Humanities

In line with last week's message, what have I been up to:

Art history: nope

Music: Springsteen, Within Temptation

Religion: it's been a bad week in one way. The funeral was held on an OU tutor and colleague of mine on Tuesday, and we heard that another had died unexpectedly on Thursday. The style nowadays for many people is to celebrate rather than to mourn. That was certainly the case with the funeral on Tuesday. I wonder how that reflects changing attitudes to life and death?

Philosophy: watched the first episode of Spooks. The starting plot hinges on the British government authorising the bombing of a train carrying a known terrorist before he carries out an attack on the UK. So can the taking of innocent life be justified if it promises to avert greater loss of life? (Needless to say, the plot got more complicated after that.)

History - watched more Tudors. They go at it like rabbits don't they. I've also been thinking about the meeting of history and geography in terms of our current landscape - that's what cultural geography is. There's a lot of landscape around Ringmer, and some people are desperate to preserve it unchanged and unchanging. There are also people around who are well on their way to being real historians.

Literature - nothing apart from picking the books I'm going to take on holiday - I'll add those next week.

History of science - I guess I include my potato experiment. I had to heat potatoes till they lost all their water, then subtract the final mass from the starting mass to see how much of them is water. After the first couple of goes in the microwave, I determined that either there is no water in potatoes, or I need a new microwave. Fortunately, after that, it began to work.*

Classical studies - erm,nothing, apart from discovering that Nick Clegg read archaeology (and anthropology) at Cambridge. But archaeology at Cambridge tends not to be very classical, so I'm not sure that I can include that.


*The answer is 80%. Or thereabouts.