YAY

So the mom issues are over...
i'm not gonna go into details but it's all good now. there was some crying and and holding and idk i think there were some misc pill-like substance she gave me at 6 am to help me fall asleep (it was rather slepping pills, nitroglycerin type thing, or it was some sort of truth serum) (i have really bad sleppingness, like, i go to be @ like, 3am but then it was like, 6 am and i was stilll awake...)

so yeah.
and now she's being all nice to me. My goodness emotional rollercoasters. i just hoope this good period lasts a bit longer.
as i always say, my family puts the FUN in disFUNctional


haha

in other news my b-day party might be in Pennsylvania. :O
lol

>.<

It's days like this that reminds me why i was so suicidal in elementary school years...

More Carl Sagan!

Ten Quick Questions with Ann Druyan

Taken from the Science Channel site

Ann Druyan is a writer (A Famous Broken Heart; Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) and the CEO of Cosmos Studios, a production company based out of Ithaca, N.Y. Ms. Druyan is also the widow of Carl Sagan, whom she collaborated with on both the Voyager Golden Record and the epic series, Cosmos. Here, she talks about what it was like to work on the series, her husband's contributions to the scientific community and beyond, and her own legacy with the Solar Sail.

Q: You're now involved in a project called Solar Sailing. Can you talk a little about it?
A: Solar Sailing is a way of moving through space at 10 times the 38,000 mph of the Voyager spacecraft, using reflective sails that look like Mylar. There are six pointed 60-foot-long sails; they're huge and very thin. Once they open, if we can prove they're powered by photons from the sun, we will have had a Wright Brothers moment. The sail will move five-tenths or one-half the speed of light. By the time it gets to another solar system, it will be one-tenth the speed of light.

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((((((((OMG this is awesome!!!!!!!!! when i'm older i'll be able to travel around space!))))))))~ SiR , your blog author ;)

Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and other randomness

So i was watching the Carl Sagan's Cosmos on the discovery channel and it was pretty great. and i remembered something i saw on the internet (a clip on the internet) and thought up a couple of random things. so the thought came to my mind ,that, under the assumption that time is a dimension(and that we live in the 4rth dimention in that sense) , is it possible that there is a universe in which time has 2, or even 3 dimentions? and there was some other stuff that i can't remember...
gah

anyway, so, next to bill nye the science guy, Carl Sagan is my favorite scientist that has appeared on tv for the purpose of explaining things. :P

Carl's bio!(read this you should!)

in other news, as nice as my mom is, as i grow up i am begining to realize how racist she is, how homophobic she is, and how backwards thinking she is at times. so is my dad. >.<>

examples and quotes:

• upon hearing the news that gay marriage was legalized in California "The end of the world is coming!" (said in Bengali). I know religiously she believes that being gay is wrong, and having premarital sex is wrong, so by her logic, gay marriage should be legal , in order to prevent one of those sins. i highly doubt that a change in the LEGAL rights of a relationship is hardly going to change God's view on all of humanity. whether or not you support this legal change, please do consider that the idea that God will destroy the World because of this legal change is rather absurd. no religion I've seen (that explained according to it's believers) has anything about two people of the same sex getting married, just about them having sex ha ha. marriage is a legal right, if you want to call them "civil unions", lets go with that. this bill's language may include the term marriage, but whether or not the ceremony has anything to do with religion is up to the couple and the clergy and whatnot, therefore religious definitions of marriage cannot be used in legal arguments. even if one's religion says being gay is wrong (going back to two people having sex of the same gender), one has to consider whether it is ok to force your religious beliefs into the law of a secular state/nation. She gets "scared" when i "argue" with her, i didn't even outrightly tell her main statement was wrong, just that her reasoning behind it kinda fails, as if she was taught these things as a child, and that even her post-rationalizing doesn;t work very well. that explanation lasted longer than expected haha.
  
• while watching the episode on evolution from Carl Sagan "If we came from monkey's, why aren't all the monkey's gone! These scientists don't know anything!" .............. wow. just wow. even if you for some reason (example religiously) don't believe in evolution on the part of humans, please come up with a more intelligent response...
• when referring to the light that became fused on our kitchen ceiling, my mom promptly said (when i said that i was too short to reach it), "That's why we need a man in the house!".... i seriously had to keep myself from saying, no, that's why we need a stepladder in the house...
• while i was watching ninja warrior, my mom said, "I'm going to be so scared when you start looking for a husband for you, you have such horrible taste (let it be noted that I've never had a boyfriend in my life, therefore this statement makes no sense, although i think that she was referring to that fact that i have a large diversity in the ethnicities of my friends, and since my school is incredibly diverse with a lot of different types of personalities among those groups, totally makes sense as i know that the majority of stereotypes don't apply, therefor actually getting to know someone before instantly judging based on ridiculous factors makes sense in my world, but not my mom's i guess) . when describing the kind of guy she wants me to marry, she says things that include "from the right type of family with a good background (eh, i care more about the guy himself than his family but ok.....) , soft spoken and nice(i agree here for the most part), etc.....and from the right kind of country" <---- I'm sorry but that's really messed up. like, really really messed up. what from their type of government? obviously that's not what she mean because my parents a re from the most governmentally corrupt politicians in the world. the only thing she could have meant was their national stereotypes. >.<>

what pains me is that most of the time my mom yells at me and speaks very loudly and kinda mean whenever i attempt to tell her the logical follies in her statements. forget that i'm not outrightly telling her she's wrong, just that her explanations have serious lacking. like, she refuses to listen to logical thinking. Heck i don't even talk to my dad about this stuff so i don't know how he'd react, considering the topics rarely come up so i don't have a chance to refute or argue anything, and i don't plan to randomly instigate an argument with my dad over controversial topics when i don't really get to talk to him at all very often. well anyway, Thank you internet extended discussion forums to show be the process of logical thought necessary to keep me from sounding like an idiot and making statements that make no sense whatever your ideology. (And thank you my friends for providing me with real life examples to use when discussing stuff with my mom (sadly, nothing will get through her head).

with all that said, i do awe her a lot of respect, because she is a nice person, and some of the things she taught me (do as she says, not as she does :D ) were really really important, empathizing with the poor, honesty, , being a nice person, sharing, not making fun of other kids and a lot of other things that was really motherly and awesome of her. I have a really complex and confusing relationship with my parents, with so muh involved that nobody, even my friends or people who have read all of my blog has the ability to begin to make judgements, as no one can even begin to completely know the whole story. I love them, as they are my parents, and they have been pretty great sometimes (except when they are being emotionally damaging like parents can be...), but i am allowed to poke holes in their logic if i want to :P


although, i do admit, my common sense sometimes falters. but when it comes to this stuff, i think i got my reasoning to argue with her reasoning right...


so in conclusion, Carl Sagan on Cosmos. Hopefully, Sunday's marathon was not the last airing of this awesome show on the Science channel. LOL that series was EPIC.

Google and yet another death

So, i had a second grandparent die this year. first it was my mom's dad who died in Pennsylvania back at the beginning of the semester. Today, this morning, the day after the end of the semester, my grandma (dad's mom) died in Bangkok of breast cancer (it was very late stage and had already spread).
Apparently she knew she had it before but she was afraid of telling anyone (if she did tell someone they could have caught it early and done the biopsy to stop it right then) .
unlike my grandpa that died, i wasn't very close to my dad's mom because she lived halfway across the world. and even when i did visit i didn't really spend a lot of time with her. i was actually planning on visiting them this summer knowing that they were old and gonna die within a few years. oh such cruel irony...



In other news, does anyone remember that documentary i did n the MYP program that was like, an hour long?
well Google video is being stupid so the uploading failed. i really hope it actually works.
(i won't be able to upload it without my laptop because that's where the files are so i won't be able to try again till i get back to Maryland)