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(04/24/13 12:00am)
On April 21, about 50 students attended a candlelight vigil hosted by various Muslim student and activist groups to honor of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings. Last semester, The State Press ran a letter from a reader calling Islam a not-so-peaceful religion. Events like the vigil this Sunday demonstrate just how wrong that letter truly was.It’s easy to forget that the extreme actions of a few do not represent the whole.Yes, the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings were Muslim, and to many shallow-minded individuals, that is an affirmation of their beliefs that American Muslims are violent and hateful.Yet, those two suspects don’t speak for the 50 or so Muslim students at the vigil who mourned the needless loss of life, nor do they represent the millions of other patriotic red-blooded American Muslims who mourn the tragedy as much as any non-Muslim American.Those who spoke at the vigil delivered messages of hope and understanding. They called on other Muslims to help the less fortunate in the memory of the victims in Boston.It’s clear that American Muslims are poorly understood by the rest of America. Rather than angrily responding to those who will inevitably demonstrate bigotry toward the Muslim community, those who spoke at the vigil promoted messages of cultivated understanding and affirmed that tragedies against innocent people transcend religion. They stressed that we are all American and that diversity is a wonderful quality for our nation.The letter, which has remained in the back of my mind since it was first published, says, “Liberals keep telling us that Islam is the religion of peace. Over and over we hear this line, possibly caused by having never read the Quran, watched the news, listened to the sermons given by imams or simply self-delusion.”Nowhere at the vigil did I see any of the hate or violence that the author of that letter claimed to be an inherent part of Islam.One individual stood out in particular. One of the organizers of the event, Huthaifa Shqeirat, the son of a local imam, told me that he was present at the vigil to show sympathy towards the Boston victims. When I asked him if he was personally worried that people will persecute Muslims in the wake of the discovery of the identity of the bombers, he told me that he wasn’t. He told me that he believes people underestimate the IQ of the American people.He was extremely kind to me, as were all the organizers of the event. It’s unfortunate more non-Muslims didn’t attend the vigil. They would have seen that American Muslims are far more peaceful and patriotic than the credit that is often given to them.Reach the columnist at Jacob.Evans@asu.edu or follow him at @jacobevansSP
(04/15/13 12:30am)
I believe every college student eventually asks themselves if their time at school was really worth it.
(04/09/13 12:00am)
As a Star Wars nut, the news of the closing of Lucas Art’s internal game development branch initially made me rather sad. Most gamers remember Lucas Arts as being kind of like the Pixar equivalent to the gaming world. Every game they made throughout my childhood was fantastic.
Lately Lucas Arts has failed across the board to produce anything of any quality. The same company that held the rights to such amazing titles as "Grim Fandango" and "Rogue Squadron" was busying itself making Star Wars dance simulators.
The closest thing to a shred of hope Lucas Arts had left was their now defunct project known as "Star Wars: 1313." Even 1313 had every sliver of quality sucked out of it over its long development, until it seemed to be nothing more than a boring corridor shooter with Star Wars aesthetics.
Actually, the more I sit and think about it, the more I’m convinced that the closing of Lucas Arts is probably one of the best things to happen that company’s intellectual property.
At one point in history, Lucas Arts was at the forefront of gaming innovation. From original intellectual property, such as "Grim Fandango" and the Monkey Island series, to "Star Wars: Tie Fighter," Lucas Arts constantly redefined genres and took important risks. Recently, this trend towards pushing the envelope has pretty much died.
However, for anyone who has held out hope for the reboot of some of Lucas Art’s forgotten treasures — please, Disney, make "Tie Fighter 2," you’re my only hope —the closing of Lucas Arts is probably the best chance we had.
The reason Lucas Arts was so amazing in the past was that it was willing to take risks to make the games unlike anything else. If you go back and play some of the Star Wars games from the end of the Nintendo 64 era, you might notice that they are still exceedingly play-able.
Lucas Arts stopped taking risks and instead pandered to the lowest common denominator. The same thing that happened to Lucas Arts is what people hate about Electronic Arts: They just got boring and greedy.
Now that Lucas Arts intellectual property can be licensed out to third-party developers, the risks needed to make a great game are taken by the developers who are now allowed to take them.
Maybe Tim Schaffer can start making more "Grim Fandango" games.
Disney may be a giant and greedy megacorporation, but it is not stupid. It knows better than to let the massive fan support toward Lucas Arts go to waste, but it wasn't going to take all the financial risks required to do it itself. Reach the columnist at jacob.evans@asu.edu or follow him at @jacobevanSP
(04/01/13 12:00am)
My dear friend and esteemed colleague Sean McCauley wrote that the government should not be involving itself in matters regarding marriage. He was referring to the recent discussion sparked by the Supreme Court's hearing on the gay marriage debate.
(03/25/13 4:25am)
My English professor wrote to my class, saying that the moment we cannot put down our technology, we become a slave to it.
(03/21/13 11:38pm)
Before the recent rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, sparked a national discussion, I wrote a column about how the lack of proper sexual education contributes to the sexual assault problem in this country. The case in Ohio demonstrates that we need more education about the issue of rape before we can have a worthwhile discussion of it. Steubenville has dominated our attention, because it hits close to home, while simultaneously remaining too incomprehensible to have any productive dialogue about it. Frankly, I have yet to see any of the arguments covering the case even approach reality. The controversy surround the media coverage of the rapists should infuriate any sensible person. On one hand, there are those that not only blame the victim, but defend the perpetrators. On the other hand, I fear anyone attempting to discuss the rapists as failed human beings rather than evil monsters would be accused of defending their actions or minimizing their damage. If there is one all-powerful demonstration of the horrible effects of our failure to provide quality sex education, especially in regards to respecting one another's bodies, it is the number of people who have tried passing off the Steubenville case as not rape. It's heartbreaking that many of my own friends have come to me after similar terrible incidents happened to them. Most of them come armed with reasons why it wasn't really rape, because it happened at a party and not in a dark alleyway, and because the rapists were people they knew and not mask-wearing strangers. I believe that what the boys in Steubenville did was evil and inexcusable, yet I doubt either boy woke up the morning of that party planning on raping anyone. I doubt that those boys even actively thought what they were doing was rape. A country that is unwilling or unable to understand rape is not going to be capable of stopping rape. We cannot honestly be surprised that so many rapes like this go unreported when, as I mentioned in my previous column, our society spends more time shaming girls for dressing scandalously than we do on teaching everyone to respect each other's bodies. There is no easy solution to the country's rape problem. Our current strategy — shirking the responsibility of teaching our youths not to rape — is clearly failing us. If we learn anything from the Steubenville case, I hope it is that we as a society understand that we allow these kinds of horrible incidents to occur, because we fail to understand them. Right now we are raising the next generation of adults to be as ignorant as the last generation about sex and about rape. Just as casual racism has been become significantly less common after we began to embrace and emphasize tolerance in our schools and at home, so too can our current rape culture begin to die out if we teach our children about these issues long before they can become victims or rapists.Reach the columnist at Jacob.Evans@asu.edu or follow him at @JacobEvansSP
(03/03/13 10:53pm)
It seems odd that a young child — too young to read and too short to see over countertops — would ever gladly stare down the 30-foot-tall skeleton of a two-ton Allosaurus. Nevertheless, many scientists such as myself and Stephen Jay Gould began our scientific careers as children doing exactly that.As a timid, suburban kid with neither talent nor promising intellect, gazing at dinosaur fossils assured me the world was not as mundane as suburban Mesa. Through the frustrations of learning to read in first grade, I dutifully worked to memorize the long names of all the best dinosaurs, so I could read the "grown-up" dinosaur books that didn't even have pictures. For the first time in my life, I actually found learning to be fun and worth the effort. If we can find the next cultural sensation to inspire a deep sense of curiosity in our youth, we can captivate the kids who only need a push in the right direction to start exercising their brains. We could raise a generation with a real drive to succeed in science.As heartbreaking as it is to admit, the Jurassic Park-fueled dinosaur craze of my childhood is mostly gone. To me this raises a troubling issue. Children from the '50s, '60s and '70s felt the rush of the Space Race, and in the '80s and '90s we had dinosaur-mania. What is igniting the scientific curiosity of children today? Even modern technological advances lack the raw emotional impact of dinosaur mania.We seldom need to worry about the naturally-gifted youngsters, but what about those average kids made from two parts mundane and one part vanilla? What about those kids that might never learn to love exploring the universe unless they're taught by a terrifying reptile the size of a building? What about kids like me?We're going to need those kids if we hope to maintain our nation's position as a hotbed of creativity and scientific innovation.By the time children begin their careers in our dismal education system, it's too late.As part of a summer internship, I taught a science, math and technology class for at-risk elementary school kids. The children had an entrenched resistance toward learning. One shy girl refused to participate in any of my activities because "science is too hard and boring."On the last day, I led the children in a squid dissection. If you ever need to observe the full gamut of the emotions of children, make a class of them dissect a cephalopod. Some children left the room holding back their lunch, while others were hysterically laughing. The most beautiful part of the experience was watching the shy girl not only take the initiative to dissect her table's squid, but also follow me like a shadow asking hundreds of insightful questions. It sickens me to admit, but with our current education system, that girl is almost certainly doomed to regain her disinterest in science. We allow bright minds like her's to go to waste, because we failed to inspire a desire to learn within them. Whether it requires bringing our children to more museums or some new way of introducing them to a richer world, for those kids like myself, we need to do something. Maybe it's time to bring dino back?Reach the columnist at Jacob.Evans@asu.edu or follow him at @JacobEvansSP
(02/24/13 10:37pm)
Many people have their own theories about the collapse of modern civilization.
(02/18/13 1:00am)
In "Die Hard," John McClane flys all the way from New York to California just to see his wife, and some German guy up and kidnaps her. Did you think that just because it was Christmas, John McClane suddenly wasn't going to do his job of wrecking some terrorists? Not a chance, buster.
(02/11/13 1:00am)
The Star Wars saga is a series of movies created by a man that looks like a hairy ham sandwich and is also one of the most iconic film series ever created. For over 30 years, the Star Wars franchise has dominated pop culture.
(02/06/13 1:00am)
I like to tell people that my face is just constantly doing a really good impression of the Rocky Mountains, but between you and me, I just have excessive acne.
(01/28/13 12:00pm)
When talking critically about comedy and what makes it so important, it's almost mandatory that the absolutely weird nature of humor gets a mention.
(01/16/13 1:00am)
Like dinosaurs and giant squid, ants belong to a select collection of creatures that truly ignite our imaginations.
(01/13/13 10:05pm)
I once went to an alpaca farm with a few friends. The woman who owned the place asked us what we studied. I told her I was a biology major.
(01/08/13 12:00am)
Seventy years after the Holocaust, the eugenics movement should have withered away and died. Even in this supposed modern era of tolerance, there is a vocal minority that advocates for a new eugenics program: imposing restrictions on human reproduction, so that only “superior” individuals may reproduce.
(12/11/12 12:32am)
For the past three months, I have been studying a species of ant called Temnothorax rugatulus. More specifically, I study how rugatulus interact with one another and choose new homes. I had never even seen the homes they live in outside of the lab — until last weekend.
(12/03/12 1:21am)
Sometimes the most poignant questions can be found in the unlikeliest of places. For my fellow nerds who have played the video game “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” gamers are asked to make decisions based on the question, "What is better – to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?"
(11/27/12 12:37am)
One of the most fascinating elements of the human condition is that of choice and consequence. Learning about people requires not only understanding their environment and constitution, but the choices they make. Video games make a brilliant medium for art, because they force the player to experience the nature of choice actively, rather than passively.
(11/19/12 1:05am)
Talking to our children about sex is hard to do. At times, it's more than just a little awkward. Our traditional approach has been to look the other way and hope for the best. In the process, we only ensure that succeeding generations would never receive the best possible sex education.
(11/07/12 1:44am)
Until last week, my understanding of the inner machinations of computers was reduced to the “black magic and the vile sorcery of the Hobgoblins.”