First off, a few more comments about the UW Forum for Admitted Students. Every few days I go back and just browse a little. Soon there should be the bulk of students getting their acceptances and coming there. Should get interesting. However I continue to see severe problems. If you look at this thread, about 2/3 down, Devon, a moderator, posts a reply on medical schools. First, Optometry is not a Med school, it’s an Optometry School. It doesn’t give an M.D., it gives an O.D. Second, we will have a satellite med school soon, which should have been noted. Third, It isn’t that tough to get the prerequisits for Med school while in engineering. He says it will take one or two extra terms, when in reality you should be able to fit it in with electives. You only need a few courses in Life Sciences/Humanities, which you have to take with CSEs to pass Engineering either way.

It is very cliche that Chem is better than Mech for interest. That is incorrect because both you can get the required courses, and each one focuses on different things. For some fields Mech may even be better because of focus on dynamics and mechanics. The Biomech option is availiable to both. Mostly it’s your Grades, Interview and MCAT that matter. This is only one example of poor responses that only make the problem I talked about in mjy last entry even worse. These comments are helping people decide what field they want to take for their CAREER! They should not be fed false information!

Well I’m on things that make me furious, once again there is a hoax running around over a new water powered car. He’s basing it off a technology he made for a water torch. I will note that a water torch is possible, but it requires a lot of energy and is impractical. However, he’s marketing this as a technology that will actually be practical. I read his online paper and it’s BS. It makes up new bonds, defies the laws of physics, and uses pretentious technical jargon to impress anyone without a basic knowledge of chemistry. If you read any into the paper you can see right through the lies. I’ll spare you the talk about orbital clouds and sp^2 hybridization, or the intro thermodynamics and fundemental laws of conservation of energy. I’ll even pass over his claims about endothermic combustion. This does not work. Electrolysis is an inefficient process and this is just the Water fuel cell hoax over again. Just because he patented an idea doesn’t mean it will work in the real world. The fact that Fox news ran a story on it doesn’t help his credibility. Also, after reading Digg comments here, I’ve decided that the Digg community is too stupid for me to visit them ever again. I’m solely a Reddit person now.

Now, on to what I really wanted to talk about, the Senate. This week Harper introduced a bill to limit the length of the term of Senators. His goal is to later have the senate elected and sees this just as a step in that direction. Harper is really pushing ahead with many concepts…seems to me to be a little too much a little too fast. It will be interesting to see it all unfold. I think that an elected senate is a horrible idea. I’ll try to explain my thoughts, but remember that I only have an interest in politics, so I might be missing something not having a formal education in Political Science.

In reality I see three options. Keep the senate as it is, make it an elected senate, or abolish the senate. In the past I have supported the first option in conversations with friends, but I think now I’m going to support the last option. My reasoning is that times are changing and people think the senate shouldn’t be appointed. And since I don’t support an elected senate, that leaves us with the option to abolish it. The senate exists to be a “sober second thought” to legislation. It was also designed to give provinces representation. This last provision’s result has made it so some provinces are over respresented compared to population (east coast), and many being under represented (Ontario, Alberta, BC). Senators are appointed usually because they are experienced, such as past members of parliament. The house of commons on the other hand has many MPs who are very new and may not know the process. This is the theory behind the senate.

An elected senate gets rid of these benifits. Provinces aren’t represented the same (possibly for the better though), we lose the experienced factor, and we have term restrictions. Problem is this is just the same as the house of commons. Why do we need two houses which will do exactly the same thing? We don’t. If we abolish the senate, we shrink the government, save money, and get rid of this problem that people complain about over appointments. We can also remove the agist restrictions on who can be a senator which are discriminatory. It I can vote, I should be allowed to become a senator.

Maybe it is time for us to modernize our government. Ontario is having their Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform (It looks like I probably didn’t get on it :( ) and BC is reforming their system. Maybe the Federal government can fix their problems…then we won’t have the Bloc getting seats they don’t deserve and proping up the conservative government.

I must say that after I activated Akismet my spam has been under control. I may even open up the comments so it doesn’t require one moderated post first.

Currently Listening to: Dani California - Red Hot Chili Peppers

Random Wikipedia Article - Affirmative action bake sale