F is for Family

I'm going to be an aunt in 7 months...

My brother's gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and she's 7-8 weeks along. He's already told my mom, but he's afraid about telling my dad (completely understandable since my dad's not the most... patient of men).

We were joking about what to name the kid. The wifey (aka the girlfriend) wants to name the kid Marrow or Nikko, but my brother wants something a little more normal. I told him he should name it (if it's a boy) Tom or Tony.

You have to know that we had 3 Uncle Toms, and two of them had named their sons Tony.

It should be interesting to see what's going to happen with my brother and his girlfriend in the coming months and years.

E is for Exhaustion and Exams

So I took one exam for calculus yesterday, and I think I might have done pretty good. I'm not holding my breath though on my grades... I don't even want to think about it...

I'm tired and getting ready for bed, so I'll end it here...

Good night, peoples!

D is for Death and Density

I'm watching Science right now, and it's a show on black holes. Everyone knows what a black hole is. It's an object so dense that the gravity it has pulls even light to its center. That's what makes it a black hole.

Black holes are "born" when very massive stars die.

For most main sequence stars, this is not what's going to happen. The star will expand into giants before they start to collapse. Usually, the heat from the core and the repulsion between atoms and subatomic particles stops the collapse from progressing past dwarfs. These dwarfs are essentially the faintly glowing embers, the remnants of the core of the original star. This is the fate awaiting our own sun. A size comparison of A-Class IK Pegasi A (left), its companion white dwarf IK Pegasi B (center), and the Sun.

For a star that is a bit larger than our sun follows a similar process. The star explodes with enough force to expel its outer layers, creating spectacular supernova remnants as well as the elements heavier than iron. They become strange objects, including black holes. Black holes form when the collapse is not stopped by internal pressure. The remnant core simply continues to crush itself further and further.

I leave you with this beautiful supernova remnant N49 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Images from Wikipedia.

C is for Challenges

So a couple of months ago, I first stumbled upon the A-Z challenge... thingy... Anyway, so I was like this looks fun! Let's do it! I could do this and Script Frenzy and finish my classes.

Yeah.

WTF was I thinking? This challenge isn't too hard, and I'm actually ahead in my Script Frenzy. My classes are my biggest concerns (obviously). I have a test tomorrow in calculus... T-T  I'm going to bed early tonight (like in 10 minutes). Maybe take a sleeping pill to knock me out the majority of the night...

B is for Bros

I've become addicted to watching videos by PewDiePie. This guy is probably the most insane player on Youtube. Despite the fact that he's Swedish, his English is actually pretty good. His commentary makes watching horror games easier. He uses a facial camera, so you get to see his expressions (as below):

He tends to upload a couple of videos every day, but the ones I like the most are his clips from Happy Wheels, where he plays as the irresponsible parent and the son.

If you have the time (and you don't mind a little vulgarity), just pop in on his channel and become a Bro! Here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/user/PewDiePie?feature=watch



Image from http://www.fanpop.com/spots/pewdiepie and http://askangel.deviantart.com/art/Pewdiepie-s-funny-ass-face-montage-xD-287361030

A is for Assignments

We've reached the final stretch at ASU for the spring semester. The last day of class is April 24th, and the professors are trying to get those last few assignments in. Here's what this month's looking like:

BIO494 - Marine Ecology and Conservation
4 short essays and a joyful *gag* presentation next week

MAT266 - Calculus for Engineers II
Homework for most of the remaining lessons and 2 exams. If I can get at least 75% on both of them, I should be able to pass. If not... I've already registered to retake it T-T

PUP420 - Theory of Urban Design
Group project and presentation

SES102 - Earth & Space Science II
Homework 4 (and maybe 5) and final exam

SES 104 - Earth & Space Science Lab II
A couple of afternoon labs and a night lab

SES311 - Essentials of Astrobiology
Group project and paper. We have to finish creating a (fake) NASA mission as real as we can make it.


That's it! Hopefully, I'll be able to survive to the end of the semester.

Shooting Ourselves in the...

In two shocking bills working their way through different state legislatures, politicians show how little they understand people and students especially.

The first bill, hailing from Arizona, targets college students. The gist of the bill is that all students, with two exceptions, would have to pay at least $2000 a year out of their own pocket towards their tuition without the aid of financial aid. The idea was that students would have a greater interest in graduating if they had "a bit of skin" in the game, and they point to the dropout rate as well as the percentage of students who pay none of their tuition. Never mind that the fees and books can be a good portion of a student's expenses.

Now, I did mention two exceptions to the law. The first is the student athlete. The politicians said that student athletes are exempt from the law because they bring in money to the school. Reasonable enough. Of course the schools put a lot of money into those students, but that's a minor detail.

The second group of special students are honors students. The only things these students bring to the school are their brains and the fees that the honors colleges charge. These students will not have to pay because they have "earned" their free ride.

Now I have a few questions about this bill.

1. How many students fully pay for their tuition through loans, as opposed to just grants and scholarships? I fall into this group, where I get only $500 a year from a Pell Grant, no scholarships, and an employee dependent waiver and use loans to pay for the rest of my tuition. 
2. How would they prevent the disbursement of financial aid refunds to students who haven't paid that bill? When would the money be due by? Would it be due at the start of the semester, or would there be due dates spread throughout the semester?
3. How would this increase graduation rates? With the economy as it is, students have enough trouble finding a job already, and probably many of those that do have a job find it stressful to juggle school and work. I can already see the dropout rate rising as students struggle to pay this fee, and fewer students will enroll. 

Let's turn our attention to the second bill. This one comes from Utah, which might explain its... ideas. The congressmen here want to eliminate sex education to reduce the prevalence of teen sex and premarital sex. This also comes with a prohibition on discussions about homosexuality and contraception by teachers.

Now, I don't know what they taught in sex ed when these men and women went to school, but I certainly didn't hear about homosexuality being taught to any degree during sex ed when I went. Contraception does more to protect people than just preventing pregnancy. Removing any instruction on how to properly use condoms increases the probability that kids won't use them right and expose themselves to STIs and other dangers.

Additionally abstinence-only sex ed puts teens at risk. In the guise of protecting their health and virginity, they tend to engage in behaviors, such as oral and anal sex, and there has been a corresponding increase in STIs coming from the behaviors.

Teens will be teens. They are basically bundles of hormones and new urges. With underdeveloped impulse control, they're going to experiment with sex. There's no way to stop them unless you lock them up until they're 25, which is when their brains finish maturing and the impulse control kicks in.

Leaving the problem up to parents doesn't solve anything. If parents don't know anything about sex ed, then how can congressmen expect kids to learn safe measures? Of course, if they think that "OMG, they're not teaching sex ed! We're going to stop having sex" is going to work, maybe they don't expect parents to have to teach their kids anything. After all, abstinence worked so well before.