Creative Title

One more post today, but I believe that the topic more than makes up for the deception. Man, I wish I had friends (You know what I mean--of the normal sort) so that I could actually remember to see these movies.

...But that does not apply this week! It's spring break, so I'll be hauling my computer home with me. Now, I doubt I'll be able to post anything for the rest of the day, as I need to get my license renewed (I never got my "full provisional" license, and my "limited provisional" license expired on my birthday, so it's somewhat illegal for me to drive right now. Don't you just love government being in control of these things?) and go to tang soo do class, and then my parents are going to have their crazy anarchist friends over, which always makes for some great conversation. Until tomorrow, or whenever I next have both a chance and an idea to post, here's the absolute most awesome video ever that the B.I.L.T.B. (Don't worry; come October, it'll change to simply B.I.L.) sent me. *Warning*: May cause drooling. Keep at least one roll of paper towels nearby when watching.



What did I say? That thing is flippin' sweet! Very Transformer-esque, indeed.

Socialists be very, very warned.

It's no secret that I have a very low opinion of the public school system. There are several reasons for this, most, if not all, of which I didn't even begin to think about until I was around fifteen. My decision to homeschool came quite soon afterwards. Obviously, it was an incredibly difficult choice to make. Just a year and a half earlier, I'd made a very similar decision when finding a high school in the first place. My base school was very near to my house, and all of my friends were going to go there. At first, my mom wanted me to go to the school where my sister was (ironically, where I ended up going), but I'd refused because I wanted to stay with my friends. However, I kept thinking about it all, and figured out that I really wanted to learn Japanese, which was offered at the school where my sister went, but not my base school. I'm not sure whether that was the sole reason for my decision at that point, or whether other factors eventually came into play, but it's the only one I can coherently recall.

So I ended up going to a rather inner-city school where I began with exactly zero friends. Looking back, I wasn't very wise--even just four years ago. However, I quickly made friends with many of the other people who were taking Japanese. Some may consider them to be of the goth/punk/emo variety, but they were really rather fun and energetic--perhaps more accurately described as the anime type (if there even is a particular "anime type"). For my entire freshman year and half of my sophmore year, I grew closer to this very large group of people at my school and got to know many of the members (which, for someone as relatively anti-social as I, is a fairly large feat). Thus, one might understand that I was really freaking upset when I left.

Nevertheless, I still believe that I made the correct decision for my education--partly because I truly feel justified in that, and partly probably simply because I sort of have to so that I didn't leave all my friends (twice) for nothing. Most predominant is probably the fact that public education sucks. Nothing against the teachers, or even most of the administrators and students, but more the entire concept. And even that statement covers a lot of ground.

To begin, I despise the curricula (heck, maybe even the idea of a curriculum). Children and teenagers are far too impressionable for what they learn to ever be decided by the government. Granted, many parents manage to teach their children basic intelligence outside the system, but still far too many neglect this duty, such that they grow up learning only what the state wants them to learn. I really shouldn't need to explain how or why this is an absolutely terrible situation, but just in case, here's what Hitler had to say on the subject: "When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'" And Lenin stated, "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." And hey, let's throw in a little Stalin for good measure: "Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." Evil or not (and they were) those guys did tell the truth about a good many things, present topic most assuredly included. Education is an extremely powerful tool that shapes the minds of every single person for the rest of their lives, and it is my opinion that any one body should ever be responsible for all of them. If that happens, the governing body will quickly figure out how easily they can engrain into young minds the idea that they (the people) need the aforementioned body to have more power.

...And that's only problem number one.

Second, the teachers and administrators get what I like to call "DMV syndrome," which has more to do with economics than anything else. Granted, that's not to say that they don't care about their students' education--far from it, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten into teaching in the first place. They simply don't work as hard as they might if, say, they wouldn't have the unions raising hell over a firing for anything short of molestation. Heck, we even just learned about this in psychology class on monday! Perhaps not this specific example, but the general theme. Simply put, they're getting paid to teach, so they teach--positive reinforcement--but they lack the negtive reinforcement of "If these kids come out of this class completely ignorant of ___subject___, you'll be fired so we can hire someone who knows what they're doing." Therefore, the teachers eventually become apathetic towards their students' individual success in the class. Thomas Sowell taught me well in my first semester at home. This is probably the biggest factor in my homeschooling, even though I didn't know it at the time. As I put it, I was "sick of not learning." Recently, however, I've realized that my style of learning is somewhat more autodidactic than most (and infinitely more so than all the "teamwork" scheiß they were trying to shove down my throat) to begin with, so it's not entirely the school system's fault in that case.

Then, of course, there was the constant barrage of feel-good talking points about diversity and achievement and all that (Yeah, the link is just a little comic relief). No, that wasn't even really the problem. It's more like they're trying to force everyone to shove themselves into the academic world, and completely forgo any other possible profession--especially since we aren't "allowed" to drop out of school before the age of 16, and even then can't get a driver's license until 18 if we do so. I suppose it's not that surprising, though, considering how absolutely cheap everything is now here. We get all our trade from China and hard work from illegals, and all (or at least the very large majority) of our products are made from oil (plastic, yadda, yadda, yadda...), so we don't really have as much of a need for all the trade/merchant/artisan jobs that were so necessary in the past. Carpenters, blacksmiths, glassmakers, masons, farm hands, mechanics, etc. Those careers are all but obsolete save for making souvenirs from small towns. This leaves a terrible predicament for young people who aren't naturally inclined to be good at math or science or humanities. I have a friend who is living with this exact problem and now works part-time at a pretzel place and spends the rest of his time playing World of Warcraft in his parents' basement. His parents won't pay for him to go to college, but from what I've heard, he doesn't seem to like the idea of more school very much. He has no direction in his life, and claimed to not enjoy anything but WoW and hanging out with friends. I knew that he really enjoys working on cars, so I suggested that he be a mechanic. This was met with a "yeah, maybe." The problem is that this is becoming increasingly common nowadays. This generation has taken on the mindset that if we don't go to college, we can't make anything of our lives. A century ago (and beyond), my friend would likely have been sent to be an apprentice at a young age, so that he could learn a trade that would be useful to society and earn him a good income for the rest of his life. But no... no college, no future: that's what we're taught.

I believe those are the three most important issues in the public school system that concern me. This took five hours to write; you can't say that I don't have a lot of thoughts.

UPDATE: Blast! I forgot to include the whole "dragging the better students down so the others' feelings aren't hurt" thing. Here's an example, though: There are sometimes three levels of each course for high school. In order from hardest to easiest, they are: AP (advanced placement), Honors, and Academic (regular...ish). My sister was once put in an AP course for one of these, and the school decided to mix the academic level and AP level classes together, supposedly to help push the academic students harder and to make them do better. Obviously, this didn't work one bit. The AP students were all doing horribly and got PO'd because it was now moving far too slow for them to actually be able to get anything done. That's fair, for you.

I never liked that song. So, I have homework tonight, but not so much tomorrow. Until then, here's something my mom emailed me a few days ago, which I thought was pretty hilarious.

It's my birthday today (the super-secret reason for the extra busy weekend), so I don't need to think or do anything thought-provoking. Hence, this incredibly stupid, but possibly funny (depending on your sense of humor) video:



Maybe tonight I'll have something better up tonight, since my birthday's all celebrated already and I won't have much to do then. For now, however, I have to get ready to leave for class in only 45 minutes (haha). Laters!

I just got around to adding this place back to my bookmarks list after the insane (two) Windows reinstall(s)*. The current front page artice (at the time of this post) is on how we can prevent the sun from vaporizing the earth in 7.6 billion years. Seriously, is our biggest concern right now how humans will continue to live when our sun turns into a red giant? My suggestion: don't be there. We've been finding some nice earth-like planets floating around in other solar systems (none are really all that similar to ours, but I doubt that this is the only planet like this around)--maybe one of those is around a younger sun to which we can transition within that time. Or, alternatively, we could easily all die from some other random disaster that's far more likely to happen far sooner, like an asteroid or a "super"volcano or maybe we'll all just commit seppuku for some crazy reason--who knows? The point is: there are a lot of far simpler solutions than using the gravity of passing asteroids to bring the earth's orbit farther from the sun every 6,000 years. Besides, how can you even be sure there will be any humans left even 6,000 years from now (and that they wouldn't have found a better solution to that problem you've spent so much money and resources on)? How about 12,000? 18,000? That's an awful, awful long time, especially since we really haven't even been around that long yet.

You know, this doesn't even really have a point, I just found the article and felt like posting on the topic. Basically what I'm saying is that I, being the slight pessimist that I am, am somewhat doubtful that humans will be anywhere near the earth 7.6 billion years from now (why would they want to, anyways?), and that it seems a lot simpler to colonize some inhabitable planet a good ways away IF we're going to be alive anywhere at that time. I'm just saying...


This seems like a good time for this:



*The B.I.L.T.B. told my mom exactly how to do it, but she decided to trust some guy on an internet forum more than the man who's marrying her daughter, so we had to do it again the right way. In case I didn't mention this at the time: it didn't even fix the problem when we did it right, so my computer has whole new innards now, too. Hasn't crashed since!

It's nearly time for me to go home for the weekend. This weekend is rather special, though, and I shall reveal why on monday (hehe... speculate away!), and even if I had my computer, it would still be unlikely that I'll have any time to post anything. However, as usual, I'll not leave you without some form of entertainment.

I first heard of DragonForce while on a car trip to the mountains with my sister and the B.I.L.T.B. I wrote it down, and listened to a few of their songs on YouTube for a while before shifting back to other various bands whose videos I find on YouTube. However, during the trip to Ocracoke, my interest was rekindled when their songs came up again on his MP3 CD that we were listening to. I think I mentioned something about it, and so he asked me, "Oh, do you like DragonForce?" Well, like I said, I'd forgotten a little bit about them, but I did remember that the music was of epic proportions, so I said something along the lines of, "Heck yes!"

This has a point, I swear.

After the vacation, I got caught up again in the whole getting-into-college thing and forgot for a few days. Then, one day after I'd moved into the dorm, he gives me DragonForce! And I've been enjoying it ever since. So, the whole point is: here's one of the songs I don't have, so I'm completely ignorant of it if they did cut out half the song like in some other videos. Enjoy!

First off--and I apologize for the horrible quality, as I only have my camera phone--my wonderful politically-incorrect earrings given to me by my uncle for Christmas:



I've actually been brave enough to wear them on campus a few times in the past couple of weeks.

Second, as I may or may not have mentioned at some point before, my great-grandfather (I'm pretty sure) went to school and (I'm absolutely certain) worked here teaching civil engineering. Well, he wrote four books on the subject--mostly about building highways. Two are in a storage facility far enough away from my dorm for me to really not want to walk there, and the other two are at the awesomely huge campus library--one on the first floor, the other on the eighth. Well, the room where the former is located is constantly filled with engineering students, and I'm too intimidated to go in there (I've known too many engineers in my life). But hey, I found the last one!



Lastly, my second calculus test is tomorrow, and I'm a little nervous, especially seeing as the first one went something like this:



Sadly, that last picture is not mine, though I can think of no better way to describe my grade. However, I believe my previous math knowledge has begun to come back to me, so I should do better on this upcoming exam.

I'm doing homework, and will likely be forced to level my WoW character some more tonight, so instead of thought, I'll bring you the absolute nerdiest music video ever made (which automatically makes it the awesomest).

Enjoy Mr. Spock by Nerf Herder (What did I say? Nerd alert!):

Hey! I managed it!

Most days (or at least half of them) since I began college here, I've been going to the totally-freaking-awesome D.H. Hill library for an hour or two between classes in order to read this book. I have yet to figure out how to check them out, and am unwilling to make such a noob of myself just yet. Besides, it's been cold; I'd want somewhere inside to read, anyways.

I'll try to avoid spoilers.

The beginning is simply fascinating. Valentine Michael Smith (whom they end up calling "Mike." Heinlein seems to like that name) is a man who was born on Mars during the first attempted mission to the planet. He was raised by Martians and was well assimilated into their culture when the next humans arrived and discovered that he existed. He was then brought down to earth for some reason or another and spends most of his time after arrival lying in a hospital bed to gain enough strength to be able to function in earth's gravity. While there, he meets a nurse, Jill, who gets him to escape for some reason, and they go to the home of Jubal Harshaw.

It continues being interesting in this part, during which Mike and Jubal have many philosophical conversations about the entire nature of the human race. Discussions on religion, war, tradition, etc. dominate the text. Then, they go to a church/cult of people dubbed "Fosterites" after the religion's creator, some guy named Foster (creative!). After that, the plot begins getting a little screwy. Eventually, Jill and Mike leave Jubal's to travel around for a while. Then, they create what is basically a communist sex cult. I think they even described it that way in the book at one point. So the entire rest of the novel is a description of that, and how blissfully happy all the members are to be free of so many things that made them human (they get rid of jealousy, anger, sadness, laughter, etc., but apparently still somehow feel great love and caring for their "water brothers"--something I failed to explain earlier in the post, but am too lazy to now. It basically makes them very close family), and also how we should all have sex with lots and lots of people because it feels good, and what possible consequences could come from something so good?

Now, I've known for a while now that R.A.H. embraced the idea of sexual freedom, so it was no surprise to me that it was at least present in the book. Nevertheless, I was rather unprepared for the entire premise to end up being the old hippie mantra of "if it feels good, do it" (I guess I should have read the wikipedia first). No ofense, Heinlein, but I simply can't agree with that. We don't really have a Martian handy to keep us from getting diseases or pregnant (unless we want to) or to teach us how to not be jealous if someone we love has sex with a bunch of other people (though if I'd have to give up my ability to laugh to do so, I'd rather be a crabby old maid).

Granted, my overall opinion on this matter is fairly more uptight than probably just about everyone. I even just learned on friday night while watching History Channel's The History of Sex series (absolutely fascinating show, by the way) that 60% of Puritan women got married pregnant, IIRC. Puritans, for goodness' sake! Humans don't appear very able to practice self-control when it comes to this sort of thing. Of course sex is a good thing, and of course it's natural and all that, but it's just my personal belief that it's a rather private matter and also not to be overused. Water is a good thing, but you can still drown. Oxygen is great, but it needs to be somewhat diluted if you're going to breathe it. There are many things that are good--or even necessary--to human life, but excess of any one of them can have disastrous consequences. But hey, that's just one person's opinion. I understand what's being said on the topic in Stranger in a Strange Land, but I just happen to disagree on many of the key points made.

Overall, I loved the first half and hated the second. I'll avoid spilling what happens in the very end, but I will say that it works under the assumption that Americans are as intolerant as people were in the middle ages or even biblical times. I know I didn't go into too many plot details, but that's what reading the book itself is for (or the wikipedia, whichever). I wouldn't really recommend it, but it might turn out to be a better read if you're not caught off-guard. However, I suppose if you want the full Robert A. Heinlein experience, it's definitely a necessity.

I'm now reading The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and am about to begin The Silmarillion, so I may review one of those sooner or later. The former is more likely to be finished first.