Eco Chic + Green Sunchips

For me Earth Day means a new market for many industries. Fashion, food, home ANYTHING can go green. Some people complain it's just a new marketing pitch, a new way to get our tree-hugging generation up and buying, well yeah that's true. But so what? At this day and age, people are so critical and most faux-eco companies would be rooted out until we're left with mostly, the real deal. If it's doing something good for the Earth and people like it, then what the hell. I've already seen dozens of commercials pitching their "green" products at idiots like me, and yes I'm probably going to buy them.

I'm not really into the whole save-the-earth scene, but when my favorite brand of jeans starts to make corn based shorts, I'll go out and buy them. Show me a cute bunny choking on a plastic bag of chips and yeah I'll feel guilty, but I'm not going to campaign for bio-degradable Lays bags afterward. Show me a biodegradable bag of SunChips that I was planning on buying anyways, and who knows I might just splurge on them because it's "good for the environment".

Motivation

Science is a cumulative course, everything builds on one another and eventually, all topics can be linked. Chemistry is an important component in the chain, I'm motivated to learn chemistry to not only do well in chemistry, but to retain knowledge applicable to future sciences. Also, both my parents, unfortuneately, have PhD's in chem so they both expect me to be crazy good. "IT'S GENETIC TRUST ME!" -- mom, which means don't fail at chem or you fail your parents. maha.

Sci and Politics

Sure science is political. EVERYTHING is political. In politics there's the constant question oof right or wrong, how far is too far and what can you do to grab the attention of enough people to get your point across. Science is all about pushing the boundaries of current human knowledge, but there's always the question of morals and political correctness that, at times, conflicts.

Example, we could have already made HUGE advances in finding the cure for loads of diseases if human cloning were made legal. Just suck out all the WBC's and blood you need...we'd have saved so many people by now. But what about the person just took the stuff from? In fact, do they even count as a person? They were created in a petri dish, not fermented in a mother's womb like a real human. Many similar scientific topics are actually heavily debated in politics right now.

Nowadays, science is almost like a show-and-tell type of deal. Both my parents are professors and (especially dad) knows that hey, even though the work he's doing is for the entire human race, to try to prolong and better their quality of life, you still need MONEY to fund that goal. If no one gives a cracker about you or your work, then no matter how much you want to cure a disease, it just won't happen. Like in politics you've got to sell the ideas and yourself. Keep writing grants and keep smiling, even when all you want to do is take your report and give the reviewer the worst paper cut of his life.

It ain't over til RPattz sings

This page needs MUSIC! 

ps

it takes some getting used to. I had to listen to it about five times before I was done being wierded out. But when you love it you LOVE IT

A Quantum Leap in Thinking

I LOVE THIS STUFF

Quantum Mechanics is one of those wierd things where you don't get it so much to the point of completely understanding it. It's fantabulous. I'm ridiculously pumped to learn more about this (scuse me my nerd is showing). Einstein was awesome but you gotta respect the quantum kids. It really takes an "outside the box" thinker to see the world in such a messed up way. In a great messed up way. This is probably the most interesting thing I'm ever going to learn in chem, in fact, the only thing that comes close to this is the flame test. (Green and Magenta fire? So cool.)

I've read about quantum mechanics somewhre before. My elementary school in New York had to read a Wrinkle in Time for class and I took a look at the other books in the series. They gave this crazy example:

Say there's an ant walking along a string. To get from point A, to point B, he would have to walk across the string by Classical Mechanic standards. (Einstein etc. all the old school guys) But by Quantum Mechanic standards, the ant wouldn't have to do all that walking, instead, if we just folded the string together so that point A was touching point B he wouldn't have to move at all to get to point B. That's totally confusing but it's the first time I've ever heard of Quantum Leaps and all that so I was kinda amazed.

It doesn't take a lot to amuse me.

Re: Did You Know

Wow, this video's a little confusing. A lot of the facts are very simply stated but have multiple meanings so I'm not too sure what some of the slides are really getting at. However, the overall mood of the piece is pretty clearly presented. We're the age of technology and advancement, and we're growing at such an exponential rate, pretty soon we might not be able to control our ideas anymore. It seems like this whole video is a warning, "don't get too ahead of yourselves guys". It's ridiculous looking at all those statistics, and a little disappointing too. (Apparently India has many honors students as we have students?)

I think it's great we're advancing so quickly but it's scary at the same time. How far is too far? Is there ever a limit to what we should know? Ignorance is a silly notion when there is so much available to us. If we want to understand something, we've pretty much attacked the problem until we come up with a plausible solution. I like our growth, I like knowing things. I'm just wondering where all this is going to take us. Nuclear weapons? Supercomputers? Maybe I'll buy a condo on mars in the future.

Anymore, it seems like anything is possible.

So

Does it work now?