Financial & Travel Musings

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Somewhat to my amazement I find myself doing the final course for my modern languages degree at the moment.

I still haven’t gotten used to being able to use a phrase like “my modern languages degree” and even now, nearly four years after getting the Diploma in French I still have it sitting on the desk and look at it now and again in case it was all a dream!

But, ’tis nearing an end now and I find myself thinking about what to do next (on the optimistic assumption that I’ll actually pass the final course!).

So what’ll it be? Well, I had briefly toyed with doing the English Language & Literature degree next but having looked at the courses entailed in that and had a stab at reading some of the novels, I’ve abandoned that plan. English just ain’t my subject although ironically I’ve been getting the highest marks ever on the English language course (U211) which represents the final one needed for the modern languages degree.

To help with looking after juniors 1 & 2, I was thinking of Child Development (ED209) and am currently reading some of the books recommended for that course. Seems readable enough though I’m not really sure that psychology is my kind of subject and it also recommends that you do the Exploring Psychology (DSE212) first which is one of the October start date courses and therefore means either no break ’til next June or alternatively a break ’til October next year.

On ‘tother hand I quite fancy something entirely different namely Physics which starts with S104 in January/February. That’s been on my “must get around to doing” list since way back in the mid 1980s. I have to confess to being one of those people who compulsively pick up a prospectus every year and it was 15 prospecti later that I started on what’s become the modern languages degree. Is anyone else that bad? I read right through every one that I picked up and marked oodles of courses that I’d quite like to do but actually ended up doing one of the courses that I never ever expected to do ie French.

Junior 1 reckons that I should run with the physics degree (aka physical sciences) as this will mean that I’ll be able to discover time travel and build a TARDIS. Personally, I think that I’d more than likely need to run with the 2+3 MPhys that they do in conjunction with the University of Lancashire to do that or possibly, if I got totally carried away, the PhD. Though you might laugh at junior 1’s reason, funnily enough the Uni of Lancs actually has been sending students off to CERN where they repudedly did what’s potentially the first experiment in time travel last May (no, really, they did - look it up if you don’t believe me!). Still, stranger things have happened - who’d have expected a civil servant to come up with the theory of relativity?

I also quite fancy doing the new world archaeology course but it sounds a teensy bit much for this year as it’s 60 points workload but over half the time ie ’tis a 30 pointer over four months or so starting September. I do have it down on my “masterplan” though and will fit it in eventually as it sounds really interesting.

Whilst I was having my annual browse of the prospectus this year (yes, I know, it would be much more environmentally friendly to browse it online but you can’t really do that curled up in bed, can you?) I came across Engineering the Future has the plus points that it’s only 30 points, counts towards the physics degree and sounds both relatively easy and dead interesting. What I worry about with that one is that it’s also the jumping off point for a BEng and I find that I feel compelled to follow things through which, of course, is how “I’d just like to be able to speak some French” resulted in me finding myself on the final course for a modern languages degree six years later.

The final dead easy option seems to be MST121 which I’ll need to do at some point for the physics degree. Only 30 points and no exam but unfortunately it’s also an easy way to switch from Feb start to Oct start courses so I was planning on saving that up until I need to make the switch for L2 physics. Yeah, I know, I could overlap courses but I’ve heard all kinds of horror stories about clashing TMAs and besides 60 points a year max seems a nice pace to me.

Of course, there’s the “do nothing” option which is always appealing, isn’t it?

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Have you ever considered why we have the technology around us?

In many cases it’s because of people seeing some gadget in a science fiction series, deciding they’d like a real one of them and then setting about making it. For example, one of the people watching the original Star Trek series decided that he’d quite like one of the little notepads that Captain Kirk always signed and started off on an engineering career ultimately ending up in AT&T where he produced an almost exact replica of that notepad around the late 80s (ie nearly 20 years later).

There are other dreamers who wouldn’t openly admit that their inspiration was some science fiction series or movie from 20 years earlier yet if you look around you you’ll find a considerable number of items that look strikingly similar to “products” that were in various science fiction productions 20 or 30 years earlier. For example, that Star Trek communicator looks almost identical to the early Motorola fold-up phone style (and was incredibly popular with Trekkies at the time: finally they could buy a real communicator). The little memory cards that Spock was continually putting into the computer are pretty much identical to the Compact Flash cards that you’ll see in stores these days. And so it goes on.

So where are the dreamers now and what are they dreaming of? What product have you seen recently in science fiction that would inspire you to work towards building a real version of it? Is there someone out there who wants to travel in time so much that they’re prepared to dedicate their lives to studying how it might be done and perhaps go on to build that first time machine? Or perhaps there’s someone who’d really, really like a transporter?

Forty years ago the dreams were of going into space, landing on the moon and building the first space station. We’ve already done those things so we need people to go even further ahead in their dreams.

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If you’re really serious about getting into a better shape then it’s best forgetting about the quick-fix solutions in the form of untold numbers of diet pills.

Instead, what you ideally should look towards is a holistic programme combining proper diet (ie eating the right things) combined with an exercise programme. This will actually increase your weight in the early days in that muscle is heavier than fat and because you’ll be converting fat to muscle (even if it’s not really that noticeable at the start), you’ll gain weight.

For that exercise programme you should be aiming to exercise as many muscles as you can simultaneously. Obviously it’s not possible to exercise every muscle at once but a really great compromise is via the use of ellipticals which are quite complex looking pieces of exercise equipment and seriously hard work if you turn the level up a few notches. When you’re starting on these, it’s best to forget all about trying to look macho with the difficulty setting turned right up: you’ll get there eventually, but not at the start.

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