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Past Projects
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- The Purposes of Literature after Auschwitz: A Comparison of Adorno, Levi, and Pagis
My senior thesis in comparative literature, which compares Theodor Adorno, Primo Levi, and Dan Pagis, all through the lense of Adorno's claim that "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." In it, I argue that Adorno and Levi both claim that the purpose of literature after Auschwitz is to prevent future atrocities like the Holocaust but that it necessarily fails to do so because it inadvertantly supports the prerequisites of such atrocities. Pagis, on the other hand, employs the motif of silence in his poetry about the Holocaust, thus calling into question assumptions by Adorno, Levi, and others, about how one can effectively write or speak about the Holocaust in the first place. This paper won Colorado College's annual "Excellence in Comparative Literature" award in 2006. The research for it was funded in part by the 2005 Robert Lewis Prize in Philosophy.
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- The Possibility of Anti-essentialism: An Examination and Defence of Wittgenstein's Family Resemblances
In this paper, for my course on "20th Century Analytic Philosophy," I defend Ludwig Wittgenstein's claim that some terms (like "game") cannot be defined because there is no single, essential characteristic that fits all members of the set of their various uses ("board game," "card game," "the game of life"). The uses of the word "game," in fact, share several properties with only some of the other members of that set, much like the members of an extended family will not all share the same attributes, but will share many attributes with their immediate relatives. I defend Wittgenstein's position against the arguments of Haig Khatchadourian and Robert Richman.
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- Kant and Levinas in Cahoots: A Report on the Contradictory Nature of Progress
In this paper for my 2005 advanced philosophy seminar on "Evil," I argue that the contradicting claims of Kant (that we must believe in progress in order to improve ourselves and the world) and Levinas (that contemporary atrocities make it unreasonable to believe in progress) are at the root of moral apathy we see in the United States (and elsewhere) today. It concludes by suggesting a new way of thinking about progress by reconciling these two positions.
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- OpenID Explained
Before the recent facelift of openid.net, there was no useful place to send everyday users confused about what OpenID is and how to log in with it. My friend, Benjamin Thomas, and I set out to create such a website. The result is OpenID Explained, which incorporates fun cartoons, clear language, and a form for determining a user's OpenID based on the services they use (e.g., LiveJournal or AOL).
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- Life as a Puzzle
Looking for a way to fill some free time in November, 2007, I came upon something called "National Novel Writing Month" (or "NaNoWriMo" for short), a contest by the Office of Letters and Light to see who can manage to write an entire novel in a month. I took the project on, and the result was Life as a Puzzle, a novel that questions the notions of fitting in and of being unique with equal displeasure. The novel was posted online in increments of roughly 2000 words.
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- Colorado College Game
The original Colorado Codage (computing club) project to create a first-person shooter that takes place in Tutt Science Center was enveloped by an adjunct course in game programming. Our new goal became to create a gaming engine that allows developers to create their own games without recompiling any code (simply by providing links to the correct XML files), allowing players to play these games with different representations: text, 2D graphics, and 3D graphics. Although the engine was not completed, we did manage to create a 3D multiplayer maze using it.
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- The tenk calculator
As part of my course in "Analysis of Algorithms" (2006), our professor had each student create a table of different equations to show us the importance of order. He included the function n! with the highest values of n at n=1000 and n=10000. Although he admitted before the homework assignment was due that he expected us to predict these values, not calculate them, one of my classmates and I decided to calculate 10000! anyway. This program is our product (literally). It can actually compute factorials up to just above 10000, though we did not add much functionality after that so as not to waste too much memory. As an aside, the result for 10000! is almost a full page long.
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- In Concurrence
This creative writing piece is a full-length half-musical that I co-wrote with another college student in 2005. It tells the story of a group of train-passengers on their way to the town of Concurrence, one of whom may or may not be insane, one of whom may or may not be inane, and none of whom are at all mundane. (Clarification: a half-musical is a text that doesn't have enough music in it for the prestigious title of "musical," but just enough music to be rejected by publishers nationwide.)
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- Stale, Longwinded, and Otherwise Horrid First Lines
This is a short story I wrote in my first-year "Beginning Fiction Writing" course. It is inspired by the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which seeks to find the most confusing and convoluted first lines to pieces of fiction that a submitter can devise. Each of the first lines in my story, though hardly competitive in such a prestigious contest, nevertheless bristles the neck, grits the teeth, and just about kills time.
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