Hippie ecological ranty ravings

I just realised that I've spent most of my day, if not all, on the PC. Whilst that doesn't particularly bother me initially, given some consideration, it does make me wonder if we rely too much on technology. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some sort of anti-technology pagan, or indeed some apocalypse obssessive, but I do worry sometimes. We all saw the Y2K worries, and indeed the worst case scenario sensationalists, but let's face it, we all new that technology can be upgraded fast enough now to avoid anything like that, especially when it didn't do shit in the end. However, with the advancement of technology, our reliance on it also increases, and one has to worry that it will eventually become everything to us, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who fears we won't be able to sustain it, especially with the imminent end of everything due to the drying up of the world's oil supplies and the subsequent invasion of Saudi Arabia that's currently being taught as part of AQA's GCSE Geography syllabus (okay, so the invasion bit isn't taught, but I am sure as hell that when it happens, AQA will be teaching complete subservience to whoever was in office at the time, and managed to negotiate a pittance of oil from America, the inhabitants of which will be too busy saying 'PUHHH-RAYSE THE LAAAWD' to actually alter their syllabuses (syllabi?)).

Wow, time for a breather. Sorry for the almighty paragraph, I just couldn't find a place to move it on to a new one. So, anyway, despite us all being taught these apocalypse scenarios as God-given fact (although I do agree with them, I feel that both sides of the argument need to be taught), and being told that we will all drown next Thursday, or Tuesday in the case of the Netherlands, people continue to use all the energy the please with a complete and utter disregard for the future. I for one have been guilty of leaving lights on in the past, and dismissing the fact when confronted, claiming it to be not worth my time, I do feel that we need to be slightly more careful. After all, the demise of the oil industry soon has become an inevitable truth, especially with BP chucking tonnes of the stuff into the ocean wantonly, and so along with giving us more time of that 'dirty' power, we get a few more years to look into renewable sources of energy (my idea of sticking hamsters in rape racks and getting a ton of hamster wheels still hasn't been looked at).

Still, maybe we should just give up. It gives the misanthropes something to whine about. After all, it's them, the introspective haters of humanity, who will suffer more than anybody from this. Although I've never heard of a misanthropic ecologist - and they're certainly the ones with the most reason to be (now coupled with public sector workers - cheers George)!

I don't want to address the world as a whole on this matter; after all, I'm awful with being green and preserving energy myself, my one saving grace being that I never litter. Also, what's the voice of one teen going to do? It's not even a matter that I'm overly concerned about, in fact, I might try and get my vegan friend to write an article for the blog based around this topic. He'd be welcome. In fact, I'll ask him now...

Philomathy (the love of maths)

I love maths. No, seriously, I do! Although there are plenty of things that I can think of that I'd rather be doing than doing a GCSE maths paper in a room of bipolar climate, I actually quite enjoyed 'helping' some friends with their revision by dreaming up trigonometry questions that were sufficiently difficult to be of a standard that would never come close to an AQA GCSE paper (needless to say, I am now short of a few friends; their heads exploded. This is a true n'yawwwww moment).

I say this because, lying in front of me, there is a challenging maths problem. It's one of these ones that has an incredibly long answer, so I won't attempt it until I have an hour or so to kill, but I shall eventually venture to do it. I look forward to it. In fact, I recall that as I was doing work experience at my primary school approximately a year ago, there was an incredibly brainy maths genius, who, at the age of 9, enjoyed doing maths. He noticed that I shared his passion, and consequently asked me to set him some maths to do over the summer. So I was hard at work, creating all manner of testing problems, then it occurred to me - he was 9. I feel that standard deviation and trigonometry will have been a little above his capabilities, but I gave him them anyway. I have not heard back from him yet.

So, as it is just 35 minutes until I must depart for my exam, I felt a need to write something about my feelings this morning. Given how absolutely zippadeedooda my exams have gone so far, it's certainly one of confidence. I almost feel on top of the world, but then my logic kicks in and reminds me that that's physically impossible. I feel wonderful, having finished for all eternity both my studies of the English language, and indeed, English literature; I daresay that my vocabulary will expand as I move into the future, and I shall certainly read more books, but I never have to complete the banal process of copying down notes dictated to me ever again. On poetry.

I've enjoyed maths over the past five years at this school; I feel it could've been a little more challenging, but that's just me. I'm looking forward to my continuation of it at college, where I will be taking further maths, which effectively means that I will be doing pure maths, statistics, decision, and mechanics, rather than just two of the four. I could do without the mechanics - I would've chosen to skip further education rather than continuing a full Physics course - but beggars can't be choosers (I can't help but feel that that's not the most appropriate proverb, but my mind escapes me for the moment).

I'll leave you for now by saying that in addition to having far fewer functions, non-scientific calculators are generally less durable; having found a spare scientific calculator on the floor, I decided to conduct a comparative test of durability - in other words, dropping two calculators from a second floor (third floor to Americans) window. The scientific one survived, whilst I had to make an unfortunate grave for the standard one, although if I'd used my usual scientific calculator for this experiment, I would now be taking a geometry exam without a 'Pi' function.

The moral of the story is this: don't drop calculators out of second floor windows.