(no subject)

Still not dead. Although home alone on Friday night with only dial-up, with a cable so short I have to sit in the hall with my laptop running out of battery, using webmessenger because the XP on this computer hasn't got a service pack yet (I think that's the problem, anyway) home alone, without any prospects, and OF COURSE nothing good on television...

... let's just say maybe the netherworld isn't so far off right now.

Other than that, though, life is good, albiet rushed. Am pretty much totally moved into the best little flat this side of the Pacific, inhabitants: yours truly, sixth_light, ladylarla and the very timely Hayley, who's at teacher's college and is into Invader Zim and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. She adds spice to our harry-potter-young-wizards-smallville-jossverses-and-dcu panfandom blend, the one that leads to hourlong conversations on why trying to write Nita is like trying to write Harry and why trying to write Lex isn't like trying to write Draco unless you're thirteen and can't read, and why buffy as a source is still producing fresh fiction years after the canon is complete, while in HP it already feels like most stuff has been done. Also, we already broke my bed by trying to pack three of us (and we're not really heavy: I'm blaming shoddy bedmaking, even though I love my bed) onto it for a couple days straight to watch S2 Buffy. Go, us.

University-wise, some last-minute course changes mean this is what my year currently looks like:


Semester 1
FREN201: French Language
MATH221: Algebra and Cryptography
PHIL208: Logic A
PHIL233: Epistemology and Metaphysics

Semester 2
ENGL115: Childhood in Children's Literature
PHIL209: Logic B
LING202: Semantics
HIST127: American History

For those of you playing along at home, I have dropped my linguistics major and look to be settling down into a BA/BSC in Maths and Philosophy. Um, I think. What I've been thinking of lately is looking at trying to get into the BSC Honours postgrad programme in mathematics and philosophy, which they actually offer as an honours degree at Canterbury. The prospect of it kind of terrifies me though. Obviously I'd want to finish up with a BA/BSc (HONS) but the honours programme looks demanding- and I'd have to take a lot more maths than I was planning on. In fact if I decide I want to do it, I have to drop American History, like, yesterday and pick up 222, which is Groups and Systems. Then next year- in my third year of study- I'd have to do MATH264, as well as as much third-year PHIL and MATH I could pack in to get all my undergrad papers with done in four years, and then maaaaaybe I could do all the honours stuff in my fifth year.

Maybe.

Maybe I should look a BA(hons)/BSc, since I don't know if I'm interested in the Maths more than the Philosophy. I know that the courses I have enjoyed most intensely have all been Logic papers- those who know me at all will, I'm sure, be vastly amused by this.

Anyway, that's enough of me blehering, so I'm stopping now- although I will take a few seconds to comment on my Logic A class this week (we have three hours on the one afternoon. I actually kind of like it except that it means I only have my favourite class once a week. Anyway, Logic A manages by dint of much effort to be four separate classes: PHIL208, MATH208, PHIL308 and MATH308. Math students have one extra class a week, which I'm not going to, and each of the four classes have slightly different assessment- PHIL208 students have two tests, everyone else has two tests and some assignments, basically. He sarted off by saying a whole bunch of crap about how it's because it's all maths-intensive and Phil sudents are going to find it hard which, whatever. I haven't paid attention to profs telling me suff is too hard for years, thank god. (Clue: if you want to do it enough, just do it. They're never right.) Anyway, I'm doing it as a Phil student and we were doing some reasonably basic propositional logic.

We're starting with truth-functional propositional logic using conjunction, exclusive and inclusive disjunction, negation, equivalence and conditional connectives (&, v, -v-,-, <-> and ->). He said that since & and - are both truth-funcional, if you can write the other connectives using only & and - they too must be truth-functional. So okay, we started with v, which is inclusive disjunction: in English, "either, or." So A v B means "either A, or B, or both is true." So A V B is basically saying at least one of A or B is true, and maybe both; or to look at it another way, A and B are never both false. So you can symbolise it using only - and &- which mean "not" and "and"- like this: - (-A & -B), or not (not A AND not B); or in English, it is false that both A and B are false.

Now, this is all cool and fun, and he starts to get the class to offer suggestions for the translation of A v B. He's looking for the one I just gave above, and he doesn't get it for about ten minutes. I did PHIL134 where we've already gone over a lot of symbolic logic, so I'm pretty confident with it, so I have the answer quickly (Did I mention this was my best subject? Because it was, I just really really really love this stuff.) He doesn't pick me, which is cool, whatever. Finally, ten minutes later some guy gives him the right answer: hooray for us, we can all move on to the next translation, except the lecturer says "Very good, I bet you're a third-year Maths student!"

GRARR. PHIL STUDENTS ARE SMART TOO, THAT WAS NOT A DIFFICULT PROBLEM, AND I- AND PROBABLY TONNES OF OTHER SECOND-YEAR PHIL STUDENTS IN THE ROOM- HAD HAD THE ANSWER FOR TEN MINUTES ALREADY.

Gods, I cannot stand people who say crap like that. Can. Not. Stand. It.

The guy who answered turned out to be a third-year phil student, so he ddn't totally get away with it. But man, what a prick.

Uh... he's otherwise a really great lecturer though. We have a one hour class, then an hour's break, and then a two hour class- and the two hour class I only looked at my watch twice, when generally in a one-hour class I'll look at my watch about fifteen times. So. Um. Good lecturer, shame about the GIANT HONKING PREJUDICE. >:O