated her, but she was definitely a strong woman. I grew from being terrified of her to kind of hating her to sort of loving her on reflection.

As I’ve mentioned before, I also had a lot of black classmates and friends when I was small. So at my elementary school, with both the teacher and student populations as mixed as they were, Black History Month wasn’t just a short month where someone made an announcement once and that was it. Everyone always did book reports on black historical figures, so we all knew ridiculous amounts of things about people like Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver (who also came up for reports when we were studying inventors and scientists), Martin Luther King, Jr., and whole slews of other people. We learned who really invented the cotton gin, the tragic early history of blood transfusions, the difficulties of the segregated south and the brave students who first integrated.

It was just a very natural part of my upbringing. And because of my specific interest in Asian American studies and because of my bleeding pinko heart, I paid attention with perked up ears whenever other race issues came up.

It was pretty shitty that there was so much black-Asian tension in the major cities when I was growing up though. Well, there probably still is. It’s weird because my profession and my suburban life removes me so solidly from most of society enough that I don’t know what the current state of things is as far as black-Asian relations when I’m living in a major metro area. Sigh. This is why I miss taking public transportation. That’s where I feel like I’m really with the random people of my community/city.

Anyway, discrimination against blacks in the US is so pervasive and obvious to me, yet so many people act like it’s not happening that it is appalling. It’s so weird to me that people can spend any time thinking about the issues at hand and NOT conclude there are major problems that we as a nation need to address. Of course, I mean that in a larger sense of tolerance and acceptance of differences in general, but it just seems so… obvious.

Rant rant. Ramble ramble.

All Are Same

A couple of years ago, there was a big hit movie (and a tv bomb based on it) called “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. I totally loved it. And most people I know did too. I totally related to it.

How many times have I heard a friend say, “My mom made me eat four helpings. She kept pushing us to eat more. You know how _____ moms are,” where the _____ could be Korean, Chinese, Italian, Jewish, Irish, Black, Mexican, so on and so forth. You could even substitute an American region (say, Southern) rather than an ethnic or cultural background. Each of the friends who say this seems to think overfeeding loved ones is something owned by the specific culture/ethinicity in question.

It’s not.

Almost every culture shows affection and caring through food. The basic survival of a species depends on the ability to find and provide food to keep themselves alive. If you are related to someone — maybe a grandparent or even a parent — who lived through the Great Depression, or someone who immigrated from a country with scarcer resources than the U.S., or maybe just really have a deep passion for cuisine and family meals, then you know what it means to be fed until you are overstuffed.

The older I get, the more people I meet, the more I see that so many cultures are so alike. The more I studied feminism, the more I saw links between feminist discourse and Asian-American discourse. And the knowledge I peripherally picked up about black and Latino studies utilized similar social paradigms and common terminology. Of course there are deep differences as well which should not be ignored, but the similarities help diverse groups of people to understand each other and to understand that progress in one area can help with progress in another. We lift each other up.

I grow frustrated when people increasingly see differences as they get older, as they run into more negative experiences. I see more commonalities, more bridges, more chances to relate and cooperate.

*sings “We Shall Overcome” to self at the top of lungs*

Chomp!

This is an utterly contentless entry.

But there is no way this picture is not worth it.