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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2012
PAGE 5
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY GANSAN
I agree with the Dunkin' Donuts coffee,
Chipotle and a crewneck being the perfect date night. I just wish I thought of it first.
opinion
Hahahahahaha Cardinals.
Hey FFA Editor, I love how you choose a combination of funny and thoughtful FFAs for the column. (Pretend there's a picture of Ryan Gosling behind this.)
ME
If I had a nickel for every time I think about you, I'd think about you more often.
Sorry, Wj Withie, I'm not just following you. I actually have a class that way.
Wait, running a marathon isn't a big deal?
I just stole an entire bag of bags from Mrs. E's. Should I be ashed?
Someone just did the whistle from "The Hunger Games" in Budig 120.
month
treatment.
recipients
provided
captive:
CORD
Text your FFA submissions to 785-289-8351 or at kansan.com
Wow, I had no clue you were in college.
Thank goodness you were wearing that shirt telling me so.
Let's play "count the boat shoes on Wescoe."
KU Fit? Yeah right dude. More like KU kind of Fit.
I think I love my Western Civ professor. She's playing a sentimental slide show of the unit we just finished, complete with sappy music.
To the person who highlighted all the main points in my used book. I love you.
You dare question my masterhood?! You favorite Pokémon is probably Rattata.
Watching my bio teacher jump every time this girl sneezes is making my morning.
How many horcruxes does Mike Myers have?
Is it studious of me to find guys to get it in with on Monday and Wednesday nights so I can get to my 8 a.m. on time the next morning?
I agree with the FFA editor. Pickles indeed!
"EMAW" backwards is "stupid."
To the guy who literally sprinted up the stairs by Malott: Thanks for making me feel like the fat kid.
I wonder how a bowling pin feels when the nine other pins get knocked down:
"ALL MY FRIENDS ARE GONE!"
A sneak peek at the future of green tech
In Kansas, this past summer was unbearable. Throughout June and July, the temperature was always above 85 degrees, and often above 95, and it never rained. But for many Americans (1 in 6 actually), this summer's extreme weather meant drought ravaging crops, forest fires and flash floods damaging homes and property. After this summer of extreme weather, the number of Americans who believe that climate change is affecting weather has increased from 70 percent to 75. With a majority of Americans believing in global warming, it's time for a change.
TECHNOLOGY
Now I'm not going to convince you that your gas guzzling F-250 is destroying the environment, which it is, but humans have made an insane impact on the environment. What I will say is that the future is green technology, and you should get to know a few of the technologies that are making headlines now.
THE NEW(ISH) ELECTRIC CAR
It looks like a Porsche, has a 300-horsepower engine, and can accelerate from 0 to 60 in 3.7 seconds, faster than a 2013 Ford
Mustang, all while being about as loud as your microwave. You've probably already heard of Tesla, the electric car company brought to you by Elon Musk, the same crazy Internet mogul that built Space-X and sent a rocket to the International Space Station.
Tesla has recently been a front-runner in electric car technology, and is once again tackling one of the major problems associated with electric cars: range. While Tesla's cars have a range of up to 300 miles, what happens if you're traveling and can't go home? Tesla's solution is to start building dozens solar-powered charging stations up and down the California coast, making sure that no car is out of range of a station. They can charge a car in around 3 hours, and Tesla said they will have most of the U.S. covered by 2014. If this small tech company can produce a system that can cover the whole country in electric cars, then hopefully consumers will expect larger companies to do the same.
FUSION POWER, I SWEAR WE'RE ALMOST THERE (AGAIN)
Fusion is the force that has
powered our sun and covered our planet with light for 4.57 billion years. What if we could harness that power on earth? For the past 30 years, fusion power has only been "15 years away" and will still probably take until 2040. But we're getting closer, and it would be a dream come true. It's the ultimate clean energy, using only hydrogen gas, creating only helium, and producing insane amounts of energy (up to 1,000 times the input energy, if simulations are correct).
Right now, there are a few techniques being used to try and attain fusion. Many groups are simply heating hydrogen up to several million degrees into a plasma (like in the center of the Sun) and trying to get energy, while a lab in California is shooting the world's most powerful lasers at a tiny hydrogen pellet and getting energy from, basically, a laser powered hydrogen bomb.
So let me get this straight, there is a technology that could generate enough power to give electricity to 10 billion people, that is generated either by creating a star or based on giant explosions, and you haven't donated money to it yet? You seriously need to change that.
GLASS ROADS
It sounds crazy, I know. Have millions of 3,000-pound cars driving on glass would be a terrible idea. Nobody would be that stupid. Except for Scott Brusaw, who believes glass is the future of the U.S. highway system. Glass doesn't have to be as delicate and frail we believe it to be – in fact, adding different minerals makes many types of glass more flexible than plastic and stronger than steel, more than enough to support the weight of millions of cars a year. Brusaw wants to use this to our advantage by creating a smart highway that is a road system with both solar panels and LED signs underneath glass to create energy and leave drivers
messages on the road.
If you have the U.S. interstate system (47,000 miles long) made of glass roads, and 90 percent have solar panels, then you would have about 184 square miles of pure solar panels. This doesn't sound like much, but 184 square miles would produce about 312 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a day, or about the same amount of energy California uses for an entire year. Not to mention the other 10 percent of roads (not solar panels), which would tell you how fast you were going, if there was construction ahead, or how long it would take you to get downtown.
Although Brusaw has samples of these roads in his lab, even he admits they still need time and would be disgustingly expensive to implement. But imagine having roads that don't need constant construction, generate enough electricity to run most of the country's power, and even tell you how fast you're going. It would be awesome.
Simpson is a freshman majoring in chemical engineering from Fairway.
INTERNATIONAL
Islam misrepresented in media
It turns out that not everyone views things the same way. I used to look at other cultures through my own narrow lens of comfort, relating everything to my own familiar experiences and values. I looked at Hanukkah as Jewish Christmas and crepes as French pancakes and a Quinceañera as a sweet sixteen (except the Mexicans were off by a year). And bless my parents for trying, but I begged them to let me eat every meal at McDonald's when we took our first international trip to Spain. I found great comfort in knowing that every culture was "just like us." And I ignored the sources that were beyond my own personal understanding.
There's a girl in my dorm named Aliaa who wears a jihab on her head and a smile on her face. She's lived in Egypt and
I watched four consecutive hours of CNN coverage on the attacks at the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya and the subsequent riots and did not once hear from an Islamic source. The only sources we have are from our very own government, because it's so expensive and risky to place journalists in war-torn areas. Welcome to 21st century propaganda: All of our information about the Middle East comes from America.
I'm a journalist now, and I make mistakes; I don't always include every pertinent source, which is just plain wrong. But the extent to which the American media has demonized the
Islam eluded me when I was a kid. I only knew that the women wore hoods on their heads and that the men hatened America, which today I understand is not true. According to the general public, terrorists only came from the Middle East. That didn't make much sense to me. I was living in the suburbs of Washington D.C. at the time, and those guys who murdered civilians from the beltway were way more terrifying to me than any Muslims; yet the people on the news only called them "snipers."
Webber is a freshman majoring in journalism and political science from Prairie Village. Follow him on Twitter @webbgemz.
Above all, I've learned that there isn't an American equivalent to everything. Muhammad isn't Muslim Jesus - he's Muhammad. We shouldn't claim that it's perfectly fine to insult another religion's prophet merely because we choose to desecrate, our own. Maybe we should learn something about this religion from the people who actually practice it before we demonize it from being different from ours. Behind the hijab or abaya or burqa, there is a pair of eyes that see from their own point of view.
Islamic people is criminal. Over 90 percent of Middle Easterners are Muslims; therefore, almost anything that occurs in this turbulent region will involve a person of Islamic faith. But religion is not always relevant to a story. A headline like, "Christian Jerry Sandusky Guilty of Molesting 10 Boys" would seem pretty out of place in an American newspaper. And yet our media feels the need to cite religion as the cause every single time a car bomb explodes in Afghanistan.
Saudi Arabia, and she's taught me more about Islam just from our lunchtime conversations than I've learned from 18 years of schooling and media exposure. For instance, I was under the impression that Muslim women are completely subjugated by men. However, Aliaa explained to me that women only have a strict public dress code in Saudi Arabia; each country has its own customs that cannot be applied to the entire nation of Islam. She proudly wears her hijab by choice, out of respect for her religion and in the name of modesty. In most Islamic countries, women can do everything that men can.
CHIRPS BACK
Follow us on Twitter @UDK_Opinion.
Tweet us your opinions, and we just might publish them.
What Lawrence concerts have you enjoyed so far this semester?
@katiemo91
@UDB_Doinbite @queticoir show on top of the Oread *wainyback@greatviewtoo*
@UDK. Opinion @hoodieallen at @thegranada, and @mutemath there the next day. September was nice
@carpenterjaclyn
©UDK Dionition The Lumineers. Definitely the best concert I've ever been to.
@mswag47
@carpenterjaclyn
SOCIAL MEDIA
Connect in person, not over Facebook
Is social media more addicting than sex? In a Kansan article published on Tuesday, a new study conducted at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business concluded that sex is a strong desire, but social media is harder to resist.
The advancement of technology has created different ways of connecting with others. The Facebook news feed updates you on your friends' lives. It's an information fest, and the more you know the more you feel connected. I can understand that social media is addicting because I love to read hilarious tweets, too. However, the comparison of desires is puzzling.
College is known to be the place where parties are wild and sexual encounters are numerous. Hanging out and hooking up are the new relationship statuses. Watch the 1978 classic comedy film "Animal House" and you can see how sex is considered a vital part of college life as Eric "Otter" Stratton charms his way into every woman's skirts.
Is this stereotype of college life accurate? According to a National Center for Health Statistics study released in 2011, 21.9 percent of all females and males aged 15 to 24-years-old had never experienced sexual contact with another person in 2002. The study points out an increase to 28.6 percent of all females and 27.2 percent of all males in the same age range never experiencing sexual contact with another person between 2006 and 2008.
Less people are having sex. Is this caused by social media fulfilling our desires to connect with others? Perhaps, but I don't buy it. The desire for physical connection is stronger. That is why so many long distance relationships fail. Twitter and Facebook provide an illusion of connection and two partners often call it quits because they don't see each other every day. Social media is available for everyone and that makes it addicting and safer than creating and maintaining a physical relationship.
We tweet, post status updates and create online associations with others because it has become the norm to not talk face to face. My roommate made an interesting discovery on Craigslist that proves my point. Instead of talking to someone people are posting "missed connections" in the Lawrence personalis for the redhead at Wendy's or the guy at the rec. Is it too difficult to talk to people? It is definitely safer to post on the Internet, but it prevents you from actually connecting with that person you want to get to know.
As humans we desire physical connection and it may be that social media has been made so available to everyone that the desires have shifted from physical to cyberspace. Don't be fooled. The social media connection is nothing compared to the sexual one. Let go of your fears. Talk to the guy in biology you have been sitting behind or the girl you see in the library every Wednesday. Don't let social media control your life and socialize the old fashioned way. Toga party anyone?
Warren is a junior majoring in journalism from Overland Park. Follow her on Twitter @jordan_mchele.
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