The Science of Life

In the United States, the main culture is that of willing and happy ignorance and intellectual laziness. In this culture, intellectual curiosity and contemplating knowledge is shunned as “nerdy”, a term used as a negative term to denote someone who is somehow lesser than themselves, because of that intrinsic curiosity and need to figure everything out. The modern American “major-cultures” think of themselves as superior to that of the “sub-culture” of “nerd”, the prior having the God Complex about being part of the crowd, the latter not really caring about how they are labeled by the rest of society, so long as they are left to their intellectual devices. In the intellectual development of any individual, I see four necessary legs; the household, the community, the educational system, and finally the individual. Any one of these four legs fail, the intellectual development of the individual fails. Here I will concentrate on the educational system. I am sad to say I am mor...

This post will be predominately geared towards two groups of people; those who are presently in college or those who are looking to go to college. I have the people that have been in my study groups in chemistry, math, and physics in mind, but this applies to everyone going to college. With all degree programs, there are two important mentalities to have while going through with it: You have to have insatiable curiosity for the subject, and you have to love the subject. Without these two frames of thought, you will make your academic and professional careers a living nightmare. The vast majority of the students in all of my classes – this semester and in every semester for the past couple of years – have not had the curiosity required to be actually successful in these classes. Now let me stop here to explain what I mean by successful. In my mind, successful is more than merely the grade, though don't get me wrong; the grade is a part of it. A bigger part of success in ...

In my last blog, I mentioned I would include four topics in this weeks blog: First, my plan for this blog. Second, the tracers for PET scans, in particular fluorine-18 tracers Third my answer to my prompt from last week Forth, a new prompt. I will do these topics in this order. I am starting my next semester on the 16 th of January. My courses will be Biology 196, Environmental Science 206, Math 286, and Chemistry 402. After todays blog, my plan is to post every week during the weekend (somewhere from Friday to Sunday) with a real world application of a topic from one of these courses for the next 17 weeks, starting next week (the weekend prior to the beginning of the semester). It is likely that I will post later in the weekend, but early-weekend posts are possible. Now, as promised, the tracers used for PET scans. PET scans are positron emission tomography, which makes a three-dimensional mapping of the functional processes of one aspect of the body, typically the brain....

I had a thought earlier this week. I have my final paper in my Hazardous Materials class due tomorrow, which is we are supposed to pick one of five prepared questionnaires to answer in full essay form. In order to save some time in writing this weeks blog, I figured I would put a public version of it on here for this week. For next week, I will do something similar for my Hazardous Materials Final Exam. (It's an online class, and I will have the final exam submitted prior to posting next weeks blog, so there will be no moral quandaries with me posting my final exam on this blog.) I would like everyone who reads this blog to perform this personal assignment. If you wish to post your copy of it in the comments or not is up to your discretion, as is sharing it with anyone in your realm of existence. But I do ask that you do it so that you may think more intimately about your at-home materials and your use of them. As with the lab note-book I spent the past two weeks writing ab...