(no subject)
Diary: Week of 30/10: University, Coursework, Dominas, Dungeon, and Slimelight
Monday started with a heavy dose of television. I sometimes feel I watch too much television, but as long as I'm not watching too much cable television I'm not too worried. It's not that the quality of television media on cable is that bad, it's because if one watches it too much not only does one end up watching endless out-of-sequence repeats, one also ends up watching fifteen minutes of adverts for every forty-five minutes of television, which is absolutely outrageous. I'd hate to die knowing that I'd spent piratically years in front of the television watching adverts of all things.
There was a programme on television where they were getting modern A grade GCSE school students to try to pass O levels. Lots of fuss made about how upon first attempt they failed the old 11+ exams, and how none of them came out with much close to A grades, and many of them uniformly failed. Apparently this proves that the quality of education has gone down.
But that seems rather silly to me. It's true that there is much less importance placed on Basic Mathematics in schools today, but this is mostly because Mathematics lessons are spent learning Advanced Mathematics. Whilst GCSE students today may have trouble with the sorts of things found in O level exams, I very much doubt that the students taking I level exams would be able to achieve much in the way of the Advanced Mathematics that GSCE students now have to cope with.
And whilst I don't want to promote intellectual laziness as such, the need for Basic Mathematics isn't so great. It's a nice skill to have, but it shouldn't be learnt at the expense of more important skills in advanced mathematics.
I should imagine similar sentiments apply to most subjects.
Also watched Battle Royale II, which was interesting. I liked some of the atmosphere to some of the scenes and the general setting, but I wouldn't rate it as that great, and it's not as good as the original film.
University saw a lecture on Nietzsche, discussing more about the genealogy of morals (fairly obviously) and a lecture on maths on infinite cardinalities, same old. Then I came home to get a phone call from elegy_of_flames to tell me she would be coming down to Southampton within a couple of days, which was obviously great news :o)
Tuesday started with a lecture on Permanides and his fairly odd philosophy (as is typical of Early Ancient Greek philosophy), and two lectures on the nature of 'Desire', which I wasn't enthused about, but wasn't bad. Between lectures I found myself eating pub food (well, a baked potato) at The Crown with some other students discussing mostly a set of feminist issues (I was rather pleased to hear one of my female feminist friends raise certain issues I had discussed very recently in regards to the acceptability of 'Hysteria' in women).
I also had time to attend the Nietzsche study hour which discussed various issues to do with the Priestly class that he refers to (and my coursework essay may end up being on), and to read parts of Bannashoroff's (sp?) 'What Numbers are Not', which was an interesting though slow and not very accessible work.
Wednesday I sat through a lecture that failed to capture my interest on Permanides, and then tried to occupy myself with Nietzsche's 'Genealogy of Morals' to little success, but after that I had opportunity to attend Gamesoc.
Then I played through an Ambush on a Van Saar gang that didn't seem to go nearly so well as it might have done, leaving my leader character gunned down and rather dead. Fortunately the right skill increases came through after the game so that an appropriate character steped forward to take charge, so it could have been worse. As ever my little gang isn't excelling, but doing well enough to stay in the campaign and for me to continue having fun.
Thursday I was down town to meet up with elegy_of_flames to help her out a little with getting her stuff out of storage and ready to be shipped back to Greece, though one box of books ended up being given to me to put in my attic (plus I got my copy of Inquisitor back) :o) Was rather surreal seeing her again after so long really :o)
Got back to mine in time to watch one episode of Angel and then get ready to run off to Dungeon which was mostly populated with a select crowd comprising of myself, elegy_of_flames, wuzzard333, fraggleonspeed, elseware, masterofwalri and angryangeltoo, that was mostly it. Seems Fraggleonspeed had managed to get into Dungeon, which was a surprise, but is rather nice.
Despite the rather select crowd it was still rather fun (or perhaps, because of the rather select crowd it was rather fun). I didn't dance, nor did we bother handing in the music requests, mostly because there just didn't seem enough people for such things (might as well been at a pub for the amount of people there really), but people still managed to enjoy themselves anyway. Plus I got to talk to people about philosophy *nods*
Friday saw more lectures on both maths and Nietzsche, but more importantly I got my hands on copies of all the exam questions for my topics, most of which I'm fairly happy about. I could answer both questions on Philosophy of Mathematics if I want to, and manage to bring in Kant into at least one of them, there's an interestingly inspiring question on 'The Unity of Conciousness' for Philosophical Psychology (though the question starts with a pretentiously ambiguous quotation), the Nietzsche questions were on a genealogical method (a bit blah perhaps) and the priestly caste (which I don't know so much about but is much more interesting). The Ancient Philosophy essays were the worst as both were 'later ancient philosopher describes earlier ancient philosopher's philosophy in this way, are they right?'. The questions both veer more naturally to the descriptive rather than the evaluative, so I'm not entirely keen.
There were a few romantic issues I had to deal with later that night, some problems regarding the sort of romantic lifestyle I wanted to lead and whether it was at all compatible with maintaining my current relationship. It seemed to head to a point where maybe the relationship could continue onwards, but I later discovered there were certain things I had been kept unaware of, and that wasn't really acceptable. Not really the sort of situation I enjoy being in, but on the plus side the experience left me unfettered and the circumstances made me feel much less guilty about enjoying the rest of the weekend with elegy_of_flames, whom I spent the night with watching more dvds et cetera.
We had planned to go to Inferno at the Electric Ballroom, but it didn't happen, and we opted to leave plans to go to London until Saturday when .me and elegy_of_flames headed up via train to London where we met up with extinctfables at the Devonshire arms, though I found hard to be particularly social given how loud that place can be (I prefer not to have to concentrate just to hear someone, or scream in order to be heard), but still, far from an awful experience. Slimelight was good also, although it was only a two-floor. The main thing being there was a lot of faces there that I hadn't seen for quite a while (including elegy_of_flames of course!)
A very sleepy train ride home on Sunday morning followed, and both me and elegy_of_flames slept through most of the day before watching the last of Angel and catching up on as much of Season II Lost as we could.
Meme:How many people have my name in America?
HowManyOfMe.com
There are:
30
people with my name
in the U.S.A.
How many have your name?
Link: Discussion of gender pronouns using a race metaphor
Link: Spy wiki
Link: Sex change to become Christ
Link: If anyone over the phone tells you to cut off your nippls, please don't
Link: Oversexed dolls
Monday started with a heavy dose of television. I sometimes feel I watch too much television, but as long as I'm not watching too much cable television I'm not too worried. It's not that the quality of television media on cable is that bad, it's because if one watches it too much not only does one end up watching endless out-of-sequence repeats, one also ends up watching fifteen minutes of adverts for every forty-five minutes of television, which is absolutely outrageous. I'd hate to die knowing that I'd spent piratically years in front of the television watching adverts of all things.
There was a programme on television where they were getting modern A grade GCSE school students to try to pass O levels. Lots of fuss made about how upon first attempt they failed the old 11+ exams, and how none of them came out with much close to A grades, and many of them uniformly failed. Apparently this proves that the quality of education has gone down.
But that seems rather silly to me. It's true that there is much less importance placed on Basic Mathematics in schools today, but this is mostly because Mathematics lessons are spent learning Advanced Mathematics. Whilst GCSE students today may have trouble with the sorts of things found in O level exams, I very much doubt that the students taking I level exams would be able to achieve much in the way of the Advanced Mathematics that GSCE students now have to cope with.
And whilst I don't want to promote intellectual laziness as such, the need for Basic Mathematics isn't so great. It's a nice skill to have, but it shouldn't be learnt at the expense of more important skills in advanced mathematics.
I should imagine similar sentiments apply to most subjects.
Also watched Battle Royale II, which was interesting. I liked some of the atmosphere to some of the scenes and the general setting, but I wouldn't rate it as that great, and it's not as good as the original film.
University saw a lecture on Nietzsche, discussing more about the genealogy of morals (fairly obviously) and a lecture on maths on infinite cardinalities, same old. Then I came home to get a phone call from elegy_of_flames to tell me she would be coming down to Southampton within a couple of days, which was obviously great news :o)
Tuesday started with a lecture on Permanides and his fairly odd philosophy (as is typical of Early Ancient Greek philosophy), and two lectures on the nature of 'Desire', which I wasn't enthused about, but wasn't bad. Between lectures I found myself eating pub food (well, a baked potato) at The Crown with some other students discussing mostly a set of feminist issues (I was rather pleased to hear one of my female feminist friends raise certain issues I had discussed very recently in regards to the acceptability of 'Hysteria' in women).
I also had time to attend the Nietzsche study hour which discussed various issues to do with the Priestly class that he refers to (and my coursework essay may end up being on), and to read parts of Bannashoroff's (sp?) 'What Numbers are Not', which was an interesting though slow and not very accessible work.
Wednesday I sat through a lecture that failed to capture my interest on Permanides, and then tried to occupy myself with Nietzsche's 'Genealogy of Morals' to little success, but after that I had opportunity to attend Gamesoc.
Then I played through an Ambush on a Van Saar gang that didn't seem to go nearly so well as it might have done, leaving my leader character gunned down and rather dead. Fortunately the right skill increases came through after the game so that an appropriate character steped forward to take charge, so it could have been worse. As ever my little gang isn't excelling, but doing well enough to stay in the campaign and for me to continue having fun.
Thursday I was down town to meet up with elegy_of_flames to help her out a little with getting her stuff out of storage and ready to be shipped back to Greece, though one box of books ended up being given to me to put in my attic (plus I got my copy of Inquisitor back) :o) Was rather surreal seeing her again after so long really :o)
Got back to mine in time to watch one episode of Angel and then get ready to run off to Dungeon which was mostly populated with a select crowd comprising of myself, elegy_of_flames, wuzzard333, fraggleonspeed, elseware, masterofwalri and angryangeltoo, that was mostly it. Seems Fraggleonspeed had managed to get into Dungeon, which was a surprise, but is rather nice.
Despite the rather select crowd it was still rather fun (or perhaps, because of the rather select crowd it was rather fun). I didn't dance, nor did we bother handing in the music requests, mostly because there just didn't seem enough people for such things (might as well been at a pub for the amount of people there really), but people still managed to enjoy themselves anyway. Plus I got to talk to people about philosophy *nods*
Friday saw more lectures on both maths and Nietzsche, but more importantly I got my hands on copies of all the exam questions for my topics, most of which I'm fairly happy about. I could answer both questions on Philosophy of Mathematics if I want to, and manage to bring in Kant into at least one of them, there's an interestingly inspiring question on 'The Unity of Conciousness' for Philosophical Psychology (though the question starts with a pretentiously ambiguous quotation), the Nietzsche questions were on a genealogical method (a bit blah perhaps) and the priestly caste (which I don't know so much about but is much more interesting). The Ancient Philosophy essays were the worst as both were 'later ancient philosopher describes earlier ancient philosopher's philosophy in this way, are they right?'. The questions both veer more naturally to the descriptive rather than the evaluative, so I'm not entirely keen.
There were a few romantic issues I had to deal with later that night, some problems regarding the sort of romantic lifestyle I wanted to lead and whether it was at all compatible with maintaining my current relationship. It seemed to head to a point where maybe the relationship could continue onwards, but I later discovered there were certain things I had been kept unaware of, and that wasn't really acceptable. Not really the sort of situation I enjoy being in, but on the plus side the experience left me unfettered and the circumstances made me feel much less guilty about enjoying the rest of the weekend with elegy_of_flames, whom I spent the night with watching more dvds et cetera.
We had planned to go to Inferno at the Electric Ballroom, but it didn't happen, and we opted to leave plans to go to London until Saturday when .me and elegy_of_flames headed up via train to London where we met up with extinctfables at the Devonshire arms, though I found hard to be particularly social given how loud that place can be (I prefer not to have to concentrate just to hear someone, or scream in order to be heard), but still, far from an awful experience. Slimelight was good also, although it was only a two-floor. The main thing being there was a lot of faces there that I hadn't seen for quite a while (including elegy_of_flames of course!)
A very sleepy train ride home on Sunday morning followed, and both me and elegy_of_flames slept through most of the day before watching the last of Angel and catching up on as much of Season II Lost as we could.
Meme:How many people have my name in America?
HowManyOfMe.com
There are:
30
people with my name
in the U.S.A.
How many have your name?
Link: Discussion of gender pronouns using a race metaphor
Link: Spy wiki
Link: Sex change to become Christ
Link: If anyone over the phone tells you to cut off your nippls, please don't
Link: Oversexed dolls