My Eyes Hurt

The problem with computers is that if you stare at one a lot during the day your eyes start to hurt before you go to bed.  Anyone ever seen the movie Battlefield Earth?  In one scene of the movie the hero is placed in a learning machine which mainstreams knowledge into his mind via his eyes (consider how Neo learning Kung Fu in The Matrix).  (See above picture)

This is me (from my webcam) after being
 in front of my computer screen for too long.

I am still getting used to this self-directed learning idea.  In fact, my new Digital Civilizations class is really confusing as far as what I should be doing.  I enjoy how the class focuses a lot on digital things, but also, because I have to get on a computer to do stuff for class I end up falling victim to my addiction to wikipedia, and youtube.  For Example:

I read the class assignment on Utopia my Sir Thomas More.  Unfortunately, reading an exert from a story I didn't know about piqued my hunger for wiki knowledge and I was instantly Google-ing who in the world Sir Thomas More was and what was his book about.  Fascinating.  It was interesting how More wrote that there was still slavery on the Island of Utopia.  Today a society with slavery would be far from a Utopia.

I really enjoyed reading about the geo vs. heliocentric models of the world.  That is because I delve into this realm often because I am an astronomy major.  So it turns out that even the heliocentric model is wrong!  The sun isn't the center because there is a center to the galaxy to which the sun is a part of.  There are billions of other stars and planets (exoplanets being my area of research) so we could never say the sun was the center of anything except a meager solar system on the edge of the galaxy in the Orion Arm.  Makes you feel small doesn't it.  Well, it was Galileo who first pointed a telescope towards the heavens and noticed that Jupiter had moons.  Guess everything doesn't revolve around the Earth!