Had a cool thing happen in my college class today! We were discussing geography in my “Intro to Modern African History” class and the prof asked us if we knew of any examples in the US where boundries were disputed. I raised my hand and recalled what I could of “Sucker Bets 101,” about part of Illinois being on a different side of the Mississippi River after a flood and how the residents demanded that the old political boundries hold. The prof seemed vaugly impressed.
I can’t even remember what it was like trying to learn without the internet. How did I do that? When I first went to college I had a typewriter. Sophmore year I got a badasz 8084 CPU, baybee!
Well, my summer assignment for AP Spanish is to write (in Spanish, of course) ten two-hundred-word essays about various subjects. These can include sports, politics, medicine, movies, music, school, religion, social problems, culture, movie starts, role models, my favorite subject, family, friends, environment, etc. As I’m reading the straight dope, I’m on the lookout for ideas to inspire the subject of my next essays.
I’ve got the SDMB to thank for two pieces of work I submitted for uni…one on whether internet groups can be considered as communities (also with G’Dope, the Aussie mini-board), and one that centred on a debate about the One Strike housing policy in the US (and public attitudes towards the socially and economically disadvantaged).
Actually the second one was serendipitous because I could not for the life of me think of a topic for my essay…so I logged in here just to get some light relief, and the debate jumped out at me…exactly what I was looking for!!
During my freshman year anthropology course, I used and cited Cecil’s column about how the Eskimos managed to avoid getting scurvy while not eating any plants with vitamin C.
In a junior year class on the sociology of science, the prof made the claim about mideival theologians wasting time debating whether multiple angles could dance on the end of a pin. I brought a copy of Cecil’s column on the subject, but he refused to accept it because it was from the internet, and he refused to believe that it had been published in a book.