Scientia: Day One.

I couldnt get to sleep for ages last night, and consequently was slightly groggy this morning. however that all wore away by the time we got to the UNSW, thanks in part to a series of arguments with mum, who was slow. The opening ceremony consisted of a lngthy exposition by some grey haired guy with a deep monotone and also a brief speech by a student which made me realise that lots of people our age have a tendancy to end speeches with "and in general...". Throughout all this, I was pretty much jiggling in my seat, with way too much pent up energy.

Then we got there and met our teacher dude "Ad" who was Dutch, and needed only a toga to look quite the stereotypical greek philosopher. Like OMG the hair.. it was EVERYWHERE... with bald patchES and bits of colour intersperesed at random...

Anyway. We did our introductions and he then proceeded to talk. He started out by giving us a list of things not to do in a philosophical debate and ended up doing most of them. But that's okay, cos we did too. I'm afraid my voice did its little decibel thing several times, and I ended up having several arguments with three guys my age called Josh, Mason and Kai. A blonde south african girl called Jacqui tred to join in but tended to get shouted down by Ad. She was trying to say mostly the same things I was. I got talking with her during morning tea, and we also got lost together during lunch in a futile search for both a store that accepted out coupons and wasnt being renovated and her friend and boyfriend in another group. We eventually found the friend, Steph, who was in the writing seminar I went to last time I was there; I've no idea what happened to the boyfriend (all I go told of him is the adjective "sadist" O_o). We also hung around a little with Josh and some other guys followed us for a while when they thought we knew where we were going at lunchtime :P which we didn't. We got hopelessly, terribly lost, found a map pointing us upstairs after we'd just come DOWN a huge set of stairs, etc. I exchanged emails with Jacqui at the end of the day.

We had a bunch of heated ethical debates, mainly about ethical relativity, which Ad claims is not a good theory for basing judgement on - but its fine if you think of all cultures as merely subculture within the greater overall human culture, so ethics applying to that greater culture are those we consider to be objective and present no matter who is looking at them, because they'd probably be different for aliens after all.

Xen diagrams were probably the most useful things I learned about today. And I got home to find my mum had somehow managed to turn her body blue and her feet green, and my cat has pissed on a sock. After which there was a freaky and very cool thunderstorm. LOTS of thunder. very LOUD thunder. Excellent!