What does Earth Day mean to me?

Not nearly as much as it should. Over the past few years, I've begun to really care about our environment and have made it a priority to do the what I can to help. I'll always turn off the light when I leave a room, unplug chargers not being used, and recycle everything possible. But to be honest, I found out that it was earth day when I saw the assignment to blog about earth day the night after. Maybe I didn't watch the news that morning, or maybe I just missed people talking about it at school. But it doesn't change the fact that the one day a year devoted to making our planet "greener" went unnoticed by me, and I'm sure many others.

my motivation

It's hard for me to identify what exactly motivates me to learn chemistry. A big part of it is the fact that the class itself is different than any other class. Instead of sitting, and being lectured for 90 minutes, we do labs and actively learn new things. I don't think that my motivation necessarily comes from some sort of tangible incentive, but just the fact that being successful in a class that happens to be pretty fun, is much more enjoyable than failing.

GRADES

This latest post about grades is very interesting. Since day one we are taught about the importance of grades and I guess I just accepted what I was being told to be true. It's hard to imagine what my life would have been like if grades had not been a main part of it. Looking back now, so much of my life has been devoted to something that now seems so trivial. I feel that the grading system that is currently in place does not accurately reflect how much a student has learned. Schools give students one chance to demonstrate everything they've learned in an hour and a half time period by filling out tiny bubbles on a green and blue strip of paper. If you fail, then you haven't learned anything. It is my opinion that part of learning IS failing. When you make a mistake, you then can identify what you did wrong and make the right decision the next time. It doesn't seem like the grading system is going to change anytime soon, so I better get used to it. Hopefully one day school will be less about how high one's test scores are, and more about how much one has actually learned.

Nuclear Waste

I think we should be investing our time and resources into trying to find a fail-safe way to get our nuclear waste into space. It seems to be the only way to completely dispose of the waste and not have later consequences. The only problem is that if there was some error in the actual transportation, the entire world would be at extreamly high risk. Until we get to the point where there is absolutley no way we could mess up the actual moving of the waste, I fear that there will never be a way to totally rid ourselves of this problem. Only put it off for later generations.

quantum craziness

Our last lesson was easily the most interesting and mind boggling science class I've had in my entire life. After skateboarding with some friends, I went straight to the computer to look up every video on quantum physics. I watched the entire Elegant Universe plus a lot of What The Bleep Do We Know? The topic that I found to be the most interesting was the string theory. The videos I watched covered a lot of different things, but I found that the common goal of all of this was as Einstein would say, unification or the master equation that connected all four of the known forces. I really hope that thursday was the only day we ever talk about quantum mechanics!

Right here, right now

This video was initially shocking to me, but after some thought I realized that it really shouldn't be. It's amazing that our country can make so many groundbreaking discoveries, inventions, and technological advances and simultaneously be a relatively stupid nation. The part I found the most astounding  though was the part about artificial intelligence. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we are all controlled and/or killed by our own inventions.

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