About

 

A few summers back (actually, it was last summer, to be honest) I spent six weeks as an exchange student in the south of Japan. In my time there, I felt something I never quite had before- with a breathtaking landscape of mist-shrouded mountains curling around you, aesthetically geometric houses and an ocean of salty water that reaches out and out like outer space, it was epic. I walked (trained, bused) everywhere with the sense of holistic beauty and, therefore, whatever I did, it was sharp and clean, like a knife. Simple tasks on a backdrop as such seem new, foreign and, for the first time in a while, exciting. I returned home with a better sense of where I was, who I was, and, when I thought about it, who I wanted to be.

 

 I am Jay Hack, a 16 year-old soon-to-be junior from Huron High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In fact, I’ve lived my entire life in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’m a pretty clean looking kid, for the most part. I’m the type who’s most likely observing numbers and shapes in his head when you wonder, “now what the hell is that kid doing, flaring his nostrils and twitching?” I realized a couple of years ago how ambitious I was, and I’ve felt it building since; now you see? What do you get when you combine ambition with flared nostrils? Well, hopefully I’ll answer that by January 10^th. I leave in four hours on a five-point-five month long exchange excursion to Nagano, Japan.

 

 I work in an artificial intelligence laboratory at the University of Michigan, in my hometown of Ann Arbor. It’s pretty interesting work- I’m the type to get hung up in small details though, which doesn’t always go over too smoothly in the realm of general, academic concepts. A few weeks ago, for instance, I spent about three days work writing my own long and convoluted algorithm for something numerous other options existed. They were all… unclean. As it turned out, there was a perfectly simple solution built in to the system. And, as it turned out, my partner had known of it. I was pretty thrown off and, now that i think of it, irrationally frustrated.

 

 I’ve spent the past summer working with machine vision: image processing applied in a certain way. It boils down to pixels and their arrangements. Pixels? The smallest bit of information an image can contain. The dots of color that make up a frame, or brightly lit squares that describe fragments of a much larger picture. My intention, and the idea of this blog, is to provide insight into a brightly lit culture through small ideas: stories, descriptions, what I might find myself gazing at, what I might find my fingers gravitate to, and maybe even a picture or two itself- I’d like to build a frame from the pixels, to show a culture ‘in Pixels.’

 And hopefully, sometime I am out there on Japan’s brightly lit crescent on an ocean of salty water, I might see myself pick up the world’s largest opera-glasses and get a good view of how my life looks from there. I hope you enjoy reading what I have to say. Let me know what you think.

 

-Jay