Financial & Travel Musings

It doesn’t seem like a year ago that I was sitting down to enrol on the astronomy course but the final exam was last Monday and I hardly know what to do with myself.

That’s the problem with final exams… there’s so much intense revision before the exam that you’re all geared up to answer any question on the subject and the day after the exam you’ve no immediate need for any of that information.

Last year the debate was on as to whether to buy a telescope or binoculars for the practicals but as it turned out I could have gotten away without either of them as the practical requiring them was optional and even if it weren’t, the part requiring a telescope or binoculars was an optional part of it. Funnily enough, we got through the whole astronomy course without actually needing to look up at the stars even once.

Oh well, this time next year I will be debating about whether or not to sign up for the planetary sciences course.

Popularity: 2% [?]

One of the interesting consequences of more and more distance learning universities plying their wares is that there’s a growth in the numbers of individuals who are becoming literate in a whole range of different subjects. In essence getting back to the situation in renaissance times when it was considered quite normal for someone to be successful in a number of disparate academic fields.

Whereas in the past people would be either qualified in the sciences or in the arts, an increasing number are finding that they don’t need to choose and moreover fascination in one field doesn’t preclude being equally fascinated in another.

Thus I find myself mid-way through a science degree and doing a history course. It doesn’t fit anywhere within that science degree but it’s just as fascinating a subject to me and may one day form the foundation of a history degree.

Popularity: 1% [?]

In another month or so I’ll be getting going on my world archaeology course but it’s not really anything to do with archaeology if some of the comments on the course are anything to go by.

For one thing, it has next to nothing to say about getting out a spade and digging stuff up which is what many people would consider archaeology to be about. Except, of course, it’s not really about that at all. Yes, it needs to dig stuff up but that’s only to find out information about whatever the various civilisations have left behind as evidence of what they did when they were on the go.

In fact, the course is basically about those past civilisations and is basically a history course except that it’s a history course with a massive time span. Whereas normal history courses cover at most a few hundred years, this one covers 12,000 years albeit skimming over most of the detail.

Popularity: 1% [?]