Guns, Germs, and Naquadah

It should be obvious by now I've been immersing in history (and archaeology). I'm into immersion as a learning method. But this current spate is not exactly methodical, and I'm not even sure how much I'm learning. I'm still having trouble doing much more than work, sleep, eat. It is just that I'm filling the majority of those little gaps in the day with more-or-less the same subject.

Such as by listening to podcasts. Unlike doing sound, running a shop, painting scenery, or any of the other things I've been paid for in the past, enough of my current work is sufficiently mindless so I can listen to podcasts while doing it. I don't, as a matter of fact, believe in multi-tasking. I think it is mostly a poor idea. I think if you have the spare concentration to do a second thing simultaneously, that just means you aren't doing the first one as well as you can.

And indeed, I'm not really focusing on the podcasts most of the time. Instead I'm doing the paying work efficiently, and via the voices in my ear am sort of absorbing names and dates and a general feeling for the concepts; groundwork that I hope will make it easier to grasp those subjects when I actually have time to sit down to study them properly.

Lately I've been following a history of the world in multiple episodes. It jumps around by necessity; getting all the way to Marathon with the Persians before backtracking to cover the Greeks (all the way back to Minoans, actually, then up through the Greek dark ages and the flowering of Athens and through the wacky world of Sparta before rejoining our previous friends under the latest ruler, Xerxes.) And because of the peculiar way my mp3 player sorts files (I believe it is by file creation date; it certainly isn't in alpha-numeric) I'm listening to them out of order anyhow.

So hopping back and forth from 3,000 BC to 394 AD during the day, reading alternatively Bullfinch or Diamond during lunch break, and then leafing through blogs or reading the latest Samantha Sutton mystery over meals and the few shivering hours I spend at home waiting for the heat to start working so I can go to bed.