The Real Reason for Washington, Part 2

And finally, the last instalment of the tale of my spring break in Washington, in which I will finally reveal the meaning of the title of that first post.

Where was I? Ah yes. Day three of our immigration seminars saw us discussion what we were going to do with what we’d learned when we got home. I’ve been to a fair few things like this where everyone starts going off on grand sweeping plans that are going to change the world overnight (or by next Tuesday at the latest) so I was somewhat wary of how useful this exercise was going to be. Fortunately the seminar leader was very good at facilitating this sort of discussion and quickly got us thinking about things we really could do, within the framework of what we do already.

One thing that we were going to do there and then was to go and visit Senator Stabenow, one of Michigan’s Senators. We had an appointment with one of her advisers the next day, so the next part of this day was to plan what we were going to say. To this end we had a crash course in lobbying politicians, which was quite fun. Again it was an exercise in curbing our enthusiasm, narrowing down our plans to change the world into issues that the Senator would actually be able to have a say on. I the end we decided to ask about some of the things that we had discussed in the past few days, such as Secure Communities and the DREAM Act (an act meant to help undocumented immigrant children who go through the American education system to not be deported when they leave school).

 As well as these pieces of legislation decided to bring up what I thought was a very valid point, that the immigration process needs to be simplified so that less educated people don’t get rejected for minor mistakes. I fully sympathise with this. I have most of a degree and I’m fairly sure that there are mistakes on my non-immigrant visa form, so I’d imagine the full immigrant paperwork is a nightmare.  We also received a bit of tutoring in what order we should say things and on how to lobby: “You can demand things and still be nice”.

After this we had a slight change of theme, given by the man with the longest job title ion the world. Bill Mefford, the Director of Civil and Human Rights of the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church. Bill talked to us about building communities, using an interesting model of simplex and multiplex relationships, i.e. just interaction with people in a very one-dimensional way (he used the example of giving money to the homeless), or actually getting to know people and building relationships. For me it drew many parallels with what we’d talked about regarding charity and justice (see last post).  Community seems to be a slightly overused buzzword in both the church and the wider world at the moment so it’s important that we know what we mean when we say it.

We then went and had lunch. Yes, we did get through all that in one morning. Maybe we should have called it Spring Work Hard. For lunch we headed to another Washington landmark, We the Pizza. Very nice pizza indeed.

Our seminar series was at an end, so after lunch we had a closing session when we talked over the past three days and what we all thought of what we’d done. To be honest I don’t really remember that much of what we did in this, I’m just going off the programme I have here. Um…  

Anyway, after that we continued with our sightseeing, as well as preparing and rehearsing for our visit to the Senator the next day. However one bit of preparation was rejected. As Senator Stabenow is a Methodist we decided that we would give her a copy of the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church, which is a book of pretty much what it says on the tin. However Dan and spent some of the evening looking through the book and taking issue with some of it, so we set out with an opinionated pencil to produce an edited, less hypocritical version. In particular we felt that the phrase “The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching” should not be followed by “We implore families and churches not to reject or condemn lesbian and gay member s or friends.”  So we can’t do individually it but it’s ok for the church as a whole to do it? Our pencil went straight through the first statement and all things similar. Unfortunately we were told that we weren't allowed to give the Senator the edited version, so it remains in Dan’s possession. The rest of the book has some very good stuff in it so I guess that was ok. It’s up for renewal anyway so we’ll press our edits then.

        

Thursday, the day of our visit arrived. Off we traipsed to one of the big Senate office buildings, walked straight passed Senator Stabenow’s office and got lost. Great start. Eventually we found her office and started waiting. We had to wait for a while so got a bit restless, accidently almost breaking both picture and a bookcase. And then came the moment you’ve all been waiting for.

Out of nowhere someone walked out of a doorway and asked “is Allegra Smith here?” It turns out they knew each other, but someone commented on how scary it would have been if it had been them they’d asked for.

“Yes,” someone else said. “What if it had been “Is there a…David Wilson here?”?”

“They’ve got me,” I said. “I knew I shouldn’t have ticked yes to the “are you a terrorist” on the visa form.

Apparently saying things like that in a US Senator’s office is frowned upon.

After they’d bailed me out we went and had our meeting with the Senator’s advisor. It was very interesting and he seemed to enjoy the break from official corporate lobbyist to talk to real people. What he said was slightly discouraging though, as apparently it’s almost impossible to get any legislation like the stuff we were after through at the moment. It was a good experience though and hopefully something more useful can be done in the future. We left fairly satisfied and gave them an (unedited) copy of the social principles, our attempts to accidently give them the wrong one proving useless. At that was the end of the serious bit of our trip.

One last act though. Every night we’d been having short devotions, looking at a Bible passage with some relevance to immigration. As our normal worship at Wesley is on Thursday  we decided to go and have a communion service at the Martin Luther King memorial.  Quite a unique and wonderful service followed. Apparently you’re not allowed to have alcohol in public in DC, so we used water instead. I promptly spilled it (“Arrggh, I’ve got Jesus all over my leg!”).  Dan talked for a bit and we got a second sermon from the quotes on the walls around us.  Dan focused on love, talking about the three rules that a few of us have been developing over the semester as what we thought was the heart of Jesus’s message: “Love God, love each other and don’t be a dick.” (You can replace dick with a stronger word of your choice if you want.) I hope MLK would approve.

And that really was the end of the serious bit of our trip. Although I was right in that the specific issues talked about didn’t apply much to me going back to Britain, it was incredibly useful to try and apply Christian ideas to a real issue in that was. I still don’t think immigration is the issue for me, although I am going to look more into what the issues are at home when I get back, but I’m sure I can apply what I’ve learnt to other areas. And I would urge anyone reading this to think about their opinions on any subject, look past the statistics and go and meet the people involved. It helps.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these posts. Please feel free to disagree with anything I say, as I could be wrong. (That doesn't mean I won't disagree with you in return however). Normal, less political posts will resume shortly!

   

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The Real Reason for Washington, Part 1.

Ok, so it wasn’t quite tomorrow. I’ve had a busy week. But anyway, time to talk about the reason the Wesley Foundation and I were in Washington to begin with, and why I ended up talking about terrorism in a Senator’s office.

I’ll start by saying that this is going to be a lot more serious than previous posts, with a fair bit more of my personal faith and political opinions affecting it. Just so you’re ready.

We were in Washington to go to the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church (GBCSUMC?), which works from a building just behind the Capitol. They’re responsible for setting the social agenda of the UMC and run seminars for church groups on various issues. We were there for a seminar series on immigration. To be honest that didn’t appeal too much to me at the start, as I thought it would have much relevance to me when I go home. I mainly signed on for the sightseeing. That view changed.

I should clarify that I am not an immigrant here. I have a non-immigrant visa that lasts until June, after which I have to leave.  Just so that doesn’t confuse people about where I’m standing.

I’ve always had a somewhat sceptical view of the immigration debate. Both here and in Britain it’s usually used as a buzzword to score political points. Not an election goes by without someone promising that they’ll be tough on immigration, and gaining popularity for it. Very rarely is what, or who, “the immigration issue” means discussed.

Some statistics to start off, but I’ll put in a warning: Don’t take this home; I’m just trying to put this into context. Too often immigration, along with many other issues, is talked about only in numbers and statistics. One of the main themes of the week was to see the face behind these numbers.

With that in mind, some numbers. The total foreign-born population of the US is just under 32 million (as of January 2010). Ten million of these are undocumented (I’m not going to use the term illegal immigrants. There is no such thing as an illegal person). Between quarter and half a million undocumented people enter the US every year. The number of deportations per year is at a record high, nearly four hundred thousand last year. I’ll get into some of the reasons for that last statistic in a bit.  

On the first day we started with a very interesting conversation about justice and mercy, and the differences thereof.   We found it was very easy to talk about acts of mercy we could do and had done, like giving to charity, working as a volunteer etc, but when it came to justice, to challenging and changing systems, we found it much harder to find places to act. Part of the challenge was to define the differences between mercy and justice.  We threw out words: Mercy meant personal, immediate, single, controlled.  Justice involves words like systematic change, long term, and dynamic. In many ways, justice is harder, because whilst mercy doesn’t affect us, justice often forces to think hard about what we do and how we live.

Next we looked at some of the reasons that America has so many people wanting to come here (Much of this also applies to Britain). The main reason is that, bluntly, it’s a better place to live that pretty much anywhere else.  We looked at the imbalance in the amount of resources we have compare to everywhere else, resources that allow America to not only be a better place to live, but also, directly and indirectly, to make other places worse by controlling trade and farming practices. We looked at the push and pull factors of immigration (in an eerie flashback to Year 9 geography), such as lack of money and education or violence in immigrants home countries and opportunity and wealth here. 

The next part was for me one of the highlights of the week. We had a guest speaker in from the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who talked about the politics on immigration from an Islamic point of view. What was fascinating about it was the way everything he talked about was rooted in the teachings of the Qur’an. It was enlightening to discover that there are Muslim who are taking a fresh look at the Qur’an and seeing how it’s teachings apply to modern life and politics, in the same way that many Christian groups are doing.

He talked about some of the legislation that’s going through the Capitol at the moment (and getting pretty much nowhere).  They are interested in Comprehensive Immigration Reform, radically changing the system to make the process fairer and easier.  This is needed badly; the current process of becoming a US citizen, or getting any documentation at all, is incredibly complicated and difficult.  I asked him about where he thought we should draw the line on who comes in, which is something I wonder about when there are debates on limiting immigration. Stopping serious criminals was pretty much the answer he gave.  

All of that talking was good, but the next morning we actually went to meet some immigrants. Jobs for Justice, a charity that works with migrant workers, introduced us to some Guatemalan day labourers. These are people who stand around in the cold waiting for people to picke them up to do a day’s labour. Often they will be victims of wage theft, not paid at the end of the day. Many days they won’t get work at all.

We went and gave them some breakfast, which is a great start to meeting someone new. Jesus ate with people a lot and that helped me to see why. Talking to them two things struck me.  When one man, who had been here for five years, started talking about home it became quite clear that he did to want to be here. And if doing this was better than before than his life at home must have been terrible. These weren’t people who were “coming here and taking our jobs”. They were here doing the jobs we don’t want because they were absolutely desperate.

After that somewhat challenging experience, we headed back to the UMC building to meet a representative of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium, who gave a different perspective: People who had moved here not out of desperation, but for the opportunities it offered. One of the main things she talked about was the difficulty in getting legal immigrants who had got thorough the system to help those on the way. A lot of this had to do with the Secure Communities legislation that is popping up in several states in America, leading to many people being deported for minor errors on their documentation if they ever get involved with the police.  I won’t go into the details here, but to any American readers: If you’re interested comment or something and I can talk more about it.

To say that I’d changed my mind about my interest in immigration by now is understating it a bit. I’m thinking I’m going to need about the same again to finish talking about this, so I’ll leave it here for now. Part two (three?) will be on it’s way soon…

Apparently saying you're a terrorist in a US senator’s’ office is frowned upon...

The past week has been spring break here, where students traditionally go off into all four corners of the world (corners on a sphere?)  and party, get drunk,  do charity or mission work or combinations thereof. I went with the Wesley Foundation to Washington DC. We were there for a serious reason which I’ll get to in the next post, but for this one I’ll concentrate on the slight seeing and stuff.

Sightseeing in DC is really easy, as it’s really rather small. I didn’t realise this until we arrived, transitioning from “forest in the middle of nowhere” to “oh look, the Washington Monument” in matter of minutes. All of the museums, memorials and government buildings are within walking distance and there’s a metro if you don’t want to walk.   

The night we arrived, after food in Chinatown, we had a wander down to the Washington Monument, America’s giant middle figure to the English, and had a look around.  It looks small form a distance, but it’s really rather big when you get closer. After that we had a walk around the National Mall (not a shopping centre), planning where we wanted to go during the week, The layout is quite simple: There’s the Capitol at one end, then a stretch down to the Washington Monument lined by the Smithsonian Museums (lots of them ). Beyond the monument you can walk one way to the White House, or the other way to the various memorials. 

The next day was Sunday, so we went to the service at the church we were staying in. It was a Lutheran church, the first I’d been to, and I quite liked it. It was probably the closest service to what’s normal at home, a proper hymn sandwich, although they had a sung liturgy.  After that we headed to our first museum, which was the one I was most wanted to get to: The Air and Space Museum.   It’s a fantastic place, with a collection of planes and spacecraft like no other. Almost all of them are famous, or were the first to do something. Some examples: The  Wight Flyer (first plane(maybe)); Bell X-1, the first plane to break the sound barrier in level flight; Apollo 11, the first spacecraft to land humans on the moon, although only the small command module came back; and the backup of Skylab, America’s first space station.  I almost missed  my personal highlight of the museum: Off on one side in the atrium is the Stardust capsule, the first mission to return comet dust to earth and one of my favourite space missions.

In our free time the next day we wondered around taking pictures of the Capitol, which is an amazingly photogenic building, then investigated the Museum of Natural History.  Lots of interesting stuff, including a large bird fossil from the one short time when birds where the dominant animals, as well as a giant squid.

Next day we went to the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world with a very interesting exhibition on the creation of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, the founding documents of American history. I got to see the documents themselves a coupe of days later at the National Archives, where I spent most of the time trying to work out if a National Treasure-style theft was possible (not really, the film took quite a few liberties in it’s portrayal of the Archives.)

That night we went to the White House, which is small and hard to get a good photo of, then moved on to the Memorials. There are quite a few of them, the largest being the Lincoln Memorial. This was very reminiscent of the Parthenon in Athens, with a giant statue of Lincoln looking out over Washington. I’ve been reading a lot of books by Shane Claiborne, in which he talks a lot about the “State Religion of America” and that place felt eerily like a temple. Impressive though, although the next memorial was better.

When the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial opened last year I was quite disappointed by what I saw of it. The sculpture was quite good but it seemed a bit small compared to the others.  What I hadn’t seen was the setting. The sculpture is carved out of a cut out of a bigger rock behind, which made it look slightly as if it had just rolled out from where it had been. (This led me to ponder whether or not it was, in fact, motorised, allowing the President to sneak down at night and drive it around while no one’s watching. The more I pondered this, the more it looked like a giant dalek. Apparently this train of thought either makes me a really good American or a really bad American, according to my friend Dan.) Spread out on either side is a curve wall inscribed with quotes from some of his speeches, many of which were quite profound. I think it was a perfect monument for MLK, focusing not on him as a person but on his work and words. It’s defiantly my favourite of the monuments that I saw.

Other sights included the National Building Museum, where there was a Lego architecture exhibition, and the Museum of American History, which had Lincoln’s hat, as well as John Glen’s spacesuit.  We also had a trip up to Arlington Cemetery, where many US military casualties are buried, along with John F. Kennedy and his family.  We attempted to stay solemn for once and not make any jokes about what we were seeing. This lasted until we got to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at which point Dan started a sentence with “I’m a bad American, but…” and it was down hill from there.

And then uphill again to the US Marines Memorial, based on the famous photos of troops raising the flag on Iwo Jima. There was one thing really out of place though, or in just the right place depending on your point of view. Rising up behind the memorial was a big black building with “BAE Systems” written on the side. A cemetery full of those killed in war next to a corporation that makes money from war. I didn’t have any spray paint with me, which stopped me making my second risk of getting arrested that week (I’ll get to the first time).

Overall I really enjoyed my spring break. Washington DC is a very interesting city, well worth going to. But I wasn’t just there for sightseeing. What we were really doing there, as well as an explanation of the title of this post, will have to wait until tomorrow. Come back soon…

Black holes, neutrinos and why Cambridge is overrated...

It’s about time I wrote another post here. There’s been no real reason of the hiatus, I’ve just been forgetting.

Today I had the last of the first round of midterms for this semester (that does make sense, honest), so it’s a good day to talk about what I’ve been studying this term. Other stuff may be saved for another post or I might carry on writing this. I don’t exactly plan these things.

I’m taking four lecture-type courses this semester, all of which I’m enjoying. They are all interesting, or at least I find them interesting, so I’ll say something about them.

First off the bad news: I’m not doing very well in Thermal and Statistical physics, but the good news is nobody is. I’m improving though and my marks are fine for a course I’m not very good at (that also makes sense).  It’s interesting though and I’m glad I’m doing it. I did wonder at the start how useful I would find this going into astrophysics, but then a grad student told me he didn’t do it and was now regretting it.  

Talking of graduates I’m also, perhaps foolishly, taking a graduate level course, Gravitational Astrophysics. This is looking at Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, otherwise known as the way the universe really works.  There are plenty of undergraduates in the class so it’s not just me, and it’s fairly straightforward so far. It’s also taught really well, with the most interaction I’ve had in a course so far. Every so often there will be a question that the class will debate, with someone responsible for writing down the answer and send it to everyone else. Which reminds me that I haven’t sent mine yet…oops.  

 It also results in some great questions, the best of which has to be “So you know in Star Trek…?” (It turns out that the scene at the end of Star Trek, where they create a massive explosion behind them to escape a black hole, is a perfectly legitimate tactic for getting out of a black hole. It’s just a shame that film got pretty much everything else about a black hole wrong. They should have used a gamma ray burst that created a wormhole. Would have been a much better special effect as well.)

A good thing this semester is that only those two courses have final exams. For the next two I have to write papers, which is going to be much more fun than exams.  The first of these is Nuclear and Particle Physics, which is my second favourite area of physics and is a really interesting course. A great result of having a world class nuclear physics lab on campus is that everything we do can be directly related to what the lecturer goes and does right after the lecture across the road.

For this we have to write a paper on a subject of our choice, for which I’ve chosen to look at the discovery of neutrinos from the 1987 supernova, the only recent nearby supernova. When a star explodes it emits billions of neutrino in every direction, which can, with a lot of luck, be detected. It was the first successful instance of neutrino astronomy and also has consequences for the apparent detection of faster than light neutrinos last year. If neutrinos travel faster than light they should have arrived here before the light from the supernova, instead of slightly after.   

The last subject is probably my favourite and the one I had to negotiate to get on to: Planetary Geology. This is really the first course I’ve done that’s studied the planets in any real detail and is the area I’d most like to get into for my own research. I’m also writing a term paper  for this about Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and maybe my favourite place not on Earth. It’s possibly the most similar object to Earth we’ve found in terms of its complexity, with a thick atmosphere and a methane cycle analogous to our water cycle. My paper will be exploring just this aspect of it, looking at the similarities and difference to Earth.    

  

As well as these I’m carrying on with my senior thesis studying variable stars. Well I say that, but it’s hit a few problems after the last couple of weeks, as the detector my data is from appears to have been designed by throwing a pile of components into a box, pouring superglue over them and shaking the box around. The people responsible for it? Cambridge University.

This means that I have three papers to write, one on neutrinos, one on a moon and one on RR Lyrae stars. None of which have anything to do with each other. Should have planned that better…

So that’s pretty much what I’m doing academically. I’ve done plenty of other stuff, but that will be for another post in a bit. A short bit not the long bit that this ends (that, like the rest of this post, makes sense. At least to me.)  

What I did on my holidays, with a bit about rockets.

Hello everyone. I hope you had a good Christmas.

I did, so I’m going to talk about it, with advance warning of a side-track in which I talk about the future of space exploration. It is relevant, as you will see if you wish to continue reading.

For Christmas we were kicked out of our dorms for three weeks (not literally, before you get worried), so that meant I had to find places to stay.  First stop was to my friend Dan’s house, whom you may from a couple of posts ago. I spent Christmas day and the day after (not Boxing Day here), with his family, meaning I got to see another state, Indiana.

Indiana is flat. That’s pretty much all there is to say about it. And I mean really, really flat. Where ever one road crosses another there’s always a manmade lake closely where they had to dig out the earth to make the banks.

After that little adventure, with a bit of snow in Michigan to see me off, I headed to Detroit and caught a plane down to Atlanta, where I met my parents and brother who flew over from Britain.

Why Atlanta? Well I did suggest they might like to come here, so they could see where live and all that, but for some reason the idea of really cold days and snow didn’t appeal as much as Georgia and Florida…

Not that I’m complaining. It was really interesting to compare the South with the North. Similar but different. The roads were better than here, although having said that Georgia had rubbish direction signs, leading to us getting slightly lost a couple of times. I suppose the main difference was the heat, it being somewhat closer to the equator. And the churches, lining the roads, each with a more over-the-top religious scrabble name than the last.

The holiday started in Atlanta, and then we drove down to Brunswick in southern Georgia to stay with a friend. Interesting place, featuring the church where John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, first came to in America. We accidently walking in on their healing service, meaning I can add another church onto my list (Episcopalian).

After that we travelled down into Florida and to the Space Coast (the diversion is fast approaching), so we could have a trip to the Kennedy Space Centre. I last went there ten years ago, which was ten years too long a gap in my opinion. It is an amazing place. The highlight of the day was the Saturn V moon rocket, which I had a childhood memory of staying at in wonder over how big it was. I was fairly sure that, being ten at the time, my impression of it’s size was exaggerated. Nope.

It’s huge. Really, Really big.   The setup of the hanger it’s in is such that you walk out behind it, right into its main engines, and look down the length of it. The base is over ten meters wide, with five engines that I could easily stand up in. It is a hundred and tem metres long. Now I’ve seen bigger buildings and bigger boats, but they really don’t have the same effect as this. This is displayed in such a way that you don’t think, “wow that’s big”, you think “wow that’s so much bigger than me.” Also you have to remember that this thing can fly. Buildings and boats aren’t built to fly over one hundred tons of stuff into space.  Some people think that that’s exactly what should be done, that this rocket should be taken out of its hanger and flown, but I’m glad it hasn’t. You’ve got to have something to aim for.     

And on that note, the diversion. For the Saturn V is soon to loose it’s crown as the most powerful rocket ever built, which I think is a bad move.

Many people here have got the impression that the end of the space shuttle meant the end of Nasa, probably due to an overenthusiastic media. Not so, the space shuttle wasn’t decommissioned because Nasa isn’t doing anything anymore, but because it isn’t good enough for what they’re doing next.

The space shuttle could operate only in low earth orbit, about 400 kilometres up. It was very good for doing stuff there, but it was nowhere near powerful enough to get to, say, the Moon. Or to a near-Earth Asteroid, or Mars. And these places are where Nasa wants to go next.

To do this George W Bush ordered them to build a new set of rockets, known as the Constellation program, which would give both the ability to fly to the Moon and address some of the fatal safety flaws of the shuttle by separating crew and cargo. Good plan, but unfortunately what he didn’t give them was the money they would need to do it. When Barack Obama came to power he commissioned a review of the program, which recommended he cancel it. Instead Nasa would concentrate on developing new technologies that would be needed for journeys beyond Earth whilst the job of ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station would be turned over to commercial companies.

The private sector has risen to this challenge, with several innovative, advanced and above all cheap spacecraft on the drawing board, in prototype stage or, in the case of my personal favourite, the Space X Dragon, already flying. This is a really important step in opening up space exploration: after all, there are no government airways. I was lucky enough to see the Space X Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the space station, waiting for its launch sometime in February. Space X are also working on another rocket called Falcon Heavy, planned to launch later this year, which will hopefully break the holy grail of rocketry: a price of less than $1000 per pound to orbit.

Unfortunately the cancellation of Constellation caused lot of jobs to be put at risk, and a lot of work lost for some of the big defence companies. Because of this policy changed again and Nasa was told that it would continue to develop the spacecraft that Obama had cancelled, the Orion. They were also told to develop a new rocket, the Space Launch System, or SLS.

 This rocket, which is basically a hybrid between the Saturn V and the space shuttle, will be the most powerful ever built.  It will be able to launch 130 tons to low earth orbit, enough for a trip to the Moon or an asteroid. Although it will be a superb, useful rocket, I think it is a mistake. Space X rockets will be ready much sooner and be much, much cheaper, and although it will take two or three Falcon Heavies to do the same job as one SLS, Nasa has plenty of experience of assembling stuff in orbit. I’m worried that this rocket, like Constellation, will go over budget and be cancelled, wasting money that could have been spend on going somewhere interesting. It’s ugly too.

But anyway, the point is that Nasa hasn’t stopped and the future of space flight should be very interesting so long as sensible funding decisions are made. Diversion over.

The rest of Kennedy was very interesting, with a collection of old rockets, exhibitions about various Nasa missions and, best of all, a full size Lego model of a Mars rover.

After Kennedy we drove back up through Georgia and Florida, stopping over at Macon where there were some quite interesting Native American historical sites. I don’t know very much about Native American history, so I may read up on some stuff for a future post.  After Macon I flew back up to Detroit, stayed a few nights at pastor Bill’s house then came back here. The end!

I also lost my hat, which is a bad thing.

   

Exams, Education and the search for a third relevant word beginning with E...

Last Friday was the last day of my first semester in America, seventeen weeks and twelve blog posts (including this one) since I arrived. It’s gone quite quickly, but so does every year.  One semester to go…

The main event of the past few weeks was the final exams. If you’ve read the previous post then you’ll hopefully be aware that the American exam season is somewhat different from ours, in that here we are examined as we go along, rather than all at the end of the year. This means that I was examined on everything I’ve done this semester last week, and can now forget it forever, which in the case of the solid state physics course I will be quite happy to do. 

Not sure if this is better than the British system though. Yes I was examined on stuff almost as soon as I’d learnt it, meaning that it was “fresh in my mind”. I find that phrase rather intriguing- does that mean that some of the stuff I learnt in my first year is sitting at the back of the fridge that is my brain slowly rotting?  Anyways- it was good in this way, but we have a lot less time to revise here, about five days between the end of each subject and the exam, rather than the week or two we get at home. The best way to compare them would be results. I’ve had a few so far but I’ll wait for the rest to talk about them and try to convert them into a British grade- which may be the trickiest part. The systems are…less than compatible, to say the least.

At this point I suppose I should sum up my impressions of America after one semester, so here we go...

Academically it’s hard to say whether or not it was easier. I would say the actually difficulty level was less than or equal to what I did last year, but that some of it was harder for me personally as I didn’t have the same mix of knowledge that all of the American students had. For example the solid state physics relied heavily on a good knowledge of statistical physics which I haven’t done yet, but was still the best match for what I would be doing at Lancaster.  (I didn’t enjoy that class, if you hadn’t guessed).  But some of the classes, particularly the second year geology course I took, were really easy (although I’ve never done a British geology course to compare, so it could just be that physics is hard.)

That’s looking at it in terms of difficulty, but what I should probably look at more is opportunity- that is, did I get to do stuff here that I wouldn’t get to do at home. Erm, yes. Lancaster has a very concentrated, physics based course and it’s been good to be able to do lots of astrophysics here instead. I’ve even got to some real research, studying the Canes Venatici I dwarf galaxy.  That research is continuing into next semester so I will talk about at another time. In fact I may do a whole blog post on it, so get ready for some proper astrophysics at some point! I’ve also been able to study galaxies and observational cosmology in detail, and to do some long lab experiments that I would miss out on at home. So from that angle it’s been very good.

And what about life in general? Well the accommodation’s been really different, both in the catered food and having room- and suite-mates. We’ve gained a reputation for loud political arguments , which I think may have annoyed some people who were trying to study over our discussion of drugs an abortion last week! Sorry.  But I’ve don’t really think that I’ve missed having a room to myself, not much anyway, and the benefits it bring in terms of people talking to each other are great. So in this area I think the Americans have got it right.

Catered eating, well I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been quite nice to be able to eat whenever I want without having to cook it and the food has been very good on the whole. But I think that one of the most valuable things I learnt at uni was to cook, something that I would have missed out on here.

This reminds me of one of the main impressions I’ve got of American University life as compared with Britain. Most people aren’t far from home here and go home regularly, on many weekends. There’s much less of the moving away from home feeling that there is in Britain, where university is something distinctly different. Here it feels much more like just a continuation of school, indeed they still call it school.   

Socially it’s been good, although I am missing Lancaster nights out as, being under 21, they won’t let me into nightclubs here. I have got to do stuff like science theatre though which has been great fun (I got an Honourable Member award, which was surprising given that I’ve only been free for two out of the many shows they’ve put on).

And what about the church? Well The Wesley Foundation’s been great and I’ve been able do some good things with them, particularly the Detroit trip from a few posts ago. As for other churches, well I’ve been to a few and have had some very interesting and varied experiences, which have so far neither confirmed nor refuted some of the images of the American church we have. More on that next semester after I’ve visited a few more.

So I suppose the big question is, would I recommend a year abroad to other students? So far, the answer would be yes.  Hopefully that will be the same after next semester!

Seventeen weeks down,  twenty three to go…

    

Thanksgiving, spaceship shaped cookies and an existential crisis...

It’s just started snowing here. And by snowing, I mean we’ve had as much snow as the UK gets in a year in about four hours. Getting to class tomorrow could be fun…

Anyways, last week was one of the most important event s of the American calendar, Thanksgiving.  The origins of thanksgiving are a mix of traditions, but for the most part it’s a celebration of when the Pilgrims landed in America and celebrated their harvest festival, which they combined with that of the Native Americans, to thank God for guiding them safely across the Atlantic. This event was pretty much the start of the true colonisation of North America by Europeans.  It became a proper national holiday in the American Civil War.

Of course, the colonisation of the US also led to the near extinction of the Native Americans, which is why my suitemate refers to it as Genocide Day…but in the interest of being nice I’ll brush over that for now!

Nowadays it’s a four day holiday from Thursday (Thanksgiving Day itself) to Sunday. Many students here decided to in fact make it a five day holiday, so my classes on Wednesday were strangely empty. My geology professor decided that those who turned up would get to write two of the question for the final exam, so it was worth getting up for.

Then on Wednesday evening I left the empty halls and went to stay with Allegra, one of my friends from church and her family. Allegra and another of my friends, Dan, have, for some reason, decided that they are my divorced parents fighting for custody over me, so are sharing me in the various holidays. Slightly worrying, but at least I have places to stay…

Thursday morning started with a parade in Detroit (we watched it on tv), which shared the usual American attribute of being huge and over the top, with vast, very well built floats.  Next came the Thanksgiving football game. There are two of these, which always involve the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys against someone. Apparently the Lions always loose, which they did again this year. Still not sure if I like American football or not.         

The main event of Thanksgiving is of course food on Thursday evening, for which turkey is eaten. Surprisingly the traditional Christmas meal is, like ours, also turkey, so they have turkey sandwiches for two months in a row instead of our one… anyway it was a very nice meal. There were quite a few people there, as an important part of thanksgiving is that it’s a family celebration. Many people take the day off and travel to be with their families, which can be quite a way with a country the size of the US! This can of course lead to travel chaos, but it seems to have been ok this year.

I think by far the question was asked the most was “do you have a thanksgiving?” On first view an odd question, but the celebration has moved on from its historical origins. I’ve been asked quite a lot of questions like this about how Britain views or knows about various American traditions. I’m still waiting for “Do you celebrate Independence Day?” But no we don’t have a thanksgiving, on account of being a proper old country rather than a colony with ideas above its station (I didn’t say that).

After the meal I went to investigate another bit of American culture, the infamous Black Friday.  Yes you’ve read that right, it’s still Thursday.

Black Friday is the first day of the Christmas shopping season, and many shops put on very good deals on electronics, clothing, toys and other stuff. People (I am not making this stuff up) regularly camp for day or days to be the first in the doors to get all of the on-offer stuff before they sell out. Shops have opened at four am before, and this year it got even worse, with many places opening at midnight and some, including Wal-Mart, opening at ten on Thursday evening.  It was decided I needed to experience this, so off we went to have a look.  

It was an interesting experience. Consumerism distilled was how I would describe it. Locusts were the metaphor someone else used. I think he may have been closer to the truth- no sooner would a trolley of stuff on offer be wheeled out than a horde of shoppers would descend on it, stripping it bare in under a minute. Unfortunately the Lego wasn’t on offer so I came away empty handed.

So waking up quite late the next day we started making cookies, leading to various arguments about the need for precision in measuring ingredients. (I’m sure the “some” is a perfectly acceptable unit of measurement, as in “add some flour, some sugar, etc.) It was then that I was made to feel old.

Plans to watch the new dvd Allegra had bought were stymied when we discovered that one of the  (twenty million) film channels was showing all three The Lord of the Rings films back to back.  The reason? It was ten years last weekend since the first one was released. That’s really scary. Something that had a fairly big impact on my life was ten years ago. Oo er…

We resisted watching them all, Allegra’s dad and I gamely staying up until the end of The Two Towers at two am, but fortunately they were repeated all weekend so we just watched The Return of the King that evening. Ten hours well spent.  

On Sunday we went to the oldest Methodist Church in continuous use in Michigan, a title that the quality of the service unfortunately didn’t live up to. Fortunately Allegra’s family agreed with me that it had been a fairly rubbish service.  I was volunteered to read something about the advent colours, for which I got nice comments about how good a speaker I am. Those comments do slightly worry me though- were you listening to what I was actually saying?   

That afternoon “dad” (Dan) turned up to help us frost the cookies. This was taken rather less seriously by two of us, leading to very large number of green snowmen with orange spots, a farmyard scene on a star, and my epic discovery that if you turned a Santa-shaped cookie on it’s side it looked like Serenity.  

After that we came back to MSU, stopping on the way to go to a Taco Bell, which I was assured was another essential American experience. In my, er, experience people only use the words “essential experience” to describe something when there’s nothing better to say about it…

So that was thanksgiving. The snow is now slowly climbing up the walls. Goodbye…