Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Big Words and Information Overloading

So I have three upper division geology classes that have assigned readings, mostly from the books but also online. The thing is, what one class assigns for one day is more equivalent to what I would want to read in a week. These chapters tend to be 30-60 pages of small font words on big sheets of paper and tend to be polysyllabic in nature. For example, for Volcanology, by my professor Ken Hon:


So maybe some of you readers are natural geniuses and can completely understand every word and concept in that paragraph without opening a geology book. I dare you to go read 20 pages of the that right now, in a few hours, because once you finish that you need to pick up one of several books that have readings either due by Saturday or homework due on Monday or a quiz that's happening Friday. That's probably another 100 pages before Saturday, not counting the online readings.

And on Saturday I have to go on an 8 hour field trip starting at 9am, which is earlier than I get up most school days, and although a redeeming feature of the trip promises to be hot flowing lava, it's still eight hours of hiking around and getting toasted and getting too worn out to eat but not too worn out to get drunk when I get home.

So you folks are probably going to hear a lot of Geology from me this semester. Until then, have this picture of hot oozy lava:

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