Saturday, October 23, 2010

Things I have learned so far...

Believe it or not, I have actually learned some things this semester!

I have learned that in MLA format for papers, there is now only one space between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next.  What's up with that?!  When in the world did that change, and why?  (Note that I do not follow that rule here. lol)

I have learned that Alexander Hamilton got us out of helping France during their Revolutionary War on a technicality!  I kid you not.  Apparently, when France signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce and the Treaty of Alliance with us in 1778, they signed them with the colonies, not with the United States, therefore, we were no longer bound by those treaties.  Nice, huh?  Sheesh.

I have learned (today!) that Krishna, even though he teaches that people should control themselves and their desires, apparently was himself a rather lusty god, who not only had multiple arms but multiple, well, bits of male genitalia, which he could use independently of each other.  One of my classmates (a friend of Rachele's, actually) posed the question of whether or not Krishna was like Stitch (they're both blue, after all), and could retract or extend his arms and male bits at will.  This, naturally, put me into a giggling fit for the remainder of class today...lol

I have been learning that the "global warming catastrophe" is crap.  Dave's been going on about this for a year or so, and when my Research Writing professor asked us to come up with a topic for our research paper, that was, naturally, the first thing that came to mind.  Then I started doing research.  There are actually a LOT of papers on the subject.  And the thing is, climate skeptics don't deny that the planet is getting warmer--what they deny is that this is necessarily man-made, or catastrophic.  The paper I'm currently reading shows that as recently as the 12th century, temperatures in China were as much as 1C higher than they are at present.  Not only that, but some evidence is suggesting that currently, much of the planet is greener (as in more plants, not the green-saving-energy kind of way) than it has been previously.

And I've also learned that I'm really not fond of writing essays or taking tests, though my grades so far seem to show that I'm fairly decent at both--so far, I have almost all As!  How's that for awesome?

Next week I go to meet with my advisor (a different lady this time, as my previous one is dealing with the English majors with the teaching option), and so I am trying to figure out which classes I want to take.  I know I want to take Intro to Astronomy (with the lab!), and I'm thinking of taking Intro to Sociology.  There's a Geography class that sounds interesting as well, though that may wait until next semester.  Then I want to take two of my required English courses, so I'm thinking of going with Intro to Language (which is evidently a linguistics class and fairly difficult, oh joy.) and Literary Criticism.  Those four classes will give me 13 credits, and I can't decide if I want to take another class or not.  Meh, I'll figure it out.

Oh, and on a somewhat related note: Heather is doing phenomenally well back in public school--she has As and Bs in her classes, and she hasn't gotten in trouble for anything other than not turning in assignments right at the beginning of the year, which has gotten taken care of now.  Hooray!

So...now that I have updated everyone, I should probably get back to my homework...lol  Have a good one, and I'll talk to y'all later! :-)