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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 7 of 7. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by alexandra_k on August 18, 2014, at 20:17:31
i'm starting to... come to terms with(?)... the idea of taking another year. to prepare. though i guess it might be better to think of it as being on the journey rather than focusing overly on the destination which seems to recede proportionally to my approach. or something. (that's an inverse relationship - right?)
i guess i feel upset that it will take me two years... what could be done in one. but then partly i just need to accept things for the way that things are. and i suppose i can also think that however much i rail about how much money this is costing me in terms of student debt the places that could rush me through faster would cost (even if i were local) at least twice as much. so... i guess that later point helps with acceptance.
the pressure feels lifted, somewhat. to feel that i have another year. which is... perhaps pretty crucial, actually, since i got stressed to point of meltdown last weekend. it means i feel more tolerant of others. instead of feeling like there is time pressure. i suspect it will also help me learn. with the panic... there is a little bit of 'just tell me what i need to do to get an A'. with the panic off... i feel more able to explore tangents that turn out to be fundamental. little things that take time but would be good to have them automatic. drawing a scale ratio on biology drawings... magnitude conversions for units... i'd feel a lot happier going into labs that matter when i'm reasonably confident i can do it all myself... even while simultaneously entertaining my laboratory partner... i think i probably can get there... but it is going to take some time given certain constraints that i don't have the power to change...
it means i can do the bio-med papers that aren't part of the overlapping 4 next year. biosci 101 which is... well... the first half of it is background for stuff we are doing now in animal bio. i can kludge along quite well because i do have background knowledge in cladestics etc... but i'm probably missing some stuff that would be useful to know... and the cognitive load would be lightened considerably if i'd have had more practice in the form of having done that class already...
bio-chem... they say you should have done organic first... but that means it is largely revision from organic and the cell and developmental classes of the previous semester. meant to be a load lightener / revision for the bio-med kids. which makes it useful preparation for me... to help prepare me for the classes it is supposed to be revising ha.
it means... i can do maths 102 which opens doors... the intro calculus paper that is required for 2nd year chemistry and physics (and helps considerably with aspects of 1st year continuing). to more maths, even... if i really do take to physics...
anyway... life is okay. i guess.
afraid... of what will happen with me at the end of next year. whether i'll get disability renewed, or what. but i guess... one day at a time... just enjoy things best i can for now..
Posted by alexandra_k on August 18, 2014, at 20:24:23
In reply to another year..., posted by alexandra_k on August 18, 2014, at 20:17:31
and accept that my gpa will suffer a lot... that... given blah blah blah a B+ is pretty great, actually. and accept that there might be a whole lot more of that for next year... the idea is to... narrow the gap. catch up. but these things will take time.
i see... that there is wide diversity in science degrees... with respect to the difficulty of papers (the amount of prior knowledge they presuppose).
or perhaps it is more that there are different sorts of knowledge that the different papers presuppose and i'm going about doing stuff that... i'm least prepared for. that might be true, actually. thinking about how a girl i was talking to the other day didn't really see that there was a great bunch of maths in chemistry... she never thought of the kinetic equations or the thermodynamic equations as being... math equations. i said she might view it differently if she had never really done equations before... and she seemed to see...
i guess i forget how much the little lawyers have to learn, too... to focus on the relevant... to be able to dig the relevant. to do a succinct summary. years and years and years and years of that i have had... unit conversions. ffs. sigh.
Posted by alexandra_k on August 18, 2014, at 21:04:56
In reply to Re: another year..., posted by alexandra_k on August 18, 2014, at 20:24:23
the stuff we are doing now in law is so weird. it is like a parallel universe or something to philosophy...
i guess philosophy focuses on theories of morality, primarily. we need to start out distinguishing what is the case from what should be the case... how you can't get an 'ought' from an 'is' and... depending on how many law students you have in the room... distinguishing legality from morality. cases like... how it might be illegal to drive on the incorrect side of the road but how it isn't obvious that it would be immoral to do so... how morality might prescribe that one break an unjust law... and of course hitler cases (just following orders etc) to try and show how what is legal and what is moral can be quite different...
but law focuses on theories of (surprise surprise) law. but it sort of runs together morality / legality... thinking that law gets its authority from morality or something like that... or that what is moral has something to do with what is lawful... on some correct understanding of 'lawful' (where some laws might be illegitimate somehow if they seem to be immoral). weird... and we got a hitler case... an informant. who informed on her husband for him saying nasty things about hitler and he was sentenced to the front line... and her trial in her defense... she said she was following the laws at the time informing on her husband... and intuition was supposed to be that she was immoral (hence guilty of something) and so they found some prior law that made the law she claimed she was following illegitimate. so they said that the prior law... well... she was guilty under that. so... guilty.
and i'm confused as hell... because people simply are gossipy gossipy gossips. and i don't understand why she (horribly immoral woman) wasn't given a bit f*ck*ng slap on the hand and told to go away... and really... the judge who sentenced her husband to the front line... well... he's the one guilty of depriving him of his liberty if anyone is.
scapegoating the bottomfeeders. mmm hmm.
anyway... i was the only person in the class who had the intuition that informants are... should be... innocent. in hindsight. i mean.
'just following orders' (to justify things like murder) is different. is differnt from her (say) telling a judge that x and the judge chooses to use x to try and justify.... say... murder...) i just don't see how we can or should make laws about gossipy gossip gossips... so very hard to enforce. but then i guess we have slander / libel laws or whatever... but that is about telling lies... so different again...
i just don't see...
Posted by ClearSkies on August 18, 2014, at 21:08:56
In reply to Re: another year..., posted by alexandra_k on August 18, 2014, at 20:24:23
What strikes me about studying law is how specialised the field is, so you can be very specific (I am guessing) in the area you decide to practice in. Criminal, civic, patent, tax, bankruptcy... Isn't there a lawyer for every area of society? That seems reassuring to me somehow.
I'm glad you made it through your meltdown OK. My ups and downs are rather dramatic with our bizarre, temporary living as roommates situation. From frosty to sulky to angry to hostile, I more often than not just grab my iPad and head upstairs to get away. We don't have any lovely little cafés to sit at - just sticky bar lounges.
Posted by alexandra_k on August 19, 2014, at 15:04:05
In reply to Re: another year..., posted by ClearSkies on August 18, 2014, at 21:08:56
yeah, there seems to be a lot of scope in law to do a lot of different things...
law is fairly different here compared to the US (surprise surprise). we have parliamentary supremacy (like england) rather than a balance of power situation (like the US). so lawyers have a lot less power and politicians / parliament has a whole bunch more... and the executive, too, as a special branch of parliament, i suppose. who funds government agencies and sets their agenda.
like how here we can't take civil action for such things as medical misconduct. or for negligence of an employer. instead we have the government agency the 'accident compensation authority' who investigates (and delivers verdicts on) complaints from consumers... unless you want to take the government agency to court ahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
too many lawyers, not enough jobs is the problem. ditto nurses. this is partly why everyone wants to be a doctor nowdays... because of the cost to train to competence (not sure why we give a sh*t about competence in something all of a sudden) we can only train so many... consensus is 'never enough'. not enough of them. tis okay... nurses can smile and hug and say things like 'feel better'. we don't have the money for a lot else...
but, yeah, some of the higher court stuff seems interesting... in a bookish way.
i went to a talk yesterday and it reminded me of everything that was wrong with my thesis. except it was given my an associate professor. of course it was. sigh. i'm... glad to be learning science. put in a bit of time cramming equations for physics (turns out we should remember them - the equation sheet we'll be provided with will be slightly different from what we are used to working off... will be confusing to me)... cramming lineages... cephlochordates have a swelling (tiny brain) on the anterior portion of their dorsal hollow nerve chord... proboscis worms have a proboscis in their ... something... i forget... anyway... things are starting to come together...
the evolutionary explanation of 'religion'. uh... whatever the f*ck that is supposed to be is... uh... the stuff of popularist novels. because it is fun to speculate with analogies and think that the game is about 'yes and'. not so fun to nail down a more specific aspect and focus on an in depth analysis of what is going on in that case. then adapting one (just the one!) aspect of that case for a similar case and doing an in depth analysis of sameness / difference to try and hone in on some actual causal processes... that's... a little too much like... genuine work. not so fun anymore. but possibly... good science...
sorry to hear about the lack of cafe's... summer for you guys... i have done some good writing / reading in pub / restaurants... but not a great situation for avoiding the booze, to be sure. do you have an art gallery or a museum or something like that? just thinking that those kinds of places might have nice cafes attached... perhaps... or some diner sorts of places... keep an eye out for writers etc... people doing work-y stuff on laptops... places advertising free wireless... that don't mind you hanging about...
> I'm glad you made it through your meltdown OK. My ups and downs are rather dramatic with our bizarre, temporary living as roommates situation. From frosty to sulky to angry to hostile, I more often than not just grab my iPad and head upstairs to get away. We don't have any lovely little cafés to sit at - just sticky bar lounges.
Posted by ClearSkies on August 19, 2014, at 18:52:09
In reply to Re: another year..., posted by alexandra_k on August 19, 2014, at 15:04:05
No museums are free here - of course.
There is one, teeny tiny museum,, no cafe, that has the temerity to charge almost $20 to get in.
Plus my writing skills have fled. Can only manage a few sentences here, and lots of disjointed blathering on FaceBook.whingeing, mostly.
Sorry about the law thing. I should have known...living in the land of So Sue Me, Asswipe! And insurance for everything. I just KNOW that your niche is proving to be elusive. That you are not the issue, and never have been. One size does not ever fit all, you know?
Like all of a sudden, my compassion for myself and others is profound. Activism, social and civic justice are a HUGE problem here. I was once ridiculed for my passion. Now I am unbridled, and finding those like minded people. So reassuring.
And,oh yeah, the oceans. They are dying, you know? Coral reefs, food chain, the whole thing might not recover. Another crusade, though not as enthusiastic. More of a mourning.
Posted by alexandra_k on August 20, 2014, at 20:26:06
In reply to Re: another year..., posted by ClearSkies on August 19, 2014, at 18:52:09
i lost my pencil case yesterday. which is a bit deal, actually. i keep my glasses in there. and i can't see anything physics guy writes down without my glasses. uh... that might have had a little bit to do with why the equation stuff in chem was so hard last semester...
anyway...
it turned up. people... left it there. through most of yesterday... over night... through half of this morning...
with a nice (reasonably expensive, actually) mechanical pencil and a box of leads... a neat little metal ruler (neat label lines are what makes your biology drawing legit)... glasses... people left it there.
wow.
i feel... happy about people today.
onto electricity now, which is hard. a bunch of new concepts and new units and everything seems all confusing...
i've sort of got the hang of displacement, time, acceleration, and velocity. for weird things... like the final velocity squared is equal to the initial velocity squared plus 2 times the acceleration times the distance. which is useful for figuring how fast a sloth is going when it falls from a tree just before it hits the ground (and you don't know how long it takes it to fall). still have some work to do on work and power and force and KE and PE... but nearly there... electricity stuff seems to much harder... but perhaps because it is not very familiar to me... unit of charge and field of charge and voltage and current and resistance. and ohms and coulombs and voltage and...
circuits are kinda cool, i think. parallel and serial circuits... they are pretty cool....
the physics help room was... annoying. people just wanted answers for their assignments. i guess i'm supposed to feel... a bit sad for them, really. since they are struggling. since they will f*ck up the tests / exam components completely. i should be more relaxed about things. give them an answer here and an answer there. appreciate that in this manner they will use different people to piece together their whole assignment. they'll probably get a better mark than me... since i work independently. because, uh, that's what i sign that i've done on the front of the form...
'supposed to'... i think the idea is... they aren't going to do very well if that is what they are reduced to / if that is what they choose to do. so... why involve myself in unpleasantries? what am i? their judge, jury, executioner or something? what does it matter?
i guess i was pissy that people do better than me with that strategy... which is why i need more time. for that to most certainly not be the case. for me to... perhaps figure how to develop good working relationships with capable individuals...
it takes time. to foster that... time for tutors to get to know you... etc... the more i relax and show myself to be helpful to others... the more opportunities to do things with competent others will come my way...
and perhaps i'll eventually get lab partners or whatever who are capable of pulling their own weight...
someone called me a nerd the other day. actually, not quite... i was in the gym and people started to get a bit strung out as the guys during the day sometimes tend to (since people are more newish around then and i think i am a bit scary) and one of the guys was 'she's a nerd' in my direction... and then they relaxed a bit... i think because they realised i wasn't playing a happy puppy game. i was... exercising. doing what my body needs to do not... trying to make them feel bad or whatever... i was... thinking about what i was doing and how i could do it better. not paying any attention to whatever they were up to at all... not interested in being impressed... but not being critical either...
anyway... i felt bad. because i thought geeks were smart and nerds were wannabe geeks. and then i think about how i suck at math and i guess i'm a wannabe geek, really. which, uh, makes me a nerd. huh. which is odd for me... to think... anyway... whatever... a few years of hard work and things will come right... and i guess it is obvious to people who matter that i care about understanding. not percentage points on whatever. which means rather a lot.
anyway... not sure what i'm saying.
people didn't steal my pencil case. for which i am truly grateful. it is a wonderfully sunny day...
even if i don't have a physical copy of campbell's bio :(
i do have the nice current edition as a PDF... and it is a wonderfully delightful book to read...to the gym...
yay.
i wish my tests were AFTER the study break... but still... here's hoping for a nice exam schedule. fingers crossed...
This is the end of the thread.
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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
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