Earth Day

I don't find Earth day necessary because people should be eco-friendly to environment every day instead of being reminded to be for one day of the year. Being eco-friendly to the environment for one day will have minimum effect. However, people need to start being friendly to the environment or else global warming will be more of an issue plus other environment issues that may soon harm humans.

Even though it is important to raise awareness, i still believe that most people will still continue living their same regular life littering, wasting electricity, etc. To be honest, I'm not really sure where I send and at the moment, I kind of don't care because I'm going to be up all night doing homework on my birthday! Okay, whatever.

Motivation and Science

What motivates me to learn chemistry this year?

Honestly, getting good grades is what motivates me the most. Because my parents stress about getting good grades to get into a good college, getting excellent grades is what drives me to learn and try to excel in chemistry. Also, because I'm a competitive person, getting better grades than my peers is what also motivates me.

However, even though getting good grades is what motivates me the most, there are some others that motivate me. I find that out of all the subjects I am learning, chemistry is the most interesting and fun. I'm not exactly sure what I want to do in the future but doing something in the future with science is definately an option. So, I guess that trying to figure out if I want to do something along the lines of science or more specifically chemistry motivates me.

What is the purpose of grades?

My parents are the complete opposite...
They evaluate my learning based on my grades. So basically, all they care about is grades.

Also, with the whole balancing out your life idea (academics, sports, social life, and spiritual life), my parents are not too fond of that idea either. It's either school or tennis. This is all my parents basically care about.

The thing is, my parents don't understand that learning is more important than what grade you get. They believe that getting into a good college is the ultimate goal based on the grades one gets. I mean don't get me wrong, everyone wants to get into a good college, but along the way to achieving it, the students should learn instead of worrying about grades nonstop.

So, feel free to try to convince my parents that grades aren't everything. I highly doubt that they will ever change their minds about grades.

Science and Politics

I don't have a clue about what to write because I am not familiar on this topic, and this is such a broad topic. Well anyways, I'm going to write ideas that I think of when it comes down to science and politics.

Okay well onto the basics...
Obviously the government affects science by funding for research or vice versa. Some examples that are widely known about when it's about science and politics are global warming and stem cell research.

People have been arguing about stem cell research for a long time. Others disapprove while others want to keep on researching about it. Personally, I think that the scientists should keep on researching because ending it without finding the answer would be a waste of money and time spent.

The other widely know topic is global warming. It starts to scare people when there is a dramatic change in weather that isn't supposed to happen. People are funding to research more about global warming and how to reduce it. Also, the gov. has been trying to keep the environment with less pollution as possible.

And this is all I have to say about the topic, science and politics.

Nuclear Power

Because I didn't really know much about nuclear power, I decided to briefly research about it. I found out...

Advantages
-emits low amounts of carbon dioxide, only contributes a small amount of green house gases (little global warming)
-technology is already available
-can generate produce a lot of energy in one plant

Disadvantages
-the waste is extremely dangerous
-impossible for a plant to be 100% secured, if accident happened, hurt humans and nature
-target for terrorist attack
-production of nuclear weapons
-energy source=Uranium is scarce
-building nuclear power plants take awhile

So the question is...
Should we use nuclear power to meet our energy needs?

I say that we should use nuclear power. Even though I've typed up more disadvantages than advantages, I still think we should go for it. To begin with, there are other things that are extremely dangerous. Also, you can't have it all. If theres little green house gas, theres a price to pay for that. In addition, there isn't really a lot of things that have 100% security. Plus, I think it should be a risk were willing to take. And the terrorists should know not to mess with us....or else... As for the nuclear weapons, we have used them before and won. Furthermore, too bad if its scarce. We're running out of gas, and we're still using it. As for the time issue, great things take time.

So all in all, I say we take this and fly with it. It's not like the earth is perfect right now with no dangers. We live in a dangerous world already and what's one more going to do to us? Plus, personally in our life time, its not really going to affect us immensely. It's not really going to be our problem at the moment, but people that live generations from now.

Quantum Mechanics

I still don't understand how all of this works. It doesn't make any sense! How is there an interference pattern for the double slit with the electrons? How can it go through both, then one, then none? It's impossible.

Also when there was a device to see which slit it went through, the electrons went back to behaving like marbles. It went back to producing two bands. How is this so? How could this be just because there was something watching which slit it went through? The electron acted differently just because it was being watched? How did it know that something was watching it? There were two different results, one that was being watched and one that wasn't.

From this...
How can we know that anything we have observed in the past, especially about electrons, is right?

Because no one knows really for sure whats up with quantum mechanics, I don't think that chemistry honors students should be learning about this. After "learning" and watching about quantum mechanics, many of my classmates were confused about what we just watched or "learned" about. When someone has solved the many questions of quantum mechanics, and the idea finally makes sense, then we should be taught what its about.

At least for now, probably my classmates and definitely I am very puzzled with the concept of quantum mechanics.

Did you know?

To start off, I don't understand how this has anything to do with chemistry and why this was assigned as homework for this class. I felt as if watching this YouTube video was pointless and just a waste of my time.

As I was watching it, I wondered to myself, "Why do I need to care about all the facts that were on this video?" Even as I'm writing this, I still can't think of an answer. So in all, I didn't really care about these facts. Sure, some of the ideas they talked about like how there are students studying for problems not even here yet was somewhat educational, but most of the facts presented on the video was useless. For example, telling us that if "my space" was a country, it would be the fifth largest, was a complete waste of my time. Personally, I don't care if this is true. That's great for "my space."

Also, I don't think that this video is fairly accurate. They had so many predictions and sure, they may have had some information that lead them to the conclusions, but they are not psychics. These predictions have only a small percentage of being correct. For instance, what if earth gets blown up in a year? The facts they predicted fifteen years from now will not happen because no one will be alive. In addition, as I said before, I did not care about all of the facts that said that this or that was going to happen in some amount of years. For example, "China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world." I DON'T CARE. What does the person that put this up want the watchers to do? This too is not that accurate. It says, "soon." How close is soon?

Another fact that got me angry was about the IQ's for India. "The 25% of India's population with the greatest IQ's is greater than the total population of the United States." That is great that they are smart. Personally again, I DON'T CARE. Also, why did they only talk about the smart people. Why didn't they talk about the stupid people in India compared to the United States?

Moving on...
Some parts in the video did not make sense at all. "Using technologies that haven't been invented...". Would someone care to explain how this makes sense at all? How can they be using something that hasn't even been invented yet?

In all, everything about the number of people on "my space", amount of google searches, amount of texts, market audience, amount of words there are, what happened while I was watching this video, and basically everything else was insignificant. This video did not help me gain any knowledge whatsoever. I will never have to know any of this useless information in my life unless there is a game show I'm participating in that has all of these random, useless facts.

This is how I honestly felt about it, and I'm sorry if my constructive criticism is too harsh. On the bright side, I liked the music...sort of.