It was at University that I learned about Asian culture. It was the first time I used chopsticks. It was the first time I drank tea without sugar. It was the first time I ate Chinese food that wasn’t deep fried. It was the first time I had dim sum. I learned to understand people with heavy accents (it was the first time I’d ever met someone for whom English was a second language). It was where I learned the diffence between Chinese (north and south), Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese people.
It was also the first time I ever met someone who was home schooled, someone who a lesbian or pretty much anyone who wasn’t straight, other than the one openly gay kid in high school.
It was the first time I learned that making racist and homophobic jokes was not ok.
It was the first time I learned the girls can write code.
Without college I would probably be a racist and not believe that social programs are necessary.
I've been trying something similar for 2D, but there it doesn't quite seem to hold.
Consider a very thin rectangle of size 1 by epsilon. Then it has circumference 2 (ignoring the epsilon). The shadow it casts at angle phi has size |sin phi|. Now, if we average |sin phi| from 0 to 180 degrees, (or 0 to 360 or 0 to 90) we get (2 / pi).
I haven't checked whether this average holds for things other than thin rectangles, but I'd imagine so. I then find it weird we get a trancendental number in 2D but an integer in 3D.
See sections 6-9 here for demonstration: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.0595.pdf