On November 21st, which was our last class because Thanksgiving Break (yay for eating turkey, mashed potatoes, and corn) we began class by listening to ‘On The Floor’ by Jennifer Lopez ft. Pitbull. Hearing that song honestly brought me back to my 15 year old self freshman year of high school because my friends and I loved that song! What I learned is that ‘On The Floor’ is actually the same beat and melody as Lambada by Kaoma, which was a dance hit from the 80’s. And to complicate measures even more Lambada actually originated from Llorando se Fue which is a folk song. A lot of sampling has been done here you could say. This class we also got into a really random topic of Asians, but it turned out to be pretty riveting. It was discussed how the Vietnamese have been pretty pissed off at the Chinese for 1000’s of year and everyone in Asia hates the Japanese. I say they hate the Japanese because of the amount of tourist they draw in because lots of people want to visit Tokyo. We furthered our discussion by saying when these groups come into America they’re automatically labeled Asian instead of the country they descend from and how ironic it is because the countries that make up Asia don’t really like each other. This led us to talk about 1790 Naturalization which was only available to “free white people” but the statue never defined or said what white is. Prof. O’Malley then asked our class if we would rather the government be efficient or fair. I pick efficient because I’d rather the government get stuff done and to be quite frank life will never be fair. An efficient government would benefit all the people of the land and we have a broken justice system that isn’t even “fair” so what makes people ever believe the government will be? Be concluded class with a fun fact that I shared at the Thanksgiving table which is that in the early republic the only important holidays were the Fourth of July and Election Day and they were violent holidays. The Fourth of July shocks me because I can’t imagine a time when Fourth of July didn’t consist of being patriotic, having a BBQ, drinking cold beer, and watching fire works. I can completely understand how Election Day was violent because we live in a time where everyone feels the need to voice their opinion to everyone and if a candidate of their liking doesn’t win they go bananas, so I can only begin to imagine how it was handled in the early days with little police force. So because of this violence Thanksgiving helped neutralize the violence, but today everyones just thankful a holiday exists where you can be a complete fat ass and it be completely ok. As for MP3, I thought the book sucked. It wasn’t even till page 170-180 where the significance of MP3 came in. What drew me away the most was the cat experiment, I actually couldn’t believe it at first and thought it was an acronym for something. Although I myself am not a fan of cats I thought it was completely inhumane that the cat was killed and they tested its brain to see if it wold work. I was so disturbed and when the chapters continued and an elephant head became involved to test hearing I was just like wow I’m too big of an animal lover to be able to tolerate this. The only beneficial part that I learned from the book was that the history of MP3 is the history of compression meaning work out put ratio. Besides this I found it cool that several people developed MP3 over a period of time and it was tested by AT&T and although thats not my cellphone carrier (team Verizon) it was interesting to be informed about. But to sum it all up I would never read this book again.