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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

> You know that's not real.

You can definitely do the James Bond semester at college if you're so inclined, which iirc is: wine tasting, handgun safety, cross country skiing, swedish massage, and ballroom dancing.

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What college are you people going to? I never saw any of these, not even as clubs, at Waterloo.

Cornell. The specific classes are:

Introduction to Wines: https://sha.cornell.edu/admissions-programs/undergraduate/ac...

Introduction to Handgun Safety: https://courses.cornell.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=...

Cross Country Skiing: https://scl.cornell.edu/coe/pe-courses/spring-pe-courses/sno...

Swedish Massage: https://courses.cornell.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=...

Ballroom Dance: https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP20/class/PE/1153

Of course the advantage of going to Waterloo is that you can probably pass the Google coding interviews.

I clearly wasted my time with English Lit, Modern European History, Linguistics and German in my first year at University!

Don't feel bad. I wasted my time with Soviet Studies. Oops.

Something tells me that that is still pretty relevant...

I mean, Cornell is an Ivy, not a regional school.

I thought you were joking, but handgun safety really is a college class... Just wow.

It makes sense, given there are academic fields where a gun might be needed. E.g. if your research involves inventorying songbirds in the jungles of Colombia or whatever. Even in the U.S. a lot of mycologists carry weapons, so if they get shot at while accidentally stumbling on an illegal weed grow or whatever they can shoot back.

The description looks like it's about competition, not just safety, akin to a class on poker. Perhaps the title is a bit of spin for defensive reasons.

Thats what I was thinking, safety is critical, but an easy 2 day class. There are so many more interesting angles for engineering students to approach handguns whether self defense (more Bondish) or marksmanship, engineering principles etc.

Laughed at that, cheers bro :)

Svalbad University has an, AFAIK mandatory, course that includes learning hot to shoot a rifle: https://www.unis.no/course/as-101-arctic-survival-and-safety...

In most of Svalbad you need to carry a rifle to defend yourself against polar bears.

> The course is intended for students with little or no prior experience of life in the high Arctic.

I’d say that there’s not many of them if they go to school there.

A decent chunk of the svalbard population is researchers who moved there for the sake of their research.

I thought it was mandatory for anybody leaving town to either carry rifle, a sacrificial husky (!), or a guide who had both?

"I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." -Ezra Cornell.

I'm not sure if they're offered anymore, but they used to have Basic Rifle Marksmanship and Epee de Guerre. My friend once told me he thought my major was "weapons".

I took Introduction to Wine Science as my 'non engineering' course. Lab component was tasting - but you had to spit it out.

It was one of the hardest courses I took at university - so much memorization of various wine regions around the world, grape varietals, etc.

> at Waterloo.

That's your problem, but at you had:

Underwater Linux .iso Distributing

The Computational Fluid Dynamics of(strictly hypothetical) Human Sexual Intercourse in a Canoe

Outdoor Code Golf(Winter Session)

"E-Sports"

> Human Sexual Intercourse

That’s not the Waterloo that I know

Thus the 'strictly hypothetical' part after the club got too many complaints for getting peoples hopes up.

> The Computational Fluid Dynamics of(strictly hypothetical) Human Sexual Intercourse in a Canoe

SimBudweiser?

Not sure whether I'd prefer to be Bond, or a pirate: archery, fencing, pistol, and sailing.

Bond. Simply for the hygiene.

I think Bond is good with a sailing yacht, pistol, and fencing. Just missing the archery unless some Bond nerd wants to point to some Bond archery (and I'd believe it).

He uses harpoons and grappling hook guns - close enough?

Not sure Eugen Harrigel would approve, but I think that’s sound enough comparison for pirates! Close enough!

You're not going to learn ballroom dancing in a semester.

By learning it I mean being proficient with it that you're smooth and comfortable with it, and can make your partner look good.

The point of the James Bond semester is more so about the lack of learning

Waste of school tuition perhaps, but certainly not time wasted learning any of those skills.

Are you really learning the skill, or are you sampling it? One semester is maybe 40 hours of instruction. Even twice that in practice puts you at 120 hours. I hardly think that is enough time to become a good skier, etc.

40 hours of skiing is 10 4-hour sessions. For a young adult in decent physical shape and with good instruction, that's enough time to establish a base of technique and confidence.

That's pretty much all you get in most undergrad courses anyway. It's usually an intro to, or first taste of, a sophisticated subject that would take a long time to master. It's only after many such intros (i.e. many hundreds of hours of study) that the student will begin to develop a more sophisticated understading of their chosen field.

In that light, is a 1-credit skiing course any different from a 1-credit astronomy course?

I’m a decent casual skier and I’ve probably skied about that much in total.

People are different. I knew a couple newbie ballroom dancers who picked it up incredibly fast. But they were one in a few hundred. Ballroom dancing looks natural, but it isn't. Every move works against natural body movement. It takes a while.

For example, when walking, one sets the foot down heel first. With ballroom dancing, it's ball first.

Depends entirely on how much time you’ve spent on it. In my experience people become pretty good after 1hr of lessons every week for 3 years (and pretty low intensity training at that), so I imagine you can condense that into 6hrs of lessons every week for half a year.

Distributed practice is a lot more effective at teaching than massed practice per hour[1]. You might need 12 hours a week, double the number of actual hours of instruction.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/2005-seabrook.pd...

Distributed and Massed Practice: From Laboratory to Classroom RACHEL SEABROOK

Completely ignores political science, economics and physics? Checks out. ;)

James Bond can't afford to worry about physics when he's skiing off the edge of a mountain onto the top of a plane.

Wouldn't that require an understanding of physics to properly make his landing :D

Understanding physics wouldn't cut it, what you really need is a generous dose of plot armor.

Absolutely not! If he understood physics he would understand that the landing is impossible, and would therefore die in the attempt. That he doesn't know the landing is impossible is what makes it possible, and he lives. Simple.

Ahh, the Hitchiker's Guide method.

"Is a Mongolian horse archer applying physics even though he has no idea what physics is and it hasn't even been invented yet" is a pretty deep philosophical rabbit hole.

In the same way that one can appreciate good wine without having memorized the names of all the world's grape varieties.

It does work if we're living in a simulation.

Sigh. Where was this wisdom when I was an undergrad...!

> You can definitely do the James Bond semester at college if you're so inclined, which iirc is: wine tasting, handgun safety, cross country skiing, swedish massage, and ballroom dancing.

Pretty sure James Bond's handgun use is more on the unsafe side of things. I mean, he does have a license to kill and uses it frequently.

nit: "deadly" is not "unsafe". You can be perfectly safe in your firearm handling and still wield the power to kill other beings. "Unsafe" presents the risk of being unintentionally deadly, but being intentionally deadly is perfectly compatible with being safe in the gun's handling.

cross country skiing? Shouldn't it be downhill?

Both movies and books agree it's downhill. Also what we would call "skeleton" today. And if you go by the books, a course in Bentley repair is not necessary because James "has a guy."

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