HILL start

Today I attended my first HILL lecture - that's Humanities Institute for Lifelong Learning, our local "open university".

It could call itself a U3A, in fact, given the average age of the students.  I reckon I was the youngest there by at least ten or fifteen years.  But I still spotted several friends and acquaintances in the packed hall - I like to hang out with the hip (replacement) crowd.

The HILL organisers were very chuffed, as this course has received more enrollments than any other they've laid on.  The theme is "The Elections of 2012"  which has the obvious attraction of being rather relevant and up-to-the minute, what with the elections being next month.

Our instructor is Bruce Miroff, a Political Science professor at the State University of New York, Albany.  He made no secret of his own (Democratic) leanings, but that seemed to play well with the audience.  If there were any Republicans among us, they were keeping pretty quiet about it.  Apparently older voters are statistically more likely to vote Republican...  However, that rule perhaps doesn't apply to the day-time-lecture-attending (aka "intellectual elitist"?), older voting crowd.

I don't think I learnt anything startlingly new this afternoon, but it was interesting to compare aspects of the coming election with elections past, to look at the unreliable science of political polling and generally to anticipate the fun that awaits in the weeks ahead (first presidential debate this Wednesday!).  And for any real political wonks out there, we were told that for the best election analysis the blog to follow is this one: FiveThirtyEight.