  Weight: According to the gym scales, about the same, but the guy took off three kilos for clothes. Height: According to the gym, I'm about the same (1.72m) Aerobics was good last night. Managed to squat sucessfully and hold for four (which was more like six by the time she started counting!! ) Stiff neck this morning. Still no time table. Went and saw Dirk, he wasn't aware that he was filling in for the guy who was filling in for the Honours Co-ordinator who was out somewhere for the week. Dirk suggested I send an email to the guy filling in for the Honours Co-ordinator. I have just sent my first Monash based email from my new Monash email address. Yay! In the case of failure I am to turn up at 11:00 and classes are mostly Mondays and Thursdays.
I could cope with that kind of starting time. I am annoyed because yesterday I could get the music to work on Dave's pc and now it just doesn't. It says it's playing and nothing is coming out. I checked volume (in two places), I checked the tape thing says "CD". What more can there be? Today I was walking through uni (feeling discouraged after failing to find out about time table) when I saw this poster Are the educated less racist?
Or something like that. I thought, oh, that sounds controversial, I could write about that on my blog. Then I thought that it would come to do "what is racism" and "what makes us racist". So I decided to take an Epicurean point of view. Basically, Epicurus holds that desires/emotions that we have that are not natural and necessary (e.g. not eating, breathing) are based on false beliefs. For example, we believe that fame is important because of false beliefs about what it is to be mortal. We (they) believe that we should be good because otherwise the gods will punish us, but this fear of the gods is false (the gods don't give a rats what we do, because they're so perfect, how could little us affect them? ) So in the case of racism the false belief is that people of another race are going to do you harm. (Now, this was probably just a bit true if you were an Athenian or a Roman....) Now it has been observed (not just by watchers of sesame street) that children aren't racist.
Racism is something we learn. So we learn to be afraid of other races, then we learn (through further education, I presume the askers of the question are postulating) that we learn that they're not that scary at all. After all, most "educated" folks think that racism is based on ignorance. It is possible to have be educated and ignorant though. (Educated and elitist, if you are Plato or Aristotle - there philosophy wasn't for the farmers, women or slaves because they didn't have time. ) Anyway, no real point, just thought it was interesting. Invention for the day: Telepathy that allows communication between members of a department and automatically generates (and sends out to students) a time table. 
