Sophia's Food for Thought

In class, we often debated nuanced questions with no true answer, like “Does stealing from a thief make you a better person, or are you both bad?” and “Is lying ever warranted?” Those debates never ended in a clear yes or no. We’d talk it through, and the answer always landed somewhere around “it depends on the situation.” That way of thinking has shown up in my own life through religion. I was baptized Catholic and did all the communion and confirmation steps, but in college I found myself in a more Christian crowd, so I now sit somewhere in between. My faith is a big part of how I guide myself and my morals, but I don’t practice it blindly. My boyfriend has been trying to grow stronger in his faith, and we recently had a conflict over it. He was reading the Bible in a very black-and-white way. At first it was little things, but eventually I couldn’t bite my tongue anymore. I told him that nothing is as black and white as it seems. The Bible says disobeying your parents is a sin, but ...

Last weekend, I went to a concert with my boyfriend and his childhood best friends, who were in town visiting. I’d never met them, and I really wanted to, since they’re a big part of who he is. I knew going in that it wouldn’t be my kind of night. I didn’t know the artist, and I’d be the only girl with five guys, only one of whom I actually knew. But my boyfriend asked me to come, and I knew he’d do the same for me in a heartbeat. That’s what a relationship is, I think: showing up for each other, even when it’s a little out of your comfort zone. The show ran from 12 AM to 2:30 AM, which is right in the middle of my sleep schedule, because I’m the girl who’s in bed early. It was EDM house music, so no lyrics and no story, just bass. I grew up in Texas on old country, where every song actually tells you something, so this was a whole different world. And somehow I still had a great time. Most of the night, I wasn’t even watching the stage. I was watching my boyfriend, laughing with his ...

 I joined the Neeley AI executive board thinking I'd mostly learn about AI, but I ended up learning a lot more about leading people. Our goal was simple: build a place where students could get into AI without feeling intimidated by it. Getting to our launch event was messy, though, because we didn't have enough decorations, a speaker we tried to book never worked out, and faculty canceled the humanoid robots we were counting on. We were stressed, but we didn't stop, we just kept going. Then I got to host the event, and walking out to see 300 students in the room is something I'll never forget. I was nervous, but I really wanted to do a good job, and once I started talking it got a lot easier. What I took from all of it is that things rarely go the way you plan, and you just have to keep moving anyway. I'm excited to see Neeley AI keep growing, and I hope we all learn a lot along the way.

I think the werewolf got so scary in the 1500s because people were already scared and looking for answers. The stories had been around forever, from Lycaon turning into a wolf to the Viking sagas, so folks were ready to believe them. Then when awful things happened, like Pierre Burgot, Michel Verdun, and Giles Garnier killing children in France, it was easier to say "werewolf" than to accept that a regular person did it. Whether those men were mentally ill, hallucinating, or just killers, everyone believed the werewolf story, and the confessions only made it worse. It also gave people someone to blame. A lot of the accused were beggars, hermits, or outsiders, and they confessed after being tortured. Peter Stumpp might have been a victim of politics more than anything. The numbers got blown up too. One historian traced the "thousands" claim back to a prosecutor who counted a whole region, and the real total was probably a few hundred. Reading about this made me thi...