Today was the first day of classes at UK, so let me tell you about how it went:

artificial intelligence

I figure this is going to be a hard class, but the lecture was pretty interesting today. I can’t say I had any interest in the subject going into it, but throughout the lecture I kept thinking of I, Robot with Will Smith, so who knows, maybe it’ll be fun. The professor seems like a good lecturer, at least, and the programming project we’ll have this semester can be written in our choice of language. No more arguing with type conversion and pointers in C++!

Asian philosophy

I found myself biting my tongue to keep from laughing a couple times in today’s lecture because I think I’m in there with a few dolts, but this may be an okay class. We talked about what the self was today, as in what we mean when we use the words “I” or “myself.” One guy rambled on about he is himself and “you are YOURself”, blah blah, which the professor seemed to appreciate. Someone else pretty much stated my view of it, which is that “self” is defined by its boundaries, that is, the thoughts swirling around in your head and the separation of sensation, like I see you get punched and I don’t feel physical pain, whereas you do. Then the professor asked “well what about God in Christianity, with His three selves?” and that same kid from earlier went off on some tangent about how all we know about God is what the Bible says, and then he started spouting off irrelevant Biblical quotations. I feel like I’m going to do a lot of sighing and surfing the Internet in this class.

astronomy

This professor is “off the hook,” to quote one of his slides that made that comment about the subject of astronomy. He’s this sixty-year-old white guy that kept saying “bullshit” and then started rapping. He was asking us what we did over the summer and some guy said he went on a choral trip. The professor asked what the guy sings, and if he sings Lil Wayne. This got a few chuckles, I guess because we were all thinking “He knows who Lil Wayne is?!” Then, the professor started singing “Shorty want a thug, bottles in the club”; I didn’t even know Lil Wayne sings that, though of course I’ve heard it umpteen times on the radio. He started out the lecture with a big slide saying “FBI Warning”, with a photo of what looked like a shot from Dragnet: two detectives pointing guns out at you. He went on about how “any unauthorized recordings or distributions of this lecture would be punished to the full extent of the law,” something like that, then said “That’s bullshit.” (There’s his favorite word again.)

honors

I think I’ll like this professor, too, just because of his attitude. Definitely not because of the reading material, because we’re reading “classics” from the 1500-1900′s, and they’ll probably bore the pants off me. They include stuff by Nietzsche, “The Prince” by Machiavelli, Thomas More’s “Utopia”, some philosophy, and some Kierkegaard. Our classroom is way off the beaten trail; me and some other students kept wandering the halls on the top floor of an old building, finding the restrooms and myriad other hallways instead of our classroom, which is shoved in a corner. Other students kept straggling into the classroom throughout the class, muttering about being unable to find the place. We’re thinking about moving to an unoccupied and larger classroom across the hall, though, which would be nice because there wasn’t enough room at the table for us all and so several of us sat in chairs against the wall.

operating systems

This is taught by a tiny Indian man who speaks very softly and has that peaceful sort of voice that makes surfing the Internet or taking a nap very tempting for me. I hope I can pay attention long enough to glean some information from him about the subject. I’m going to try and borrow Kathy’s old edition of the textbook, since I’m sure a new or used copy would be well over $60 at the bookstore.