I'd Like To Own a Prius

Earth Day, in general, is a day in which all beings on Earth can come to appreciate how important the Earth is and realize we as human beings are very lucky. So yea, Earth Day is great; I'm tired.














Stay Cool!
(you wouldn't want global warming now do you?)

Motivator

Motivation to do a certain action can be many different reasons and many of the reasons can be totally different from each other. I think a lot of the things students do for school such as homework and school work are extrinsicly motivated. Even though a certain subject at school might be very interesting for a person, I think any learning, if learned at school, is extrinscly motivated simply because we have to by the teacher or to get that certain grade. I think grades are a big extrinsic motivator on the certain quality of work a student might turn in and because of this I think a lot of what motivates students have a lot to do with the whole topic of grades we had to do for our last post. To further elaborate on this, I think if we get rid of grades I think a person will have a much easier time finding out what intrinsicly motivates us in school. Personally, I feel like learning Chemistry for myself is something that is extrinsicly motivated by the fact that it is an academic subject and just have to do good at. Even though I'm very extrinsicly motivated to learn Chemistry I think Chemistry is very interesting subject to those who are intrinsicly motivated to figure out how and why the world operates as it is. Personally I feel more intrinsicly motivated to learn Biology (more specificly Human Biology) than Chemistry.

Bitter-Sweet Relationship Between Politics and Science

(two blog entries?! now that's just insane..)

Science is used for good and evil based on politics.
Evidence:

EVIL - Orthodox Cancer Treatments (esp. Chemo) - look it up on google
few stuff:
http://www.cancertutor.com/
The Cancer Industry and Questioning Chemotherapy both by Ralph W. Moss, PhD

GOOD - Research for Alternative Energy

GOOD - Stark Industries for shutting down its weapons division and CEO creating a giant flying mechanical robot suit because he wanted to be a humanitarian and ensure homeland security.

EVIL - The atomic bomb brought upon many deaths

GOOD - The atomic bomb saved lives by ending the war

EVIL - Nukes made during the Cold War

GOOD - Space race

EVIL - The McDonald lady suing McDonalds because science made her coffee too hot

EVIL - Use of rainbow herbicides to help out American soldiers fighting Vietnam

EVIL - The dictator of San Lorenzo bribing the son of Felix Hoenikker to obtain a piece of Ice 9 in which later killed the entire world in a few days

GOOD - With the eventual death of the planet, world leaders devise a plan to build a tiny nanobot containing all the genetic information for all life on Earth in which they plan to shoot it into space through a black hole just before the planet dies which would then travel through a wormhole coming out into a parallel universe in which the nanobot would then possibly land on an uninhabited parallel universe Earth or a planet suitable to sustain Earth life in which then millions of years later (or thousands of years later) organisms would fully grow and an entire new generation of humans will then emerge

Can I be your son Mrs. Gallagher?

(another blog entry, how crazy!)

Dear Mrs. Gallagher,
All I have to say is, I wish you were my parent because to be fairly honest, it's too damn demanding to be an asian student in a neighborhood where there are like a trillion other asian students for my parents to compare my grades to. (Good thing I don't live in California, there are as much asians living there than the number of rice you can count in a rice patty) I really admire your belief of academics being the most important thing when growing up in life. I too believe there should be a good balance with everything else in life and academics. I also admire the fact that you try to get the point across by not showing your children their report cards; but, with all due respect, I still believe this idea is crazy and I think a grade is the best way so far in terms of efficiency to mark down a person's academic achievements in simple paper form. It's sort of like entering into a competition only to figure out the contest holders are withholding the results because they believe everyone's a winner. I also don't think in the end college boards would necessarily care if you tried your hardest. But you are right about the fact, and I totally agree, that there should be a healthy, natural balance between everything in life and one's achievements should be based on what you have learned and did, not just in academics. Ultimately grades only tell one's personal achievement that doesn't reflect anything on a person's personality to do well. Even George W. Bush said, "...even the C students can become the President of the United States." (Even though I think it's kind of late to quote former President Bush by now) >.>

Sealed With Much Love,
Chris

QUANTUM MECHANICS!!! 0_0

Ok to tell the truth, I wasn't being a good student and fell asleep for most of the video presentation on quantum mechanics. With that being said this post will probably be lamer than a 34 year old living in his grandmother's basement... or Mr. Gridnic's powerpoint slide transitions. (Just kidding, they are amazing btw!) And it won't be as long as the "Solid!" blog (you win this time! >:O) However, I did manage to soak in some information in between the periods of head bobbing and constantly staring at my paper. So, just like the other blogs, I will rant on about how quantum mechanics is the most mind blowing and reality bending theory ever. In the beginning of class we learned about how electrons move to higher energy levels using energy. The electrons then move back to its original energy level and gives off photon energy. This process we learned is called a quantum jump. At first I believed this was plausible and didn't find anything odd about it but when we learned that electrons cannot occupy space in between energy levels, many including I, became stupefied because that eliminates the possibility that electrons can move to higher energy levels. One thing that came up was teleportation, but can teleportation really happen? Even though this seems totally out there, it explains a lot about how atoms give off photon energy. One thing that seemed scary for me was how much of the position of an electron and even life relies on probability. An example gave in class was the cat in the box model. It was scary to find out that there are so many parallel universes and in half of those, the cat was already dead. What the model also provided was the explanation to why scientists can't physically examine an electron because the sole act of observing would alter the results. Quantum mechanics seems so preposterous and yet it explains a lot of how the atom behaves. In the end (after I woke up), the presentation lead to many philosophical questions and comments and something about walking through walls.

Did you know...?

At the end of this video, we are given an open ended question;

so what does it all mean?

Many things can be concluded from watching this video but many come as no surprise. For starters, China becoming a world power was no surprise. With their booming economy and rising population, it seems almost inevitable that they become an international power. Another is how rapidly the world's population is growing. According to the work of Thomas R. Malthus in his essay The Principle of Population, written in 1798, he explains the fundamental concept of unlimited population growth and how it is tied to the human population. With this in mind it comes as no surprise that the world's population is growing in exponential times. An interesting part of the video that caught my attention was how fast a piece of technology spread to an audience of 50 million; however, this also came as no surprise as well. As we live in the information age and as ads from improved telecommunication become more abundant, more and more recent technology get caught on faster and faster. What I and probably many people come to realize by watching this video is that as human population grows exponentially, technology does as well. And as technology grows, such as improved medical care, so do the human population. As years go by, it comes to no surprise that the relationship between humans and AI become more close. An example of this is the statistic that 1 in every 8 couples in the last year met each other online. Today people carry around mini computers in their pant's pocket and phones that can do way more than just make calls. No wonder the number of internet devices started exceeding a billion in this year. This sort of human and machine symbiotic relationship leads to an event called 'Singularity', a term expressed in Raymond Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. It expresses how one day Artificial Intelligence will far surpass the computational capabilities of the human population around the year 2045; which is also relatively the same time period the video predicts as well. It comes as no surprise that humans will rely more heavily on technology as the years come. Even in the 1967 short film "1999 AD" it predicts machines managing everyday human life e.g.; automatically preparing meals for families based on an individual's nutritional needs, providing exercise regiments to maintain an individual's muscle tone and so on.

Many of the statistics expressed in this video come as no surprise; however, a couple of statistics are very shifty. For starters 25% of India's population with the highest IQ is greater than the population of the US because of the fact that India's population is 4X as much as the US. This information doesn't conclude that India is a smarter country than the US or anything but just states that they again have a higher population. It's also questionable whether or not to say that China will become the number one English speaking country in the world. That is like saying the US is the number one Spanish speaking country in the world just because Spanish is a widely taught language in US schools. FYI: 1/3 of the US population is enough to match the population of Mexico. To also answer the question: To whom were these questions addressed B.G. (Before Google)?, 3 years before the domain Google.com launched, Yahoo! already gained more than a million hits and just a year before that, Mosaic, a graphical web browser, was released.

BTW (By the way), it also comes as no surprise that 694,000 songs were probably downloaded illegally during the presentation of the video. You can thank the music copyright infringement in China for a lot of that. This video has nice music btw.

(Youtube links to the short film 1999 AD at bottom)