Yesterday, was my freshman orientation at IUPUI. I got my JagTag, learned all about getting financial aid, and getting a a part time job at IUPUI. I also schduled my classes. My schedule is so simple! I love it.

My placement scores were great! I tested into Calculus, MATH 163, the math class I wanted to start in. I also whooped but on the chemistry placement exam and got into the normal chistry classes. I have to take a lecture chemistry class and then a chem lab. When I took the French placement, I thought I did horribly, but I guess I skipped over a whole year… 10 credits. So, besides those, I have to take a Windows on Science class. Kind of a “what am I going to do with my life after college?” class.

Besides that, life hasn’t been too busy. I saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and it was very impressive. It make me so excited, that I decided to start the 6th book. It’s all been really great, so far. Life after graduation has been great. It’s been very simple. I hang out with a few friends on a normal basis, and then Olivia who is always a blast. I don’t talk about her much on here, but she’s so great! We’re just great buddies… our relationship hasn’t gotten old one bit. I hope to be with her for a while. And! We’re both very academically focused… so we don’t get in each other’s way during school.

“It would be a mistake to view Bush as an aberration in modern political history. There are far more parallels between Bush and Clinton than either Democrats or Rebublicans would like to admit. And most of Clinton’s abuses followed precedents set by Bush Sr., Nixon, Johnson, and earlier presidents. Bush is more a symptom of the decay of American democracy than a first causes.”

“A democractic government that respects no limits on its own power is a ticking time bomb, waiting to destroy the rights it was created to protect. The more people who believe democracy is failsafe, the more likely it will fail. Attention Deficit Democracy produces the attitudes, ignorance, and arrogance that pave the way to pollitical collapse.”

I started this book tonight, and it’s already so good, but kind of scary. He starts out by stating the point of the book in an introduction. He really slams Bush a ton in the beginning, and then he starts to show parallels between Bush and Clinton, and as you can see nearly all modern presidents. He’s talked about how both Bush and Clinton have bombed places without the permission of Congress in the name of freedom and democracy.

He also talked about how long it has been since we’ve had a president who ran on a platform based on the Constitution. This book is very informative and I recommend it to every one who does not realize the importance of our Republic. We must realize its deterioration in order to stop it. It’s strange that all of the mainstream media ignores the only ‘08 candidate that advocates the Constitution. Oh, the irony of the United States.

Attention Deficit Democracy by James Bovard.

My dad is constantly bugging me to put all of my conversation that I have for him on my blog. It is because in person, he hates to talk about the things that I’m learning in all of the scientific writings that I read. I don’t care who gets this stuff or who doesn’t… I am going to rant and scream to the world how incredible this stuff is.

First of all, the book I am currently reading is a collection of physics lectures written by Richard Feynman. He was a big physicist in the 50s and 60s and I’m pretty sure he went to all teaching until he died in 1988.¬†His writing is magnificent. The only thing that you really need to know before you read this book is some basic calculus and some Euclidean geometry.

It starts out talking about a lot of mathematics involved in classical¬†mechanics. Classical mechanics is just Newtonian physics… the boring stuff… force, kinetic energy, momentum, acceleration, all of that classic stuff dealing with bodies in motion through space. If there are any of you out there that think those types of things are what physics I’m going to be studying in college are, you are mistaken. Although these are the basic mechanics to what I’ll be doing, and an important part in the learning process, it is only the beginning.

In Einstein’s time and just before, physics was entering a revolution, where electricity and magnetism were starting to be known as a large part of modern physics. All kinds of men made incredible contributions to science in those days… and they were all brilliant. Luckily for Einstein, he was coming up at just the right time when all of the equtions he needed to answer the things he’d been dreaming up were being born. Things such as the Lorentz Transformation and so on. A famous experiment called the Michelson and Morley Experiment had just been conducted.

It’s as if God was pushing Einstein right up to the top of modern science. He had been dreaming about principles of relativity since he was 16. He failed his last final in college, which would have led him into electrical engineering. Instead he was stuck in a patent office all day in Switzerland doing nothing, but dreaming up the ideas that would change the world of science and technology as we knew it. The basic principles of relativity were starting to form, but nobody really saw it coming until he came in and BAM! Like magic, he put all of it together.

I was excited last night and earlier this evening about the things I’d been reading. I knew Einstein’s theories of relativity about how it changed our views on space… and then I also knew about his famous equation which states that mass is proportional to energy. Tonight Feynman finally pulled it all together for me, and I understand how the two connect now. I also learned a bit of vector analysis which was a really cool form of math which was composed of a little basic calculus, basic algebra, and some Euclidean geometry, but when they were put together, it will make your head spin at first. It was really exciting as I grasped it all.