So here at Chicago we have something called Core Bio. It's a lot like high school bio, except that it's not taught by Dr. Bajwa. There are several ways to avoid taking it - such as taking an actual bio class; I had thought about doing that, but then decided I didn't really want to take a bio class that might actually be hard. You can also get out of it by taking even easier, stupider classes, but I didn't much like that idea either. So, core bio it is.
Along with core bio you are required to take "Writing in the Biological Sciences". This used to just be the discussion section for the Core Bio class, and then they changed it into... Writing in the Biological Sciences. While it counts for no credits and meets for only 1 hour a week, they still make you write stuff, including a final paper. Now this is only the second quarter that they've done this, and so they're still trying to get it right. One of the options for the final paper was to write about the evolution of a fictional species. This got lots of complaints from people who had taken this last quarter about how they didn't get any options that were that cool or that easy.
Well, guess what I decided to go with. Now what sort of creature should I write about? I decided to go with flying fish that actually fly, an example that Darwin himself used of something that might evolve in the future.
I get the idea I set mine up rather differently from other people's; I think most other people did theirs as something in the present, a creature which had evolved long before historic times and was simply little-known. I put mine in the future.
Now this creates the problem of time scales; how far in the future? I mean, these are some major evolutionary changes we're talking about, to allow these fish to actually fly; it had better be pretty damn far in the future. I hedged on that one, by adding a note from the person who had found this document (even much further in the future) about how he wasn't certain which calendar system the author was using. But, that still left the problem of the scale of the time. If civilization was continuous from now to when this was being written (which is hardly a given, but I didn't really want to have to think about when different dark ages would occur, especially as I didn't even know how far in the future I was setting it), that would mean we would have a good account of the evolution of this creature, as we would have been there to observe it. And so I ended up with a time scale way too fast to be evolutionary and way to slow to be historical. :-/
The fact that I had this during historical time meant, of course, that I got to spatter the paper with references to books thatdon't exist won't be written for many thousands of years. Basically, realizing it probably wasn't going to be a very good paper, I tried instead to make it as flavorful as possible. I included references to recent scientific disputes regarding details of my topic; I included notes from the translator, finding this document so much later, about his annoyance with being unable to determine just when it was written; etc. The worst was when - well, so, for negative dates, I just used a negative year number, but there was one time I wanted to refer to such an early event by its century. You can't say "the negative 81st century"; it doesn't sound right. It has to be, the 81st century... abbreviation. But how could I do that and maintain the ambiguous calendar gimmick? I could have abandoned it and simply said in the note that he appears to be using a specific calendar system that doesn't actually exist, but I didn't think of that. And "convenient ink smudge!" was, I thought, going a bit too far. Instead, I decided that the abbreviation itself would be ambiguous. Now this also seems a bit unbelievable; I certainly couldn't explain it in the paper itself, though, so instead, when I submitted it online, in the comments section I made a note about how the two calendars used the same abbreviation because the one was trying to replace the other.
We'll see what grade I get.
In other news...
Some people had the idea of swapping our Smash cartridge with the cartridge from Henderson, hoping they would (at first) just figure someone had erased everything, and, after noticing it wouldn't save, just figure the battery has crapped out. Unfortunately they noticed the used sticker on the back and realized what had happened. [By all reports, though, they all still suck at it.]
Ian bought a bunch of soda, Doritos, and Red Bull from Costco and is selling these out of his room, calling his operation SOGAMOR, or, as Kat has dubbed it, IanSTAAFL. (No, TANSTAAFL still has not reopened.) What does it stand for? Nothing, apparently it's a combination of the Sindarin words for "drink" and "night". Why all caps then? No idea. He's selling stuff for the same price TANSTAAFL was, so I suppose TANSTAAFL must actually have been making money on most of their stuff... although that would make it very strange that it was ever *not* making money, as they seemed to generally have sold everything by the end of each quarter. Hm. Unless Ian's not making a profit on this, but I find it kind of hard to believe he'd be doing this if he weren't. Or unless the Red Bull is more expensive and he expects just to make a profit on that? I find that kind of hard to believe as well.
-Harry
Along with core bio you are required to take "Writing in the Biological Sciences". This used to just be the discussion section for the Core Bio class, and then they changed it into... Writing in the Biological Sciences. While it counts for no credits and meets for only 1 hour a week, they still make you write stuff, including a final paper. Now this is only the second quarter that they've done this, and so they're still trying to get it right. One of the options for the final paper was to write about the evolution of a fictional species. This got lots of complaints from people who had taken this last quarter about how they didn't get any options that were that cool or that easy.
Well, guess what I decided to go with. Now what sort of creature should I write about? I decided to go with flying fish that actually fly, an example that Darwin himself used of something that might evolve in the future.
I get the idea I set mine up rather differently from other people's; I think most other people did theirs as something in the present, a creature which had evolved long before historic times and was simply little-known. I put mine in the future.
Now this creates the problem of time scales; how far in the future? I mean, these are some major evolutionary changes we're talking about, to allow these fish to actually fly; it had better be pretty damn far in the future. I hedged on that one, by adding a note from the person who had found this document (even much further in the future) about how he wasn't certain which calendar system the author was using. But, that still left the problem of the scale of the time. If civilization was continuous from now to when this was being written (which is hardly a given, but I didn't really want to have to think about when different dark ages would occur, especially as I didn't even know how far in the future I was setting it), that would mean we would have a good account of the evolution of this creature, as we would have been there to observe it. And so I ended up with a time scale way too fast to be evolutionary and way to slow to be historical. :-/
The fact that I had this during historical time meant, of course, that I got to spatter the paper with references to books that
We'll see what grade I get.
In other news...
Some people had the idea of swapping our Smash cartridge with the cartridge from Henderson, hoping they would (at first) just figure someone had erased everything, and, after noticing it wouldn't save, just figure the battery has crapped out. Unfortunately they noticed the used sticker on the back and realized what had happened. [By all reports, though, they all still suck at it.]
Ian bought a bunch of soda, Doritos, and Red Bull from Costco and is selling these out of his room, calling his operation SOGAMOR, or, as Kat has dubbed it, IanSTAAFL. (No, TANSTAAFL still has not reopened.) What does it stand for? Nothing, apparently it's a combination of the Sindarin words for "drink" and "night". Why all caps then? No idea. He's selling stuff for the same price TANSTAAFL was, so I suppose TANSTAAFL must actually have been making money on most of their stuff... although that would make it very strange that it was ever *not* making money, as they seemed to generally have sold everything by the end of each quarter. Hm. Unless Ian's not making a profit on this, but I find it kind of hard to believe he'd be doing this if he weren't. Or unless the Red Bull is more expensive and he expects just to make a profit on that? I find that kind of hard to believe as well.
-Harry
