Category: General

I’m stting on the floor of the commuter lounge. There is an amazing shortage of chairs in the union. This is on top of the shortage of outlets. Tuesdays and thursdays seem busier than wednesdays. I have no class on Friday.

Last night I did homework. I never did too much homework in college 1.0. Not only did I do homework, its not even due for a while.

My fears about this math class are pretty much gone. Most of the material I’ve had before in some form, and if I didn’t have it previously, I’m not worried about learning it in small chunks. If anything, this class might have been the perfect class to ease back into things.

I’ll probably be taking a class or two this summer. Physics I for sure. I don’t need anymore math for the Astro Phy major, and all my classes are bottlenecked by physics. I can’t take Astro 2001 till I at least take Physics III. The issue for me isn’t the raw number of classes, its the sequence. I could take some jackoff CLA classes.

Its noon and I got class in 20 min. Got to go and brave the -3 degree weather.

“Sequences, Series, and Foundations” started out pretty easy. The first week or so is just boolean logic, and I’ve had all that before. It also seems to dabble in set theory, which I have no problem with. The textbook is not a textbook at all, but a photocopied booklet created by the math department. Total cost: $16.

The companion website for my astronomy course is pretty cool. I’ve talked about and read about the use of the Internet in the classroom, and the University of Minnesota seems in it pretty deep. (Almost) All course registration is done online. There are no course catalogs printed. All the classrooms I’ve seen so far have digital projectors on the ceiling. 802.11b is everywhere.

Something that has suprised me is how many students have cell phones. This is true in high school as well. All of my extempers have a cell phone. All of them. Not nearly as many U students appear to have laptops. If they do, they don’t bring them to class. The bandwidth at the U is great. Wireless here is faster than my DSL at home (which is to be expected).

They do need way more outlets in the union and more places to sit. Its much less crowded here today than it was yesterday. I’d attribute that to everyone having already purchased their books. My classes are all near the union, which is great. I don’t have to cross the river for anything. (have pity on Bietz)

I sit writing this in Coffman union at the University of Minnesota To my right are two (I assume) freshman girls asking each other if they are in the same classes and wondering where their buildings are. To my left is a woman who is studiously highlighting something in a three ring binder. All over a 20 something men and women buying books. I have about and hour and twenty minutes till my first class in almost thirteen years.

Having a computer I can put in my lap with a wireless internet connection makes this a ery different experience from college 1.0. I’m seconds away from Google, which means I’m really seconds away from the answer to pretty much anything that might come up in class. (well, almost. Probably can’t solve math problems) I purchased a flow pad and some pens because I rarely use paper anymore and I don’t think i can type notes in a class on series and sequences (I might be wrong). My math class didn’t have a text book for sale that I could see. My astronomy textbook is by far the coolest textbook I’ve ever had, complete with 2 CD-ROM’s and a companion website. Its chock full of graphics, but not in a high school dumbed down sort of way.

Somethings never change. Some lefty group has a table up in the union (animal rights I think). I’m sure there will be another there tomorrow, and probably once every two weeks a christian group will make a cameo appearance. College 1.0 had no real involvement in campus life, and college 2.0 wont either.

I’d lie if I said I wasn’t a bit nervous about my math class. Its been a while since I took one and I haven’t really been doing problems in my spare time since then. On the other hand, I can focus more time on one class than I could in 1.0. My astronomy course looks to be a total breeze. I read most of the textbook and knew most of it already. (famous last words)

If anyone else is reading this who is taking classes here, my class times are 12:20 – 1:10 and 2:30 – 3:20. My classes are not far from the union.

I’m going to have to get into the habit of recharging my laptop nightly. I’m going to have to use a few hours of battery every day now.

Most of the people I’ve spoken with about my mid-life decision to go back to school have sort of had an odd look on their face when I told them what I’d be getting a degree in. Once your over 30, the only thing you go to school for is an MBA or maybe a law degree…..maybe finish your PhD. Getting a degree in Astrophysics of all things really seems out from left field…..and it is.

I’ve been fascinated with space since I was little. I can remember television images of Skylab astronauts and I remember watching morning television of the first images to come back from the Viking I. I absorbed everything about astronauts and space that I could. When in high school, I tried to get an experiment on the space shuttle, but my teacher wasn’t very supportive of it, so it never happened. (My project by the way, was to test methane production from microbes. No clue if it has ever been done.)

After that, I got hooked on debate and followed a path that took me down the road of economics (which I still enjoy). Something always nagged at me for not taking physics classes in college. After college, I said if I had to do it all over I’d either a) debate hard core and screw my classes, or b) not debate at all and major in physics.

Now, sitting at the age of 34 I’m going to do what I have wanted to do since I was 7. Everyone regrets what they never did later in life. I figure this way I can remove one regret off the list.

On a related note, President Bush announced a new space program this week. I watched the speech live on NASA TV at Apple Valley. I don’t go into politics too much on this website, but I think I’ll touch on it some here.

I like the plan in spirit, but if I was in congress I wouldn’t vote for it.

This program is just going to be a longer, more expensive version of Apollo. We’ll go, land, say something profound, and come back. Whoever’s foot touches the Martian soil first will go in the history books. Whoever touches second will go in the footnotes.

Money for space should go where it will get the biggest bang for the buck. If we have grand visions of colonization and terraforming, the first step is going to be to find a cheap and efficient way to get into orbit. Until we do that, nothing else matters and anything else will be too expensive to do on a regular basis. One positive result of this might be getting momentum to finally scrap the shuttle. Its 30 year old technology. Its expensive to fly and hasn’t come close to meeting its goal of regular flights.

The most profitable thing in space right now are satellites. Anything that can make that cheaper and easier can be a business. Anything that can do that, is also the first step towards long term colonization of space. We’ve taken the metaphor of Columbus and other explorers way to literally. Space is not the Americas. For starters, the new world had an atmosphere and people already living there. It required no more energy to sail the Atlantic than it did to reach the far points of the known world. Getting out of orbit needs more than tall masts and sails.

Communication satellites, GPS, and remote sensing have more than proven the value of putting stuff in space. The priority now should be on being able to do that cheaply and easily. The space shuttle isn’t it. The path to Mars isn’t a base on the moon, its developing craft to shuttle between stations at various orbits. Its developing techniques for conducting large scale engineering in space. Its getting down pat all the stuff we need to do close to home.

In the mean time, there is plenty that can be done in the name of science without sending people to mars. As the technology improves, the cost of sending probes and landers all over the solar system should get cheaper. We’ve learned a great deal from Hubble, and more telescopes at Lagrangian points would be even better. This approach would result in significantly more science, at a substantially lower cost.

This program will not result in a permanent moon base. I say the odds are good we will never make it to mars in 20 years. We are going to be facing a big demographic crunch in the next 20 years, and we have no way to pay for it.

Some good news:

1) I don’t have to take any liberal arts requirments, whatsoever.
2) Most of my math classes have transferred such that I’ll only have to take one lower level course.

My two classes for this semester are “Introduction to Astronomy” and “Sequences, Series, and Foundations”, the one math class I need. Given all the stuff I got taken care of, I can take 1/2 the classes and still finish the degree in the time a normal undergrad would.

I’m sort of excited.