Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Art of Lecture Crashing (~jinghan)
The fact that a lecture hall is crammed full of people and the roll is never taken offers plenty of opportunity for lecture wagging, but have you considered the opposite? Lecture crashing.
So after several weeks of my friend trying to convince someone to come to his climate change lecture with him (simply because it was right after our physics lecture), I finally folded because… well I had nothing better to do. And physics had been very vague and confusing and I ended up just writing down the lecture slide titles in a ridiculously neat font to make myself feel better about the fact that the meanings of the words didn’t really make much sense to me:
- properties of electric charges
- electric forces: b/w electrons & protons
- electro statics: charges at rest
- unit: -e electron +e proton
- bla bla etc.
So I needed something to lift my moral. Climate change it was… ironically. The notes I got from this subject which I was not enrolled in were far more interesting:
- Australia leads the world in putting CO2 into the atmosphere”
- get Barak Obana and Penny Wong as speakers
- Universities should have a formal role in developing the new low-emissions technology to reduce climate change
- In the world there are only a few hundred David Jamesons, collectively we have only a small influence on climate change, so we need not worry
- If my emissions cause deaths in a third world country 10s of 1000s of kilometres away, is there a legal issue? The lawyer said, ‘don’t worry you are only connected by the tenuous atmosphere of the earth, it would never stand up in court.’
- Everybody is numerate when it comes to dollars
- How we’ll be living in 2050 is not a matter of dollars but a matter of joules
- Human heartbeat = 1 Joule; mobile battery = 10kJ; tank of petrol = 2.4 GJ
I have seen environments students in physics (it’s good for the demonstrations, they sprayed rice bubbles over the class the other week), a friend of mine sat through a second-year biomed lecture on his first day of uni (quite by accident when he sat himself in the middle of the wrong lecture), I did my maths homework on the side of a Managing Environments lecture, heck people even crash our maths lectures. Though my friend told me afterwards: “he is an awesome lecturer, but he doesn’t speak english!”