I am so freaking amused by this picture. You both look so loooooong.

We should do a real photo shoot with you and Zeus before I leave. Fasho.

superfoodforyourheart:

captainkirk:

oceanchild:

beggarsbanquet:addictivetendencies:thedoormouse:(via fymiloventimiglia)

loving this.

I want to be unapologetic.

Kinda think that If I were to want and wear a nerd shirt again, this would be it.

Google=Skynet? Highly possible. I was totally just talking about this a few days ago.

http://www.bustedtees.com/Skynet

but really. I love google.

I had this great epiphany while I was in the shower a few minutes ago.

What would it be like to learn something that I actually NEED to know for my future?

That sounds really cynical, but it’s a very specific and pertinent question. Elaborated:
What would it be like to learn something, not for the sake of knowledge, not because it helped me think or understand or read better, not because I was interested in the concepts, not because it explained society, but because I would actually NEED the knowledge in order to perform? Now, or later in life?

This line of thinking was started as I recalled one of my favorite moments from this week’s How I Met Your Mother episode. Ted Mosby, main character and narrator, has recently become an architecture professor and in this episode has a very good reason to NOT want to be lecturing to his 25 some odd students during the exact time slot when he is scheduled to be there. So he runs in, gives the briefest 15 second run through of bridges and goes to run out the door. As he’s about to leave he says, “Who really wants to learn about suspension bridges anyways, right?” And all of the students raise their hands. This is cheesy, but I loved it.

So I’m considering: Is there any way in hell that I wouldn’t, in those students’ places, be stoked to be getting out of class early instead of sitting through a lecture? What professor would I raise my hand for?

And I come to the conclusion that even the professors that I absolutely love, whose classes I attend every lecture, who take interest in their students, who have small class sizes, even THOSE professors… I’d be pretty happy to just call it a day if they had somewhere more important to be.

That’s where the practical education part comes in. If I was an architecture student, it might be pretty dang important for me to understand how bridges work. I might need to design a bridge some day. Logically then, I don’t want my professor to skip bridges so that he can go on a date, even with the ultimate girl next door with whom he has been in love since 5th grade or so. I need to know how to build a bridge that won’t come crashing down, damnit.

I now question whether there has been a single thing in a single class that I have taken at UCSD that I NEED to know.

I can only come up with two classes (from my now 7 quarters of 4+ classes a quarter) that have given me this kind of information: Vis 60, introduction to photography, and Vis 70N, introduction to media. Each of these classes had at least one lecture day (60 had two! :O) in which we actually discussed technical aspects of photography and videography, respectively. And let’s be honest with ourselves: I still could have learned this stuff from google. (Although, you can pretty much learn anything from google now, even how to build a suspension bridge.)

But other than that, what I choose to study has me learning nothing that I technically can’t do without in that manner.

I’d like to point out that I’m not throwing UCSD completely under the bus here. What I choose to study has me learning nothing that I can’t do without. I’m quite sure the bio, chem, physics, math, computer science, etc, students have a very large load of things they actually need to know in most of their classes. It’s just an interesting commentary on a divide between subject types. And, of course, UCSD’s utter failure to include less than abstractly theoretical classes to its social sciences and humanities students. But that’s a rant in its own right. This is a personal curiosity.

How would I function in that kind of learning environment? There would be a new sort of pressure. I need this stuff, I don’t just want it. Right now I learn whatever I learn because I value learning and curiosity. How would I behave differently, how would my study habits change, if my classes built on each other? If subjects were connected not only to each other but to something I actually intended to do?

Would I crack?

I don’t have any kind of answer to this other than to hope that I wouldn’t.

But that’s that. Here I am blatantly not studying my Judicial Politics cases as I write about studying. Maybe I’d care more about these if I was going to law school?

For right now, I’m going to tell myself that learning for learning’s sake is a positive character trait, just to bring this discussion to an end and my studying to a resumption.  ¬_¬

oh. and this fantastic jack in the box.

amused by the cute little angry things? kawaiinot.com. :]

Muah! Love this little coffee pot and how it channels fabulous things. :)

WANT.

smogs:

Perhaps you once asked yourself, ‘What exactly is Hamlet trying to tell me? Why must he mince his words, muse in lyricism and, in short, whack about the shrub?’ No doubt such troubling questions would have been swiftly resolved were the Prince of Denmark a registered user on Twitter.com.

This, in essence, is Twitterature.

This video channels a lot of what Jerusha and I want to do with our proposed book project for Uganda.

There is so much more love and hope and joy and worth to the African people than the tragedies that are all over the media. We need a new focus.