One week into PhD!

So I survived my first week of PhD courses. Korbel School is great and given its rather smaller size, you get a lot more student-professor interaction. The good news is I am taking 3 courses only, but the downside is a) it is quarter system, so time really runs fast, b) courses are often reading-heavy (especially if you wanna read the 'optional' ones too), and c) I am taking an RA job and insha'allah will soon get a teaching job too, which will keep me pretty occupied.

Here is something I found really interesting in one of my readings:

Someone was stopped by a cop for speeding at 56 miles an hour. She argued, "But officer, taking the car ahead of me as fixed, I was not moving at all." "Never mind that," replied the officer, "You were going 56 miles an hour along the road, and (as he stamped his foot) this is what is fixed." "Oh, come now, officer; surely you learned in school that this road as part of the earth is not fixed at all but is rotating rapidly eastward on its axis. Since I was driving westward, I was going slower than those cars parked over there." "O.K., lady, I'll give them all tickets for speeding right now-and you get a ticket for parking on the highway." Nelson Goodman (1989) p.84

I know such stuff may be too basic for many people, but having never taken any courses in the field of philosophy, which this particular course is all about (The Normative Foundations of Global Political Economy), it is quite amazing to read this kind of material for a change from graphs and models and Hamiltonians, etc.