I attended my second Frontiers lecture today. I’ll willingly own up to a lack of interest: my motivation for attendance was curiosity rather than education, and I wanted to see how many people bothered to show up the first day after break. The turnout was impressive.

However, the lecture’s content was so elementary that I found myself spending most of the lecture wishing that I hadn’t bothered to come. I guess curiosity really does kill the cat - or at least put her to sleep.

But then the professor turned hydrogen balloons into fireballs. That was kind of hard to sleep through.

After a minute of thinking about it, it became less impressive. At that point, I instead started to wonder if the lecture had been ‘borrowed’ from my tenth-grade chemistry teacher. Same material, same presentation, same demonstrations (fireball balloons included).

It was really a dead ringer.

As I was sitting in my Frontiers discussion section today, I started copying the (slightly altered) lyrics of the Lamb Chop song along the margins of my notebook.

This, as it turns out, was a mistake – the song wasn’t kidding when it said that it never ends! I didn’t mind at the time – I was kind of bored and found it amusing (this probably says something about my mental prowess, but we’ll gloss over that). In retrospect, however, I realize what a shame it was. I wasted two hours of priceless instruction time. I realized as I glanced through my notes that this class is extremely valuable. Why should I complain? I need to be paying attention! Frontiers is as good as it gets! Read the rest of this entry »