I've just finished reading Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan. It is quite an interdisciplinary book or transdisciplinary as the epilogue says. I am reminded why I read and try to take interests in all subjects, even if some of them are beyond my immediate grasp.
The book reminded me of a conversation overheard a few weeks back. Two girls were complaining about the heat. One girl wondered if there are planets that are not as hot as the Earth. She'd rather live there. Maybe she'll go to Mars or Pluto. The other girl as clueless as the first said, Pluto is a planet? Where is that? (Maybe all this was said in jest but that's another matter and another subject altogether.)
This conversation also reminded me of the why of the service courses in college. But I wonder if everyone understands the reason for these service courses because most often than not, the complaints about them are how they could be useful to one's life or one's professional undertaking. It's "what do I do with an algebra or biology subject for when my course is English?"
These subjects are taught in high school and required in college so that when we complain about the humidity and heat of the Earth we won't want to relocate to Mars or to Pluto. Or that if we are the nursing student who complains about Algebra (another overheard conversation) we won’t kill our patient when we are already a full-pledged nurse because we can differentiate a milliliter versus a fluid oz. of drugs, maybe we won’t know its exact conversion but we would know what to do.
The world has changed from our parents’ days when we are very good just at either Maths or English. Now the world requires us to have at least a basic understanding but more than rudimentary knowledge of every possible subject in the world.
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