World Population

This is an early screenshot from a web application I'm working on that visualizes historical trends. For each country, I created four metrics that were represented by the different color lines. What appears to be a long gray border under the nation's names is actually 3 separate lines that are supposed to represent population.

According to worldometers.info, the current world population growth rate is 1.13% per year. At first it doesn't sound like much, but this is actually an insanely fast growth rate. To put it in perspective, with this growth rate the world population will double roughly every 50 years. 

If we look at the history of population growth, it's apparent that explosive population growth is a relatively young "problem". Only in the past few centuries has world population skyrocketed to the current 7.4 billion. 

In the case of my application, I put in the 1% growth rate and didn't give it any thought. It was only when I started working on the graphical elements that I realized the issue. My little "population bars" double in length every minute (I compressed each year into a second). Thus there was no easy way to graphically represent the scale of population growth. After all, give it a few minutes and even the integer data type itself gets overflowed (as seen in this current screenshot of the application.)

This reality has made me re-evaluate what I aim to express with this application. Originally I thought it would be compelling to show how historical trends repeat, to show how the world works at a macro level so that even the individual with his/her short life can fathom and be inspired by it.

But issues such as population growth remind me: Although history repeats itself, it also generates new trends all the time. Trying to predict its course is, as Tolstoy often advocated, a fool's errand.

And looming over all of this is the fact that the world will end eventually. No matter how I try to represent my little worlds, they should inevitably collapse if I am being realistic about the state of humanity on the earth. Overpopulation is just one of the ways in which this could happen. Thus my idea of depicting history has become unexpectedly depressing. I wonder if I should rename my application to "Apocalypse Simulator" instead?

Update: Redesign!

As you may have noticed, One Iris has undergone a visual overhaul recently. The tabs have been merged into a single navigation bar, and the archives have been placed into a dropdown menu from said bar. There have been various minor changes, and a color theme change as well.

I had a lot of fun (and frustration) digging into the page's source code. Blogger's built-in editor is a far cry from sublime, I have a lot more appreciation for good text editors now. I picked up a bit of HTML and CSS in my software engineering course this semester, but I'm definitely far from being a web development expert. That being said, I hope you guys like it. :)

Music: Going Home

Summer Vacation has taken on a new meaning in my college years. For years, the two and a half months represented pure, unproductive, lazy bliss. Of course, it's an even longer three and a half months in college. Yet as the vacation's duration has stretched, so too have my expectations associated with it. I've been home for two weeks now, and I feel a constant pressure to re-organize my life, create impressive personal projects, and in other ways define my professional identity.

For the first two weeks however, I've taken a break to relax, read, and relearn the piano, which I had stopped playing in college. I've also been reminiscing about older shows and games I played, perhaps longing to experience the same pure wonder and engrossment I once could achieve on a daily basis.

The most recent memory of absolute engrossment I have is from about exactly one year ago, in the summer of 2015. In that summer, I watched the anime "Shin Sekai Yori" or "From the New World" in the span of around a week. The show was highly thought provoking and I give it my highest recommendation. As I recalled my enjoyment of the show, one song kept rising to my memory. It captured the essence of the series for me: its emotional depth, contradictory nature, darkness, and stunning beauty.

The song is named "Ienikaeru" (Going Home):

This song could be described as the main theme of Shin Sekai Yori. The show opens its first scene with the piece, and evokes it in key moments of character and plot development. I won't be analyzing the piece's importance in the show, as doing so would be impossible without giving the plot away. Rather, I'll be discussing the piece from within the larger context of art in general, as it is a significant artifact of Western culture.

Did I just claim that an anime song was a significant Western cultural influence? Well yes, but not quite in the way one may expect. For those more musically inclined, forgive me if the following does not come as a surprise to you.

The main theme of "Shin Sekai Yori" (From the New World) comes from a symphony of the same name, composed by Antonín Dvořák in 1893. "Going Home" is a well-known piece of classical music, often presented in beginner's books in a simplified version known as "Largo". I looked in my first piano book, and lo and behold there it was. I had played this song in 3rd grade and simply forgotten it.

As I researched the song in its original form and viewed its choir renditions, I was overcome with awe. It is a simple, nostalgic piece evoking the spirit of returning home after a long work day. And yet in the context of "Shin Sekai Yori", the piece had come to take on an unfathomable new significance to me, simply by virtue of its associations to the show's plot and themes. By listening to the original version and studying its history, the piece again gained a new dimension of meaning to me. Words cannot explain the sort of wonder I experienced in that moment.

I often like to ponder what makes a work of art, well, art. I feel this experience has made my understanding clearer in some mysterious way. This simple melody, played by many a beginner piano student, not only holds a time transcending emotion in its notes, but it also evolves with new artistic mediums and themes, lending its historical legacy to modern expression.

Truly wonderful! "Going Home" has grown from its origin to modern day media, maintaining and iterating on the emotions contained in its notes. Finally, after all this the piece has found me as I have, interestingly enough, returned home. What new meanings will I give those notes in my mind as I now play it myself, in this lazy summer evening as I relearn the piano? Perhaps this is but a small part of the wonder that drives the professional musician or composer...