The latest episode’s segment on nuclear reactors on university campuses reinforces my opinion that this show is only here to instill fear in people.

The show’s producers call the reactor on the McMaster campus “an ominous” building and let you believe that nothing good comes out of there. The first “issue” they mention is the lack of personnel manning the parking booths at the entrances to campus. The producers (I’m guessing) expect a person to be checking ID at the entrance to the campus and ask them about their business at the reactor. Needless to say this is (at best) a dumb thing to expect. The campus is a public place with over 25,000 people living, learning and working here. If checking 25,000 pieces of ID on a daily basis sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. Even when the parking booths were manned, you could just drive by them and not stop. This is a non-issue. University campuses are public places, a fact they conveniently do not mention, and open to the public. 16×9 seems to forget that they were allowed to film on campus without requiring authorization precisely because of this fact.

Next (still within the first 5 minutes of the segment) they go on to compare the 5 MW reactor here with a 500 MW reactor at the Pickering Power plant, pointing out the difference in security level. Let me get this straight: you expect the same security level at a 5 MW reactor as at a reactor ONE HUNDRED TIMES ITS SIZE? Does that really make sense to you, Garofalo?

Of course no such segment could be complete without a scientist giving us facts (whether or not they pertain to the subject matter is another story). The scientist 16×9 interviewed mentions that in the correct geometric arrangement, uranium can be used in an atomic bomb. Of course, by telling us this, the 16×9 producers imply the material from the McMaster reactor is dangerous and capable of being used in a bomb. Really? I can make a bomb out of bleach and ammonia, are you going to go to Canadian Tire for your next expose?

At this point (about 7 minutes in) the video crashed Firefox and it was just as well. I had had enough of this fear mongering they call “ground-breaking investigations.”

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“No problem,” I thought to myself, “I’ll just go to the store at the corner of King and James streets and buy tickets there.” Sauntering up James street towards King I had a chance to revisit some of the sights I had not seen since my move to Markham (which was followed by my parents’ move to Sarnia): the Y, some church, other buildings etc. When I get to the store, I ask for 10 tickets, “$18.50″ says the man behind the counter after reading the display. I pull out my (sometimes) trusty debit card and he swipes it for me. I look at the screen and BAM: “A $0.50 will apply. OK?”

No, it’s not OK! Why would it be ok? I’m paying close to $20 here, why would you charge me? Setting aside the fact that charging people for debit transactions is retarded in and of its own, it’s not like I bought a $0.99 piece of candy. It’s $20. I canceled the transaction and walked out, on principle. I don’t want to pay for a simple $20 transaction.

In case you were wondering, I did take one of the new buses on the 10 Beeline line. It was nice, I will want to see it in action once school starts.

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Apparently some geniuses in child psychology and learning have said “There’s no point in doing homework and it takes away  from family time, now give me my Pokeball back or we’re not friends anymore.” OK, I made some of that up. The point is though people think kids have it rough nowadays. A lot of stress, not enough family time and all because of (god forbid) homework. The article mentions the 10 minute rule, where homework for the night should take you 10 minutes for each grade you’ve been through (40 for 4th grade, 50 for 5th and you get the point) [Sure wish I would have known this rule when I was in elementary and secondary].

The downside of this rule is, of course, that the amount of homework “seems reasonable enough for first graders, but this quickly (emphasis mine) escalates a full hour per night for 6th graders and two hours per night in Grade 12.” I don’t know about you but that amount sounds reasonable to me. What time do most schools get out at? Say 4 PM at the latest? So get home and be babied up by mommy and daddy who missed their precious overtired and overstressed angel so much during the day that they brought work home with them. All this takes you to say 5:30 PM. Dinner at 6. Homework at 6:30 and, if you’re in 6th grade, you’re done by 7:30. I don’t know what bedtime usually is for an 11 year old but lets say 9:30. You’ve got two full hours to spend with your family (Read watching TV or most likely on Facebook or MySpace).

But what about those poor grade 12′s. They have TWO full hours of homework. I don’t know about any of you, but in my grade 12 year (let’s say 4-5 years ago for the sake of argument) I didn’t go to bed until 12 AM if that. Trust me, it wasn’t the homework that kept me up, it was everything else I wanted to do. For most of my friends 1 or 2 AM was early to go to bed and again not because of homework.

I really do not understand this society of ours. I agree with the point that more doesn’t mean it’s going to work better. Or as in this case, help the pupils learn better. It is still needed, if just to make things like multiplication and taking derivatives automatic. You’ve heard of muscle memory, how about memory memory?

The kids of today are being babied beyond belief. I used to laugh at the whole “back in my day, we had it tough” but no more. The answer to the homework “problem,” if you want to call it that, is not the amount but the content. Homework needs to be made more engaging (not to mean more entertaining). Instead of asking students “How fast will a bucket empty if it has 5 L of water in it and it is leaking at 250mL per second?” change it to “How fast will your iPod fill up if you put 20 songs on it per day and it can take 20,000 songs in total?” It’s that simple.

OK, that’s enough for now, I have at least 170 minutes of homework waiting for me.

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