EPIC FAIL

Remember when I said I was going to post weekly about the class I am TAing? My bad.

Here are they spark notes:

Food production and agriculture:
Did you know that the Haber-Bosch process has allowed about 40% of the world's population to be fed today? This same process has also contributed to millions of deaths because it also creates TNT. Using ethanol for fuel does not help the environment as much as you would think. Every time a corn farmer decides to sell an acre of his corn for ethanol fuel instead of fuel, an acre of land somewhere else in the world is plowed/deforested. This happens because the demand for corn does not decrease, so it is still profitable for a farmer somewhere else to grow corn. Sadly, that acre typically comes from the rainforest, or a place called "the Cerrado" in Brazil. The Cerrado is a biologically-rich savannah home to over 10,000 species of plants. ~45% of these are unique to the Cerrado. Realistically, to address world hunger, this land is going to have to be farmed. It's sad. And it's sad from a scientific point of view. Biodiversity is crucial to the medical industry as a good portion of drugs are derived from plants, animals, and microorganisms.
Transportation:
Did you know that after the Model T became affordable in the 1920s (1 car per 5 people), people projected that everyone would have their own airplane parked in their driveway by now? We are now approaching 2 million cars on the road. That is a huge problem in terms of solving our energy crisis, global warming, and moving toward a sustainable infrastructure (electric cars). Electric cars are promising, but they certainly have downsides. Most car batteries are based on Li-ion batteries. But this is not a solution because Li is not a common enough element. We also don't have batteries that have a large enough range. As I mentioned above, we are also missing the infrastructure for it. It is alarming that we really don't have a backup plan that we can implement in a reasonable amount of time.
Transistors:
Did you know that the most common man-made object in the world is the transistor? Makes sense considering there are over a billion on a computer chip nowadays. Anyway, this touches on how amazingly small technology has gotten. Back when our parents and grandparents were our age, there was a race to make things bigger. Every country wanted to have the biggest skyscraper. Nowadays, there is basically a race to get things smaller. Do you guys know what MEMS are? MEMS stands for MicroElectroMechanical Systems. It is basically like creating little machines! Some could even say MICROMACHINES!!!
The picture above is from Sandia National Labs and shows a dust mite in comparison to the gears in some of these systems. MEMS are created in the same way the nanoscale features on the computer processors are created. This is accomplished through lithography techniques (like those that are studied in my lab) that are easily described through a picture.Get it? I hope so.

Anyway, that's enough spark notes. I'd like to talk about actual TAing. I am finding I have responsibilities I didn't anticipate. For example...and as the only example I am going to give, I am writing the test! Sure, I went over topics to put on the test with the professor, but I am actually writing the questions. It's actually pretty hard because it isn't a math-based science class. A lot of the issues we talk about don't have "correct" answer. And there are also lots of answer that one could put down. The real challenge for me is writing the answer such that they write down the answer I want. I had to write a quiz a few weeks ago. Here are the first 2 questions:
1) What are the consequences of releasing large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere? For this, I was only looking for people to say global warming/climate change as we had talked about this in class.
2) When does this occur? For this, I hoped people would say "when we burn fossil fuels," as we had discussed in class. Not everyone had that answer. One person wrote "50-100 years" and another person wrote something about photosynthesis and plants releasing CO2. I couldn't believe it. Oh well.

I also made a girl cry yesterday. This one girl (she might be retarded, just kidding, but she is fucked up socially. Like talking softly while staring at the ground, wearing black glove-sleeves, and wearing shirts that have Link from Zelda drawn in stained glass) never talks in class. And she gets shitty grade on homeworks (she wrote 50-100 years on her quiz). After class, she always asks how she can improve her grade, to which I always respond by talking or posting on blackboard. She recently got a 6/10 on her homework and wanted to know how she could do better. A reasonable question! I guess she didn't like my answer. I told her:
a) It's best to have an answer that is longer than the question for a discussion based class. Most students are writing nearly a page per question. She wrote a sentence.
b) For every homework, I post on the course website a homework from a student who got a 100%.
Anyway. she cried. I don't care. I even emailed her at one point to remind her that if she wanted to get a good grade she could take a few minutes to post on blackboard!

SMELLIOT - OUT!

PS: poop