First day off of Fall Break...

...actually turned out pretty good. Some weird, awesome things in class today.

In Archaeology, we were just assigned a short group project where each group examines an ancient African or Mesopotamian state. First of all, it was a surprise to me that ancient Africa even had states, but the professor said that Africa was once one of the most well organized continents in this respect, with states like Great Zimbabwe. What caught my eye though was a Mesopotamian culture called the Uruk, known for their clay tablets and (awesome) ziggurats. I can't help but think of the big ugly Uruk-hai Orcs from Lord of the Rings, and personally I think it's a conspiracy perpetrated by Tolkein to discredit ancient Sumerian cultures. Or something. I'm working on that one.

Next was a prettty average Economics lecture on aggregate demand, until the end of the class when we started talking about the history of money. We started with bartering, and moved to coins, fait dollars (like we have now), and checks. Then the professor asked what the moeny of the future was going to be, and someone said, "Electronic" which the professor agreed with but pointed out one important problem with. "Electronic money is, in reality, imaginary. Since you need not carry anything with you but a debit card, money as we know it wont exist. We could change the name of our money to...say...Unicorns, and you could pull out your Unicorn card to make transactions from the nearest Unicorn Bank!" We all cracked up at that, but he does have a point. I never actually saw any of the money I made this summer except on a bank statement and out of an ATM. It seems kind of dangerous to rely on nothing but electronic records to prove your entire monetary assets...

Anyways, after delicious tacos it was time for Philosophy where we kept talking about Descartes. The big thing there though was getting the paper I had written two weeks back and was so worried about. First of all, I have to say that my worry wasn't impractical; before the professor gave us the prompt, he told us a story of his professor's philosophy class getting their papers back. He said to them, "If philosophical writing was like math, you all literally would not know how to count." Needlesss to say I was a bit anxious, never having writen 'philosophically' before. That's why I was so happy when I got mine back with a B+! The prof. left a lot of good comments on what I had done well and what I should try to improve, but I still think he graded somewhat leniantly. Nice to have that not to stress over any more... I need that leftover stress to prepare for his midterm next week!