BILL NYE!!

SO, I got to meet one of my childhood superheros the other day! thats right bill nye! and just in case you were wondering they did play his theme song before he came on stage so it would have been worth your time to go. I was lucky enought to get seats the fourth row in in the middle!
Bill talked about alot of diffrent things, but one thing that he said the most was that "we can CHANGE THE WORLD!" he did kinda yell it too. lol but he talked about all of these ideas and the advances we were making the the scientific community. He kept telling us that yes there are problems in the world but its us as the future generation who can fix these problems and can make the world better. we can create a way to lower the earths temperature, we can create a way to easily and safely go to the moon. (btw 550 people have gone into space! did you think it was that many? cause i had no idea...)  I just kept thinking this man has devoted his life to science and to helping make the world a better place and he has over 500 students here listening to what he is saying.
The things bill said were amazing, sometimes i didn't always know where he was going with things but it was wither funny or interesting so he had my attention for the whole time. He even made up a few words, very dr seuss worthy. It was fun to try and see the ASL interperators fingerspell them because they were soooo long and weird sounding.
So basically i just wanted to reaffirm the fact the Bill Nye is amazing, that he belives that we can change the world and create things to fix the world and i am in full agreement with him. if we want this world to last and be the best that it can be its our job to try and fix it. to make it better, to make it last. Bill pointed out that most people fall in love with science before the age of ten. I realized that i went to space camp when i was 9 and that is when i fell in love with astronomy and science. I want to help other kids fall in love with science too, how i am going to do that? i have no idea....

$$ College $$

          So College started this week, well last week. I'm not really counting last week cause its the week were you enter a room and the only important things that are really said are "this textbook will cost x amount of dollars and you will need a clicker and to buy access to the website where all the homework is posted" that is an example of one of my classes. Awesome right? wrong... very wrong. not. ok. with me.
         This week every time I got my wallet out to pay for a textbook, or to get a clicker, or notebooks, or an ID, or a bus pass (the list goes on) I thought of the olden days where only the rich and powerful could go to school. It was a great image that even back then school was something you had to pay a lot and work for. I can hardly imagine how much a book cost back then... when all books were written by hand. Hard to imagine with what we have now, laptops, Internet, printing presses. So my question is, after all of the technological advances we've made since then WHY are books still 200+ dollars? I understand that alot of people put work into them and that they are big and heavy and for some reason those two qualify as reasons as to why I pay more. I just think that if you buy a textbook that took maybe 20min to an hour to make on a machine and most of the information was already in the LAST edition of the book why i have to get a new one and why it costs me more than a car payment for textbooks.
            So after this experience of extreme spending I became very grateful for all I have. INCLUDING the opportunity I have to go to College. To earn a degree. To better myself and hopefully my community. I am thankful for my job and the ability it gives me to afford college and the nasty text books that come with it.I am greatful for the internet and the ability to buy book cheaper off their and to rent them and get my money back. I am also grateful to not have been born in the dark ages where girls weren't even allowed to go to college, let alone leave the house. I'm a little to headstrong for that to have lasted for long. However if dragons really did exist back then and I could own one...never mind we won't go there. today.

So in the end College = good and textbooks = so ridiculously expensive it hurts.