I saw the new Pixar movie Wall-E this past weekend, and it was a visual marvel. I've long since stopped really noticing that these animated movies are animated, because the techniques and tools have progressed so far. (Did you even notice the appearance of actual live non-computer-generated footage?)

From a straight movie perspective, it was ok -- certainly not my favorite Pixar movie. But what it lacked in strong actor presence it made up for with educational value. Here are the top seven things I learned about life from watching Wall-E.

** Warning: Potential Spoiler Alert **

1. Capitalism is bad --  The movie takes place some 700 years after an exodus of humanity from a trashed and poisoned Earth. Presumably, this is the result of the "benign" rule of the BnL corporation. So, the big bad corporation is the cause of the downfall of Earth. (I'm guessing that between the technological requirement of Wall-E and the political requirement of a corporation taking over a united Earth, I'm pegging the exodus at a hundred years or so from now.)
2. Apple is good -- Talk about product placement, way to go Steve Jobs! From the still functioning 800 year old iPod to the Macintosh startup sound when Wall-E reboots, it's nice to see that the rumors of Apple's imminent demise have been (greatly) exagerated.
3. People are sheep -- We let the corporation take over the world, we let (helped?) them trash and poison it, and then we let them talk us into running away from the problem. Then, given the "Shangri-La" environment of the Axiom, we devolved into overweight, glowing screen addicted blobs. (Oh wait, that last part isn't really evolution, now that I think about it...)
4. People are adaptable -- After a seeming lifetime of relative ignorance, the Captain stays up into the night querying the ship's computer (Sigourney Weaver in her finest ship performance since Futurama) about Earth. John and Mary instinctively seize on their new-found freedom once made aware of the "real world" by Wall-E, and sacrificed their own safety to protect a sliding mass of children on the Ledo deck. Seemingly nobody on-ship objects to returning to Earth and starting anew. Yes, people seem to have an inherent attraction to what's fundamentally right and a curiousity about what's around them.
5. Computers are evil -- The autopilot deviously tried squashing concrete fact in order to maintain its hold on power. (Where have I heard that before?) The repair bots tried to "fix" EVA in a move reminiscent of Nicholson in "One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest". Hell, EVA tried blowing Wall-E away on several occasions. They just can't be trusted. (Except, of course, for the computer I'm typing this on... heh heh...)
   
6. Robots are good -- EVA and Wall-E were just doing their jobs, but realized that there was a new directive worth striving for. The "broken" bots also pitched in to help them achieve that goal, as did the writhing mass of humanity. Ultimately, the bots tried to do what's best for us.
7. Stuff lasts forever -- Come on, a Rubix Cube, iPod, and Atari 2600 that are still in one piece 800 or more years later? I have a cube that didn't last 5 years in my closet, and who knows where my 2600 is. Still, the idea that our trash is still around hundreds of years later rings true. After all, I've been to New Jersey.

Some of these may seem contradictory, but that's the nature of the future. And of cartoons. So deal with it.

Another semester has come to a close, and with it some (hopefully) better grades.

So what are you doing this summer? If you're like most students, you might benefit from this post I wrote a couple of years ago about how to spend your summer vacation. 

For me, there's no rest for the wicked... We've enjoyed a doubling of usage in each of the past three semesters, and I aim to keep that trend going for the fall. I'm sitting in the local Starbucks right now, enjoying a too-large coffee and thinking of more cool and useful things to do with College-Cram.

Enjoy your summer!

Between wrapping up the spring semester and starting my summer "vacation" plans, I changed my profile page to include links to some of the most popular articles I've written over the years.

In case you hadn't seen them all, here they are:

• Best Ways to Cheat in College
• Seven Keys to Getting Better Grades
• How to Write a Killer Essay
• How to Take Good Notes
• How to Work with Word Problems
- - - - - - - - - - - -
• Seven Keys to Writing a Better Resume
• Seven Keys to Ace Your Next Job Interview
• Secret Behind Textbook Costs
• Finding a Holiday Job
• Giving an Oral Presentation
• How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Enjoy these, there are plenty more where they came from.
 

No, this isn't about Star Wars. We had some pretty serious thunderstorm activity pass through here early this morning with torrential rains, lightning strikes, tornados, and sporadic wind damage scattered throughout the area. While College-Cram is hosted by a major hosting company, unfortunately that company is located about 30 minutes north of us and was also caught in the same storm front.

The results, as some of you may have noticed, were some intermittent outages all day today.(I believe we were down about an hour total, in about four separate incidents.)

I applaud those of you who braved the elements and stuck with us, including Dzenana looking for Macroeconomics homework help on market equilibrium, and those who even managed to keep a sense of humor.  You're the real storm troopers.

The recent outcry by the Obama's campaign over unauthorized access into his passport, (Obama Passport Scandal) brought to mind one thought...the candidate and party who's solution to all is "more government" is complaining because government was bad. Now they will cast it as the administration's fault,  and that a government run by their administration will (of course) be better and not have these types of problems.

The unfortunate part of all of this is the State Department employee who opened the files on Obama, McCain, and Clinton are probably not direct hires of the current administration, but are more likely life-long government bureaucrats, who pretty much stick in the government regardless of which party is currently in power.

This incident concerns a passport which is a federal government document, and even though it is a clear violation of privacy, it is information that the government has created on its citizens for the purpose of security.

Now let's expand the problem and look at making health-care a part of this same government bureaucracy. The intentions are good and are designed for the well being of all, to provide nothing less than the best health care in the world. The government will have all of our medical records on file, from the smallest wart removal to the cancer that is ravaging our bodies. The government will help us make decisions for what is best for our lives and administer care with the utmost compassion. It sounds great!

It will be the same compassionate system that helps the poor out in times of trouble. We all know they would have to be the most compassionate bureaucracy in the system, right next to the streamlined and efficient Social Security administration...

The reality is that bureaucracy (more government) is not the answer to our problems just as Obama and Clinton have experienced lately. More government means more potential for abuse, because there is no good government except for the one that is limited with checks and balances.

Just think what the next election cycle could look like: similar security breaches in a national health-care system could end up dropping bombs like "this candidate had to be treated for STD's three times" and "this one is going through hormone replacement therapy." It could be interesting and really dirty, not to mention highly illegal. Is this what you want?

How do you pick a presidential candidate in the primaries? I used to think it was a process of examining what your values were and then aligning them with the candidates. Unfortunately it is hard to determine exactly what a candidate's own value system is in this current process, where most issue positions are determined by a 15 second sound bite.

I guess the next step is to research the position papers of each candidate found on their websites, but honestly some of their past decisions don't exactly match up with their policy positions. It appears that local, state, and congressional politics allow a candidate to hold and govern by one value system, while the presidential requires a different set of values. What or who is the candidate?

The next step is the presidential primary debates, where candidates can express their "current" policy positions and explain how they have developed concerning real issues (flip flopping). Each candidate can clearly differentiate themselves from the other by attacking one another over personas instead of issues, which further muddies the water.

Maybe I am naive, but I always thought it was a simple process of matching one value system up against the other. I guess it is easier to be a stampede voter, rushing heedlessly to the candidate of the moment!

We're supposed to be educated college students. We can do better than that, can't we? 

A couple of years ago we translated our Periodic Table into a flash program for your cell phone, and posted it up on the Adobe website for free.

I ran across it this morning while running a Google search, and thought I'd post it here for you. Here is the Periodic Table for the cell phone.

Some of you have asked for an easier way to find out the latest buzz on the site -- the most recent blog posts, who's commenting on what, and the newest notebook entries. We've put together a way for you to easily keep up to date.

Just click on these links to get the latest buzz on blog posts, notebook entries, and member logins/communities.

All for you!

Professor Cram 

I have been watching some classic TV lately from my childhood...

I  was always a fan of the Gomer Pyle show. I noticed yesterday an uncanny resemblance of Gomer to Mike Huckabee. You be the judge!

(Check out more about Gomer Pyle Mike Huckabee here. 

I read the book "Kite Runner" by Kaled Hosseini back during the summer and was absolutely rivited to it for the whole week. Hosseini peals back the curtain to the culture of pre-taliban and post-taliban Afghanistan. As I read through the book and was hit in the face with classicism dealt through the tribal structures and the development of a young man from cowardice to strength, I was confronted with my own personal development and value structures. How do you grow up a young boy into a man! This was an excellent book and worth recommending to anyone who wants to gain a perspective of the various cultures of the middle east.