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.
"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".
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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."
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.