Author Archives: Jacob Treat
Challenge Coins
Informant Background:
This informant is a Junior at USC in the Naval ROTC program. he considers himself the typical college boy and often enjoys attending the numerous parties around campus.
Informant’s Story:
“Something I know that a lot of people do in the navy, but I’ve seen frat guys do too is the whole “challenge coin” thing. Challenge coins are, like, these large coins that represent a group or person. There’s normally, like, some design with the group or persons name on there. Anyways, the way challenge coins work is that you always keep a challenge coin on you for when you go to the bar. If someone starts tapping their challenge coin on the counter, everyone else has to too. The last person who takes their coin out, or if they just straight don’t have it, they have to buy the next round.”
Analyses:
The Challenge coin is a tradition held very near and dear to the U.S military, though no one loves the game more than navy chief petty officers. Challenge coins are created for every unit, and high ranking military officials. This can range from a small platoon, to an entire command. As it turns out, from the informant’s story, this practice is beginning to take hold in non-military organizations as well, namely frats. Many theories exist as to the origin of the challenge coin, the oldest one being WWI, where it is said an American pilot was shot down over france and was subsequently stripped of all valuable items,by Germans as they thought he was dead. All except a coin with his squadrons insignia. Eventually he met a group of french who thought him to be German. Having no ID, he held up his coin to which they recognized his squadrons insignia. Instead of giving him an execution, they gave him wine.
Don’t look into the microwave
Informant Background:
This informant is a sophomore at USC in the Naval ROTC program. She grew up in Pennsylvania in a middle class family. As a child she enjoyed all things sci-fi and fantasy, and in high school she developed a passion for the military in JROTC.
Informant’s Story:
“When I was little I used to love popcorn and would always sit with my face against the microwave staring at the bag as it slowly rotated and started to pop. It was like TV for me. That is, until my mom told me that I could fry my brain and go blind. I was so terrified of the microwave, I wouldn’t even look at it from any less than five feet away.”
Analyses:
It is generally inadvisable to look directly into a microwave when it is on, however, it will not force you to go blind and fry your brain. The way a microwave works is that it uses radio waves to force the water molecules in the food to vibrate, thus creating heat. These radio waves or “microwaves” are no more dangerous than the radio waves used by walkie talkies and other communication devices (provided you’re not actually in a device that uses microwaves, such as industrial sized wood curing machines).
Feet Up!
Informant Background:
This informant is a sophomore at USC in the Naval ROTC program. Very soft spoken and polite, she grew up in Anaheim California. Considering herself a typical teenager through highschool, she had a fondness for the urban legends that circulated throughout the school.
Informant’s Story:
“When I was little and I was in the car with my mom, when we were about to go over train tracks my mom would say, ‘feet up’ and we all would put our feet up until we were across the tracks. Apparently if we left our feet down it was considered bad luck.”
Analyses:
This story is most likely related to the fact that railroad tracks are electrified, particularly the third rail. If one were to step on this rail they would be electrocuted and so the idea came to pass to avoid electrocution by raising your feet so you don’t touch it, or to possible keep you from grounding yourself. Other variations include doing the same action, but instead making a wish, or lifting your feet when crossing a bridge, instead of or in addition to railroad tracks.
computer art
Informant Background:
This informant is a sophomore at USC in the Naval ROTC program. Very soft spoken and polite, she grew up in Anaheim California. Considering herself a typical teenager through highschool, she had a fondness for the urban legends that circulated throughout the school.
Informant’s story:
“Well, something popular today that I’m pretty sure everyone knows about are the little faces you can make using the symbols on a key board. There’s like, the normal smiley face with the colon and parenthesis, the surprised face with the colon and capital ‘O’, and a bunch of others. They can be really simple like those or more complex lie [explanation how to make the following face] (^_^). I’ve seen some really complex ones though. Like, full dinosaurs and stuff. I don’t know who has the time and patience to make them, but I just copy and paste them into my Facebook and chat and stuff.”
Analyses:
What the Informant is what is known as “ASCII art”. “ASCII” which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is essentially source code that changes numbers into other symbols that aren’t numbers, as computers can only accept numbers. These symbols include the entire alphabet, every grammatical symbol, and any other symbol you can put into a text box. There are a total of 128 of these symbols. “ASCII art” is the ability to take these symbols in order to create some form of design. As the informant noted, these designs can be as simple as the classic :), to as complicated as designs spanning several lines, consisting of hundreds of characters. These designs are used primarily as reactions, meaning the design is posted in response to something else that was posted. With ASCII art becoming so common, many separate programs have been designed to recognize these series of symbols to actually create the picture in which the symbols are supposed to represent. These cartoons that replace the symbols are known as “emojis” and are common among such programs as Facebook, imessage, and Kik.
Examples of ASCII art:
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
……(\_/)
……( ‘_’)
…./””””””””””””\======░
/”””””””””””””””””””\
\_@_@_@_@_@_/
……………………………………..________
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:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::\ …………..”~–„_____„„-~~”