Bearshorty's musings

Today was pretty much similar to yesterday. I read “Marco Polo” and “Silk Road” and some Sherlock Holmes. I’m certainly catching up on my Central Asia history.

I was playing this online game where you have to name all the countries on each continent in certain amount of time. You type in a country and if it is right it shows up on the blank map. It was fun. Oceania is what I know the least about. I’m surprised at how much I know about Asia probably because I’ve been reading so much about it. I also did the game for counties of England, both modern and pre-1974 change.

National Geographic article about our population hitting 7 billion this year and the general population trend was very interesting. I didn’t realize that 9 billion in 2050 is probably will be as high as it will get as the population is really slowing down. Educating women is still the best strategy to slow population growth but the point this article is making that it isn’t about overpopulation right now as much as it is how we use resources to take care of that population. When I grew up everyone had one or two kids, and three children was really strange and considered a big family and when I came here, TV shows always had three children as a standard family and that was weird to me.

Exercise: 30 minute walk
Cross-stitch: Orange and gold this time and some ducky feet. I messed up one color on the beak, since the symbols for yellow and gold look very similar, I will have to fix it tomorrow.

I read the second chapter of the ‘Silk Road’ book. This chapter was about Roman Empire and its Eastern trading contact in 1to 3rd century CE. I know so much about Roman Empire but not a lot about the Eastern part of it, so it was fun to learn. I’m glad I’m teaching this class, I feel like I will learn a lot myself. As I was reading the chapter I got excited about geography and maps, and I do love my historical atlas. So I worked more on my Powerpoint for the introductory lecture. I found lots of maps online of different ways to view the world, from world map from American point of view, to world map from Chinese point of view, an upside down map that puts Australia on top to Ptolemy’s map to the medieval maps with Jerusalem in the center.

And I will also explain why we use AD and BC and CE and BCE and what that means. Once when I was teaching Development of Europe a student came up to me after class and asked how did the Romans knew to count backwards since all the dates were 30 BC and 26 BC. I explained about the Roman calendar and how antiquarians calculated everything in our dating system. I no longer take that for granted when I teach and I explain this in the first lecture together with what I mean when I say 7th century CE or 7th century BCE. I do have this wonderful book of chronology for English history that really goes over so many dating systems – I get very geeky over things like that.

In the evening I also set up the school website for my writing classes, mostly I wanted access to rosters. I can see the pictures of my students too. One class is 2/3 boys, the other is more even. That will be interesting.

“The Fabulous Riverboat” by Philip Jose Farmer.
( My thoughts on the book )

Now that I’m done with the second Riverworld book I will read “The Study in Scarlet” by Arthur Conan Doyle and Marco Polo book. I read the introduction to the Sherlock Holmes volume today – it was pretty funny in its defense of Watson. I also read the introduction to Marco Polo – a very good introduction and I have to remember to tell my students to read it before tackling the book. I’m excited about both. I think I read Sherlock Holmes as a child, I certainly saw the awesome Russian movies when I was little (and I think Russian TV is showing it this weekend which is great), but I don’t remember much.

( HIMYM )

“Six Feet Under” Over the last month I finished watching the series. Today I watched the last episode. Mostly I had the show on in the background while doing other things and I rarely do that with TV I like. It was an OK show. It had its moments. Certainly the last episode was good. And the acting too. But I’m glad I didn’t watch it before otherwise I would not have wanted to see “True Blood” and that show I love. Mostly the characters here were just not that likable.

Exercise: I went for a walk, about 45 minutes.
Cross-stitch: Yellow was my color today as I did half the head of the ducky.