Save a tree: no homework!

It is going to be a late night tonight. I have to write up my stat mech homework. No, I don't have to do my homework, just write it up. All the problems have been thought about, worked out and solved. It has been quite a bit of work, I tell ya. The thing is, though, that the solutions consist of blackboards full of equations erased long ago, pieces of scrap paper and thoughts that have not been written down because they were "trivial" details. Some of these details took me months or years to learn back in the day and now they are trivial. Ha! But, I digress.

I miss the good old days. In freshman physics to write up a problem you just had to write a couple of lines about the information given in the problem and then the formula you were going to use. Finally, a couple of lines of algebra and voila. I used to be able to fit ten problems to a page! Now the figure is more like four pages to a problem. I think this is bad for the environment. Too many trees die to make paper so that we can turn in a well-explained, fully-developed and poorly-written treatise on how to solve certain problems for homework each week. I say we do the rainforest a favor and stop assigning homework! ;-)