I personally did not get a lot out of today’s lecture. Maybe I was day dreaming about being outside in the 78 degree weather in February. Whatever it might have been, I know we discussed the impact color and race. I found it interesting that you were able to pull up a website and it showed the different races and classifications. Even though it is 2018 and segregation is no longer a thing, there is still the issues of blacks and whites. There might not be signs that say black restroom and white restroom, and blacks do not have to sit in the back of the bus. However, that does not stop people from living into the stigma of race. If everyone was able to follow/ accept laws there wouldn’t have been a need for signs to segregate people in the past. We carry around the common sense of race, but there is a lot more to race than what people see on the outside.

In the beginning of class we talked about how music is different in today’s time due to the African decent of music. We listened to a couple songs and talked about the different beats and accents in music. This was nothing new to me since I played the violin for years but I thought it was really cool to hear the live performance when everyone was clapping on the wrong accented beat. I hate going to a concert and nobody knows how to clap on the right beat and together, so I can only imagine how the performer felt to hear that in the crowd. After discussing this topic we moved on to talking about minstrel shows. This was an entirely new topic that I was not familiar with. A minstrel show is when white men would dress up in white gloves with black face paint and exaggerated lips. Only white people could attend these comic shows and that makes sense due to the sensitivity of the subject. I personally feel that these minstrel shows are quite strange but I guess it was normal in the beginning of the 19th century when these came about. At the end of class we looked at how minstrel characters exist even in today’s society. Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny can both be considered minstrel characters. Mickey has white gloves and black ears and bugs bunny has white gloves and exaggerated lips. Until next class!

I thoroughly enjoyed today’s lecture and it got my mind thinking. When you think about it noise is usually just the background sound that we don’t pay any attention to it’s the sound that is distracting us from what we are doing. As humans we are always looking for signs and “signals” to let us know that its time to do something or somethings happening, etc. The example that Professor O’Malley provided in class really helped me to grasp the signal and noise concept. The example was when we go to ask or mom or parents a question and mom doesn’t give us an answer she just starts to lecture. The question would be a signal and the lecture is noise. It is the difference between what we want to hear and what we don’t want, which would just be noise. I’ve always thought that as people with higher education we shouldn’t think of questions only with a yes or no answer, but like you said in class any problem can be reduced to a yes no question. It just makes everything more simple and is a less complicated way to answer a question. The one thing that I am still having a hard time understanding from class is the concept of information being related to uncertainty and the more uncertainty, the more information. The U and Q example didn’t help me understand this at all either. I guess my brain can’t grasp on to this concept. Overall I really enjoyed the lecture on signal to noise ratio.