Greetings from cow country.

I was just kinda surfing a bit and found a link to a new product out on the digital audio market...

I had this idea about a year and a half ago, when I was brainstorming for Dr. Karuv, and he blew it off as already done. The bastard. They even got it patented. This is the kind of moment when you wish you wrote down you're ideas every now and then and mailed them to yourself. grrrrr...

Does anyone else remember me discussing the concept? This is a horrible feeling.

But yea, back to the community I go.
More on my experiences here at Deep Springs later.

Well, I leave for Deep Springs tomorrow (today). I will take pictures. I will tell Etay that everyone loves him. In my wake I am leaving my first essay for Deep Springs, which I re-read just now and must say I am very proud of. I did found a number of errors. I always will. They are preserved here.

After this essay is my Why Deep Springs essay. Both of these essays where part of Part 1. I didn't post essay 2 because it's my Oedipus essay from Mrs. JD's class. If someone really wants it, I'll post it.

Well Check 'em out, leave feedback. I'll put up my Round 2 DS essays when I get back.

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1. Describe yourself, discussing the most influential aspects of your experience and environment and your most significant or valuable accomplishments.

There exists a sense of hypocrisy in self-expressed eccentricism. Constantly I yearn to express my differences, but feel muted by the pompous aura I wish to disassociate myself from. I consider myself a bold individual, yet I am one who is well aware of the egocentric radicalism that all too often shows through as a watermark upon an expression of individuality. Moreover, what makes me any different from those arguing themselves to be individuals through the same denunciation? I fear such associations, and hereby I am attempting to break free from this seemingly hopeless situation, if at all possible.

Only recently have I fully accepted that it is my experiences that define me, and thereby I recognize that they are what define me as an individual. By this definition, it is true that everyone is an individual, and no two people have had the same experience. But the question then becomes how different are my experiences from the norm?

To begin with, let me relate the one event that has most significantly altered my experiences, and ultimately, my character. Six years before I was born, my mother gave birth to my older brother, Olof, who is affected by the genetic mutation known as Fragile-X syndrome. Although I was not alive, this is the event that has shaped my life more then anything I have personally witnessed.
A great deal of my understanding of life focuses around this unique order of events, namely the fact that Olof, the Olof that I love more then anything else in the world, was born before I was even a thought. It has brought me to realize that so much of life is beyond my control, so much of my life results from the whim of others. Here my understanding of existence has crossed paths with Sartre, namely that a man’s existence is his interaction in society, an unraveling of events, and so much of life itself is a fate sealed. Heidigger’s image of "thrownness" is also highly relevant.

Trying to establish a bilingual household, my mother was not happy when she was told that two languages would be too confusing for Olof. He could manage only one language, they said. Olof is now 23 and speaks both Swedish and English fluently. Yes, his academic skills remain on a 2nd grade level, but there is so much more to the success of man.

Olof will never write a novel, but after a family trip to Costa Rica, he wrote a two-page essay documenting his adventures. And although Olof will never go kayaking down whitewater, surely he enjoyed the thrill of canoeing the Costa Rican rainforest just as anyone can enjoy a thrill. In addition, he competes in Special Olympics, for which I do volunteer work, where his achievements have placed him in the local newspapers sports section more than anyone I know. What I have learned from Olof is that everyone can find joy, and in many ways I almost envy him, that his pleasures should come so easily, for he has a truly joyous character.

Growing up with Olof has certainly been a learning experience. As a young adolescent attending his High School track meets, I would be too embarrassed to cheer for Olof as other spectators would laugh audibly at my disabled brother in last place. But Olof has taught me the importance of cherishing what one does have, and I have a very special brother. I now proudly encourage him, unfazed.

Olof serves as a distinct example of an aspect of my life that has shaped who I am. He is a one of only four people whom I share my home with now that my oldest brother has moved away. But I have also come to recognize the seemingly less significant facets of existence as major contributors to the greater me. Formulating a mathematical analogy, I feel almost as if I am a three-dimensional polygon, rolling down the hill of life, having a virtually endless amount of sides, all having different shapes and sizes, and all of which contribute to the path gravity chooses for me.

One such facet is my placement around the dinner table. For all of my seventeen years, I have sat next to my mother on the same side of the table. My other two brothers have sat on the opposite side of the table, with my father at the head. This, like everything else, has made me myself. The dinner table has always been a central point in our household, providing a stage for a large majority of our family interaction and debate. Now that I am older, I find myself to be in constant agreement with my mother in debates, and I can see this being partially founded in my being on her "side" of the table. Being the youngest child in the house, and the last to be spoon-fed, my placement was natural, but it can not be overlooked when attempting to establish my identity.

Specific experiences constitute sides as well. One that I have learned an astonishing amount from comes from my days as soccer goalie in eight grade. My coach had just hastily informed me of the rule that a goalie could not receive passes from his own teammates. Sure enough, my defender passed me the ball after only a few short minutes of play. The problem was that my coach had not told me the consequences of breaking this rule, and like a deer in headlights, I became distraught. I screamed for someone to come and receive the ball, rationalizing death to be the result of any contact with the doomed ball. The ball rolled into the goal, tallying a point for the opposition, and I was crushed. What did I learn? The power of a panic-attack to corrupt one’s potential for rational thought. I often recall the irrationality that panic can cause, and the importance of retaining level-headedness.

My public presentation is something I have long stopped troubling myself with. It is true that I enjoy outlandish clothing more then most, but sometimes it becomes a question of function. While visiting Münich on my backpacking extravaganza this past summer, I rode a trolley wearing a Mickey Mouse midriff shirt. Why? All my other clothes were being washed, and that was the smallest, lightest upper body cover I owned. It had been selected while packing, intended for just such an occasion. I had picked it out of the free bin at a garage sale a few months earlier. Was I embarrassed to look so out of place? No, for I saw intent in my action. I rarely feel a need to ‘fit in’; it’s fun being different. That’s who I am, and this is what my experiences have made me.

Now the question remains, what do I value as my most significant or valuable accomplishments? Mostly, I value the diversity of my accomplishments. Any one of the following dualities depicts a small dispersion of the wide array of experiences I have had, and the equally diverse consequences they’ve had in molding me. Working as a network system administrator for one of Sweden’s, and now Europe’s, largest Internet media companies, Spray.se, required me to meet the demands of the hectic information technology world at the young age of 15.. My experience sipping Melange at Café Havelka in Vienna taught me the value of peaceful reflection. Attending the Intel ISEF competition, a part of which was an open inquiry session with a elite panel of ten Nobel laureates, gave the chance to discuss my research in nomadic computing with Leonard Kleinrock, inventor of Internet technology. This contrasts well with my deep love of Stockholm’s archipelago, where I’ve sailed boats of many different sizes and shapes, providing astonishing experiences lacking human interaction entirely. Attending the 1999 and 2000 ESPN Winter X-Games as a Media Photographer with full credentials, available to me as webmaster for freshangles.com, gave me a chance to photograph alongside seasoned veterans as I sat underneath the Big Air jump, my lens fixed on the sky. But my on-snow professional experience was useless when I was helping a athlete twice my age overcome fear to compete in the Special Olympics. I intern at Columbia University in order to get a feel for the formalities of academic research, but this in no way stops me from letting it all go to emerging from a steaming sauna in the depths of winter to roll around naked in the snow. Having designed modular load bearing structures with balsa wood and paper for a Destination-Imagination challenge that won my team an invitation to the International Finals was a tedious yet rewarding mental challenge. Hiking three straight days through the Austrian Alps outside Innsbruck, nourished only by cold ravioli, was a laborious counterpart. A week later I left the mountain town of Zermatt with only 60 Swiss cents and a half loaf of bread, destined for Paris. This particular effort, and the bread, lasted an exhausting 24 hours, which included a freezing night in the Lausanne train station, a real challenge of endurance.

Diversity is the cornerstone of my existence, and the outlandish scenarios I chose to describe here constitute only a fraction of my everyday life. From bohemian to geek, I choose to be both and everything in-between.

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3. Why do you want to come to Deep Springs? What do you think you might gain from the experience, and how might you contribute to the experience of others?


Mark Twain once said "Don't let school get in the way of your education." Deep Springs provides a uniquely intimate education where the student actively defines his own studies, and he is offered opportunity to model his studies around his desired education, rather than vice versa. This is something I yearn to do, and I can only agree with Twain’s words. I feel that my application to the magnet school I currently attend is reflective of my long-standing belief in academic autonomy. I view both the educational model and the existential environment of Deep Springs as radically unique aspects of the experience that I truly feel complement my interests.
As for this environment, most people think that I am maniacal when I tell them I would love nothing more then to spend two years on a ranch in the middle of the desert with two dozen other male students. Indifferent of people’s opinions, I envision myself very comfortable in the environment. My scientific pursuits in life have been very rewarding, but for me, Deep Springs would serve as a scientific sabbatical, affording me the opportunity to train the philosopher within me. The isolated environment would allow me to truly focus. As L.L Nunn said, "The desert speaks." The French author and pilot Aintoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote of the desert in Wind Sand and Stars, with an enchanting passion that captivated me. "Here I possessed nothing in the world. I was no more than a mortal strayed between sand and stars, conscious of the single blessing of breathing. And yet I discovered myself filled with dreams." The dessert environment presents a unique promise for discovery, almost wiping the slate clean.

I believe that the most important education a person can receive is a filling of this slate. The Deep Springs experience presents itself to me more as a philosophical self-assessment rather than education, allowing a student to find himself rather then forcing an ideology upon him. As much as I sympathize with the apparent Deep Springs ideology, it pleases me to an even greater extent that this ideology is in no way embedded into the principles of the school. Ideological allegiance results in zealotry, and I am glad to see that Deep Springs is averse to this. Deep Springs may often be regarded as "a cult school" at a glance, but I can confidently say that my understanding of the educational model has taken me beyond that.

An important part of understand my desire to attend Deep Springs is understanding that I am a firm believer in learning through experience. I believe not necessarily in learning life the hard way, but more so in what Thoreau called to "earnestly live it from beginning to end." "How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living," he asked. Life is an artful creation, defining existence, and it is something that needs to be studied much less than it needs to be executed. I believe that life needs to be lived. Please understand I do not preach the abandonment of academics in any way. As I see it, academic analysis is complementary to existence. Living life has come to serve a subdued role in society to analysis, and consequently people are analyzing their lives without ever having lived! The two approaches must co-exist for life to be fruitful. More than any other potential experienced available through life, I see the Deep Springs experience as a rare opportunity to live.

One of favorite quotations from all of literature comes in the introduction of Thoreau’s last essay, published post-humorously, titled Life without Principle. He begins his discussion of life with the statement: "The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer." I do not wish to attend college in order to be told answers. More than anywhere else, the Deep Springs education demands its students to challenge their studies, and pose their own questions, to think, independently. When I consider what contributions my presence would make in the Deep Springs community, I note the diversity of the experiences that have shaped me as a unique individual to be my greatest asset. I consider the independence of my thinking to be of the caliber required to keep a community such as Deep Springs on the cutting edge. I feel that I ask the aforementioned questions, I think.

For me, Deep Springs isn’t about a professional education. My application is not exactly motivated by the extraordinary internship opportunities. I have full intentions of pursuing a lengthy study in higher education. The Deep Springs experience is about making a journey into the desert in order to develop a life’s philosophy, and this is something that I consider important to find before I lose becoming lost in the entanglements and bureaucracy of profession. Deep Springs is undoubtedly a nurturing environment for such pursuits, attending to both my philosophical discovery and my yearning to live life.

"But the labor Johan, what about the labor?" It’s all part of the priceless experience that Deep Springs offers. The opportunity to have a notable voice in the democracy of a community, and the responsibilities required of a student within the Deep Springs cooperative both contribute to the what makes Deep Springs so unique, and they are critical to the formulation of a complete life’s philosophy.

This summer I met an American from Vermont in Switzerland, and when I discussed Deep Springs with him he responded, "You can milk cows for free in Vermont, too." This is true, but nowhere besides Deep Springs is the labor integrated in such a way as to complement the educational studies, effectively creating an education about life. It is this education, or rather as I mentioned before, this philosophical self-assessment, which I feel to be at the center of the Deep Springs schooling.

And so, L.L. Nunn, that is why I wish to come to the desert. But what will I bring to the Deep Springs community, and why should the desert embrace me? I feel that the diversity of my character would be fitting in the already diverse Deep Springs community. The European values of my Swedish upbringing contrast sharply with having grown up surrounded by American suburban pop-culture. I would even like to go as far as say that I am bicultural, being a active participant in both the American and Swedish lifestyle. Additionally, I cannot imagine that Deep Springs receives many applications from students as scientifically oriented as I am, and I hope this interest is taken positively, with my recognizing my strong interest in innovation. The diversity of the Deep Springs environment is critical in providing an atmosphere for social development, where leadership can be learned amidst the irregularities of variety.
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cheers.

Some summer photo's up, only europe trip left to post.
Mp3 list up.

On the thought of mp3's, here are some artists that I've added recently that are worth checking out:
Creeper Lagoon
The Hives
Jimmy Eat World
Velvet Underground
Manu Chao

The snow has arrived. I think I'm going to get up early tomorrow and take some photos. Should be a beautiful day. Then I'm going to knock down some bio..gotta love bio.

The busy-ness (no, not business) continues...

So to the point that I got a speeding ticket today. 60 in a 40. Forest Ave. Crap-ola. It's 20 MPH over the limit, making it a 5 point violation. Meaning that since its my first year driving, I lose my license...UNLESS -- I go to the summons and plea guilty and say I'm a good kid...then it goes down to 2 points, and I keep my license (the limit is 4). All together it completely sucks. I guess I really didn't realize how crappy getting a ticket could be. sheit. It ain't worth it kids. Keep legal.

I bough a rock-star jeans jacket at Salvo for 10 bucks. When I wear it to school I'm gonna tell everyone its Dolche&Gabanna. haha. Dinner time. Will compose a commentary on the experience of shopping thrift stores later. It's quite interesting.

Wow, I haven't posted in the longest time. I've been busy.

Christmas break involved some wonderful skiing, from which I returned to confront the challenge that has faced me since -- the Deep Springs essays.

Due in the mail on tuesday, I don't really have much time left. I have the first one, "what is evil?", pretty much done. The second one, "Author a manifesto", I got through with help from my junior year research paper. The next one, dealing with the Deep Springs mentality of "work in the service of humanity", is a really good peice, in my opinion. The last one, "what is the purpose/the shortcomings of high school education" (paraphrased...all except the first one, "what is evil", are paraphrased), is the only remaining one, though here I am very opinionated, so I do not think it will difficult. I will be conquering it this afternoon.

This year I've already bought 2/3 the CDs that I bought last year -- 2. The Velvet Underground is really awesome. I picked up their 1969 s/t at Tower for 5.99 out of the cheap bin when I was there looking for Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come. I ended up also buying Manu Chao - Poxima Estacion for $17 at B&N...I've been looking online for that CD for ages, and when I saw it there (again looking for Refused), I had to buy it. [sigh] It is an awesome CD though, no doubting that.

I now have over 16 gig's of mp3s. Craziness.

An interesting quote from Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, on my whole NHS stance "When I was in high school, one of the first honors I got was to be a member of the Arista...when I got into the Arista I discovered that what they did in their meetings was to sit around and discuss who else was worthy to join this wonderful group....When I became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, I had ultimately to resign because that was another organization most of whose time was spent in choosing who was illustrious enought to join."

I've been keeping an amazon wishlist as of late, mostly to keep track of all the books I want to read. I added it to the main navigation menu. Check it out.

I'm visiting Deep Springs for 1/24 - 1/28 . . .I leave the 23rd for Las Vegas, where I booked a room in a hostel for a night. Good stuff. I return early the 29th, on a red eye flight. I'm planning to do a lot of reading out there, seeings as I should have quite a bit of free time, when everyone else is doing their homework. I will be partaking in labor and classes though (observation only on the classes).