“O let not Time deceive you”
February 9th, 2008 at 6:24 pm (Education, Literature, Productivity, Psychology)
Last semester, I joked that I’d somehow gotten ahold of a virtual Time-Turner, since I was taking a class at USC that occurred at the same time I was teaching at Cal State LA, on Thursday evenings. This was possible since I was taking the class through the Distance Education Network, and therefore could view the 2.5-hour lecture on my computer at a later date (usually the weekend).
Santa sometimes has a funny sense of humor, and this Christmas he brought me (among many other wonderful things) an actual Time-Turner. And yet — while it was pretty cool to be able to turn time last semester, unlike Hermione I didn’t actually end up with any more hours in the week. By the end of the term, I was aching for a break. So I held my Time-Turner and realized that, rather than a symbol of incentive for double-booking, really it was more of a warning — a caution against that kind of stacked-up crazy schedule.
But did I heed the warning of the Time-Turner? No. By the time January rolled around, I’d already committed to an even crazier term: working, teaching an entirely new class at Cal State LA, taking yet another class at USC, all the while trying to write a Master’s thesis so I can graduate this spring. None of them are technically overlapping in time, but (just as when the Time-Turner let me spread things out) all together it’s still a gradually suffocating weight.
Thank goodness my teaching duties end with the winter quarter at Cal State LA. As of March 15, I’ll have one less thing to occupy my energies. And if I ever propose this sort of schedule again in the future, someone kindly strangle me with the Time-Turner’s chain.
Rex said,
February 14, 2008 at 8:14 am
You and Hermione both seem to be able to handle dramatically busy academic schedules, even without the use of a Time-Turner. Strangulation seems excessive unless you start committing yourself to more than 28 hours of stuff a day!
learndorphin central said,
February 14, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Never underestimate the power of learndorphins.
BTW, on Mars, you’d get another 38 (+/-1) minutes per “day” :-)
Rex said,
February 15, 2008 at 11:52 am
On Venus you’d get another 166,680 minutes per day. But a year would be a little under two days long. On Mars, however, not only would you get an extra 39 minutes per day, you’d also get 668.6 days per year. 18-week quarters, anyone?
learndorphin central said,
February 15, 2008 at 3:14 pm
So, theoretically, I could say my next degree will take “just three years?” :)
» Benford’s Law sqrt(-1): Jim Carson, reloaded: This one goes to eleven. said,
March 10, 2008 at 11:45 pm
[…] There are three major categories of multimedia files– songs, podcasts and lectures — whose file sizes are clustered. Songs tend to be 2 – 6 minutes (Freebird, notwithstanding) since I delete stuff that’s shorter. At an average encoding of 128kb/s, this results in a lot of 4Mb – 6Mb sized fies. An informal sample of my favorite podcasts(”Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!“, “This American Life“, and “Talking Robots“), suggests it’s common these span 10 minutes up to an hour. At the top end of the size graph are lectures. (I admire Kiri’s stamina in going the full four(!) hours.) […]