Through a few odd happenstances, I had to learn how to install a fluorescent light this summer. One of the common bits of advice always out there is never stop learning.
Anybody else learned something new the last few months?
I finally learned how to make the Thai coconut soup Tom Khe Gai. About my third effort before it was better than the local Thai guy's. Lime leaves make for a lovely, subtle perfume.
I began studying Middle Welsh. I had to put it on hold because I am supposed to be writing something and I am waaaay behind on that, but I hope to return to it soon. MW has this cool feature called lenition, which. . . OK, OK, I'll spare you the bloody details:)
I learned to successfully grow cilantro from seed. I had a few failed attempts last year. There's something so satisfying about heading outside, chopping off a bit of cilantro, and putting it on your dinner that night.
I came one step closer to understanding Taranto's style at the Washington Post, Best of the Web.
There is a random one-sentence paragraph typical of the style. He takes a literal reading of the original text for ridiculing porpoises, pointing out mixed metaphors or simply the ridiculousness of the analogy. The annoying thing is the random bit pulled from the nether region included with the snark. Ultimately it is just snark.
He's better in print than he is live. His style is. Bad as this is in print, it's still better than him actually saying it. Nobody gets his snarky silly crap.
I almost made a post of this but probably better to be nit picky and annoying in the comments.
The sentence reads:
Because as Ben Franklin sagely observed, you can't make a magnet with cloven meat.
Please edit that sentence out. It is so distracting.
In the previous paragraph Obama says congress is not using a scalpel but rather a meat cleaver and leaving the meat cleaver called sequester on the table. It gutted everything, the military, investments, jobs, growth, education and research needed to make this country a magnet for good jobs.
Simple enough. Bullshit, but simple enough.
So Taranto has "magnet" and "meat cleaver" , thus "cloven meat" magnet for cloven meat. I see no relevance to Ben Franklin whatsoever. Franklin is introduced for the literalism magnet for cloven meat. Just pulled out... from somewhere. Most frustrating when you are trying to understand what the fpoint is to it. It would be too clever by half if it were clever at all but it is not. Just annoying.
I learned you better tape or spray small trees before they get girdled by rabbits. I had this nice young sugar maple that just started to really take off and it just started to wilt. I checked and sure enough, girdled all around.
All right, I helped someone replace the seal under a toilet. This was a first. That was a few weeks ago.
I learned some basics how to edit a web site using Adobe's Contribute - that's a new venture.
My SO does this learning stuff better than I do at this age though. I'll probably go senile first.
We need to replace a ceiling fan+light in the dining room - we tried and got stymied, although I video taped the Home Depot guy explainnig to us what to do. We lost it b/c it was a dimmer switch and the color wires weren't meshing with what we expected to find.
Maybe edutcher can fix it for us. Bring the Blonde over, we'll cook dinner, you and I can have a couple of postprandial cigars and call each other names afterwards.
I'd like to see President Mom Pants invited to make a post. It would be interesting. I know he could make a post on Garbage that would get my seal of authenticity but I wonder if he's got something else to share that I could relate to.
I'm learning how much chess has changed in 40 years. For a few hundred dollars these days a club player can put together a computer software/database setup worthy of training a grandmaster.
Back when Fischer challenged Spassky in 1972, the thoroughness of his preparation was unusual. Using books and magazines plus his phenomenal intelligence, Fischer memorized all of Spassky's published tournament games before he played Spassky in Reykjavik.
In those dark days you had to assemble the games yourself and play them over by hand with a physical chess set. Look at the book for the next move, look at the board, pick up the piece, put it down, assess the new position, etc. Switching constantly between the board and the book really disrupts your concentration and it was easy to lose your place.
Now you can go to chessgames.com, search for Spassky, pick one game from the thousands available, and play the game over on the screen by clicking the forward and reverse buttons.
I learned that trying to live in your house while doing extensive drywalling is stupid, irritating, and disgusting. You would have to be an idiot to do it twice.
I also learned that idiocy is a chronic disease that can return every couple years without warning, and seems to be a virus you catch at Home Depot.
I learned there is a thing called "Maternal DNA." It comes from Mitochondria, which exist in our cells, but were probably bacteria at one point in time, that have learned to coexist with our cells.
An egg has tens of thousands of Mitochondria in them, but sperm have only a handful of them. When the sperm hits the egg, it jettisons the mitochondria it used as an energy source, so all Mitochondria is solely derived from the mother.
Because of this property of Mitochondrial DNA, it is possible to trace to original mothers tens of thousands and more of years ago, by following mutation chains. Interestingly, it is possible to do this with the alive population: you don't need to find remains with DNA intact, and you can also estimate how long ago the mothers lived by using statistical techniques.
You have to really be some kind of chattering class, ivory tower asshole to ridicule porpoises? They live in the ocean and breath air, which was a really unfortunate choice. What most people don't realize is that they thrive on those plastic six pack webs - I've seen photos -, but they also have no hands to take the cans out. I can only feel pity. That's how I know I'm a good person.
By the way, for most Americans, Spassky was the Soviet has-been dethroned by our own Bobby Fischer. True, it was a glamorous victory, and Fischer was a one-of-a-kind guy.
But Spassky was almost as impressive. He too was a prodigy who marched into the grandmaster ranks while still a teenager. He too was an extraordinary player whom almost no one could beat. Until the championship match, Fischer had never managed to defeat Spassky.
However, unlike Fischer, Spassky was a full human being. He was a gentleman, never said anything bad about anyone, and in his prime looked like Clint Eastwood. The Soviet authorities allowed him to move to France. He settled there with dual citizenship, married a French woman and has lived a good life.
Spassky is now 74. His hair is still full, but snow-white.
I'd like to add this about Boris Spassky, a man. You can partially take his measure by reading the words he used to describe another great chess player, Paul Keres, who was one of the strongest people never to have become the World Chess Champion. This is how a man speaks:
"I loved Paul Petrovitch with a kind of special, filial feeling. Honesty, correctness, discipline, diligence, astonishing modesty – these were the characteristics that caught the eye of the people who came into contact with Keres during his lifetime. But there was also something mysterious about him. I had an acute feeling that Keres was carrying some kind of a heavy burden all through his life. Now I understand that this burden was the infinite love for the land of his ancestors, an attempt to endure all the ordeals, to have full responsibility for his every step. I have never met a person with an equal sense of responsibility. This man with internally free and independent character was at the same time a very well disciplined person. Back then I did not realise that it is discipline that largely determines internal freedom. For me, Paul Keres was the last Mohican, the carrier of the best traditions of classical chess and – if I could put it this way – the Pope of chess. Why did he not become the champion? I know it from personal experience that in order to reach the top, a person is thinking solely of the goal, he has to forget everything else in this world, toss aside everything unnecessary – or else you are doomed. How could Keres forget everything else?"
I haven't quite learned it yet, but I've been using Khan Academy to learn (with much more clarity)calculus. I like it a hell of a lot more than I did in high school & college.
I learned to successfully grow cilantro from seed. I had a few failed attempts last year. There's something so satisfying about heading outside, chopping off a bit of cilantro, and putting it on your dinner that night.
Nice! I had a failed attempt at the last year. Your post gives me hope.
I learned how to solder a copper pipe that has a continuous drip running through it by using the amazing bread technique. And best of all, when you turn the water back on, a baguette pops out of the spigot!
Patrick said... I haven't quite learned it yet, but I've been using Khan Academy to learn (with much more clarity)calculus. I like it a hell of a lot more than I did in high school & college.
I have also worked through parts of the Khan Academy oeuvre, by myself and with my daughter. Among all the currently free sites on the internets I would be most likely to give them money. A truly outstanding site.
There has recently been a bit of coverage of the high failure rates of the Massive Open Online Courses run by San Jose State University. If you have ever taught anything or done an online course this will come as no surprise. A few topics lend themselves to online learning, most notably math, but most topics don't. Teaching is not going to be automated any time soon.
Teaching is not going to be automated any time soon.
I agree. I do both classroom and online teaching on the side. Definite downsides to online teaching. Plus the whole aspect of leaving the house and going to college at a time when you are straining at the end of your parents' leash; that's not going to change.
If you look at construction projects at colleges, at least on the East Coast, they are alive and well. Despite the systemic issues with higher education, they are not going to be replaced by online degrees anytime soon.
Learned I could quit Althouse.com cold turkey. But alas, I could only stop talking about Althouse for (6) mos.
And now that she has closed her comment section lol.
ok, ok, right after I started posting at Althouse, I quit for (3) mos. And after her and Meade's WI union protest minutiae I quit posting for another (3) mos. so (6) mos. wasn't that remarkable.
Learned several folk had an intense stake in the Althouse empire. ok, already knew that.
I learned I like edutcher. If you take away the idiotic politics that divide people, and over which most of us have ZERO influence and can do NOTHING about anyway, people are usually pretty cool on their own. Edutcher has a style about him.
I learned how to make great wild rice: The slow cooker is fabulous. You can adjust the time to make it whatever level of cookness you want. You can do it on the stove too, but you are more likely to screw it up. At least this will probably not burn the house down.
phx said... I learned I like edutcher. If you take away the idiotic politics that divide people, and over which most of us have ZERO influence and can do NOTHING about anyway, people are usually pretty cool on their own. Edutcher has a style about him.
I suspect that I am learning that the almost universal outbreak of comity amongst the commentariat will eventually kill this site.
I think we need some left-leaning posts for the commentators to really hate on. Just sitting around and nodding heads about how evil Obama and Trayvon are is not going to cut it in the long run.
I began to realize Spassky was something else when he joined the audience clapping for Fischer after Fischer defeated Spassky in round six with a beautiful game.
In 2004 Spassky appealed to President Bush to pardon Fischer for playing their match in Yugoslavia, when that country was under sanction by the US State Dept.
The letter's conclusion:
It is clear that the law is the law. But Fischer's case is not usual. I am an old friend of Bobby since 1960 when we played in Mar-del-Plata and shared 1-2 places. Bobby is a tragic personality. I realized this at that time. He is an honest and good natured man. Absolutely not social. He is not adaptable to everybody's standards of life. He has a very high sense of justice and is unwilling to compromise as well as with his own conscience as with surrounding people. He is a person who is doing almost everything against himself.
I would not like to defend or justify Bobby Fischer. He is what he is. I am asking only for one thing. For mercy, charity.
If for some reason it is impossible, I would like to ask you the following: Please correct the mistake of President Francois Mitterand in 1992. Bobby and myself committed the same crime. Put sanctions against me also. Arrest me. And put me in the same cell with Bobby Fischer. And give us a chess set.
Boris Spassky 10-th Chess World Champion 08.07.2004
I learned that telepathy may exist. I have a Kindle book called The Complete Book of Questions: 1001 Conversation Starters for Any Occasion by Garry Poole. This morning it occurred to be that Comment Home might utilize this approach. Periodically a question might be posed, as edutcher / deborah did today. The book questions are grouped into 10 categories: Light & Easy - Simple, light-hearted topics Personal Profile - Personality traits and behaviours Preferences - Likes and dislikes, favourites Blast from the Past - Past personal experiences Just Imagine - Speculation and imagination Viewpoints - Opinions and perspectives Hard-Hitting - Deep and challenging themes From the Heart - Feelings and emotions Spiritually Speaking - Basic spiritual subjects Extreme Spiritual Matters - Complex spiritual issues If deborah, edutcher or any of Comment Home contributors wish more information about the book I would be glad to e-mail them sample questions.
I wanted to sign up for regular e-mail notices to keep up with Taranto, actually, because he is interesting along with all those little "okay what are you on about now?" things that he likes, I thought I could with a click like twitter, but they presented a subscription to the whole place so I left.
ARM: That could be true. The tension was a key ingredient at TOP. If it wasn't left vs. right, it was everyone against Althouse.
I took what I consider a legitimate left-side swipe at the right-wing author of the post on the GOP candidates for 2016 - nobody said I was a moron or a cunt, seems to have been ignored.
I think that's pretty freaking good from the Althouse diaspora. We should be able to make legitimate points against each other, argue them hard or ignore them, then have a beer in the next nonpolitical thread.
I thought AlanS was going to have a shit-fit all over me, and he didn't. I give respect.
See. I don't pull any punches. And I'll be happy to have a drink with TY when it's all said and done. Provided he can get over the fact that he just took a shot to his glass jaw.
This is the way it should be. At Althouse it felt like it was all babies, all the time.
phx said... I took what I consider a legitimate left-side swipe at the right-wing author of the post on the GOP candidates for 2016 - nobody said I was a moron or a cunt, seems to have been ignored.
I think that's pretty freaking good from the Althouse diaspora. We should be able to make legitimate points against each other, argue them hard or ignore them, then have a beer in the next nonpolitical thread.
One thing with Althouse was that she tried, often desperately, to put a political spin on pretty much everything. Posters here are making an effort to present neutral topics in a neutral fashion, which facilitates a more balanced discussion. At the moment the blog is still a bit of a mess and needs an editors touch but they are making progress. At least everyone seems to have finally figured out how to post in the same font size, which helps the look of the blog. There needs to be a limit on how much text appears above the fold, which some posters understand and others not so much. I would like to see things to work out, but it is a competitive business.
"Teaching is not going to be automated any time soon.
I agree. I do both classroom and online teaching on the side. Definite downsides to online teaching. Plus the whole aspect of leaving the house and going to college at a time when you are straining at the end of your parents' leash; that's not going to change.
If you look at construction projects at colleges, at least on the East Coast, they are alive and well. Despite the systemic issues with higher education, they are not going to be replaced by online degrees anytime soon."
I think college and the military fulfill similar ends; the mixing of the gene pool. And with the higher colleges, networking in overdrive.
Spassky on Keres: "Why did [Keres] not become the champion? I know it from personal experience that in order to reach the top, a person is thinking solely of the goal, he has to forget everything else in this world, toss aside everything unnecessary – or else you are doomed. How could Keres forget everything else?"
Well let's not forget bad luck. A couple of games go slightly differently and he emerges to challenge Botvinnik from Curacao in 1962 instead of Petrosian. (Geller also had a bit of bad luck there.)
And let's not forget that Keres was in cahoots with Petrosian and Geller in 1962 to fix games at the Candidates Tournament. So he wasn't exactly a saint.
I haven't quite learned it yet, but I've been using Khan Academy to learn (with much more clarity)calculus. I like it a hell of a lot more than I did in high school & college.
Calculus is simply beautiful. I don't think you get anything else as powerful and beautiful in mathematics until you get to Galois theory.
I remember my Algebra II class (this would be Abstract Algebra, 4000 level for math majors) with Alex Turrell. The first day of class he told us to take a sheet of loose paper and take notes. That day we discussed many of the problems of antiquity: which polygons are constructable with compass and straight-edge; why isn't it possible to trisect every angle with compass and straight-edge; questions about roots of fifth degree and higher polynomials; etc. At the end of the lecture, he told us to put that sheet away, and that we'd come back to it.
Weeks later, we get to Galois theory. And one day he tells us to take out that sheet of paper from day one. Over the next fifty minutes we completely demolished these problems, some of which had resisted solution for thousands of years before Galois's theories were understood. Fifty minutes!
I still get goose bumps thinking about that experience....
First, Hollywood has missed a great opportunity in not making a biopic of Arthur MacArthur, Jr, son of a Supreme Court Justice and father of Douglas MacArthur. That man led an extremely interesting life, with lots of natural 'Hollywood' moments in it.
I learned there two sizes of playing cards, bridge and standard/poker. Bridge cards are slightly smaller. I also learned that plastic cards are superior to paper or plastic coated paper cards because they don't deteriorate or collect oils. Plastic cards have a superior shuffle and can be washed.
I didn't have the time to figure out the recent crazy business where Spassky, as an old man having a medical crisis, decided that people in France were conspiring (or something) against him and he had to be spirited back to Russia.
85 comments:
I finally learned how to make the Thai coconut soup Tom Khe Gai. About my third effort before it was better than the local Thai guy's. Lime leaves make for a lovely, subtle perfume.
Alluding! Definitely alluding.
A clear violation of Ohio Bicycle Convention of 2013. We'll see your ass in shackles in S-Gravenhage.
Pay more attention to the south side of the fig tree if you are trying to get the first ripe figs off before the fig beetles get going.
Today I learned that "glid" is a word.
Yes, I was finally toilet trained.
I began studying Middle Welsh.
I had to put it on hold because I am supposed to be writing something and I am waaaay behind on that, but I hope to return to it soon.
MW has this cool feature called lenition, which. . . OK, OK, I'll spare you the bloody details:)
I learned how to make a water level this month. I also learned some interesting group theory.
ndspinelli said...
Yes, I was finally toilet trained.
It's never too late.
I learned that I like my brother-in-law more than I thought I did.
I learned to successfully grow cilantro from seed. I had a few failed attempts last year. There's something so satisfying about heading outside, chopping off a bit of cilantro, and putting it on your dinner that night.
I learned about Derrida. Or to be a little less precise, how I learned to stop worrying and take Rh's advice.
edutcher, I'm toilet trained a decade or so before needing Depends for incontinence.
I came one step closer to understanding Taranto's style at the Washington Post, Best of the Web.
There is a random one-sentence paragraph typical of the style. He takes a literal reading of the original text for ridiculing porpoises, pointing out mixed metaphors or simply the ridiculousness of the analogy. The annoying thing is the random bit pulled from the nether region included with the snark. Ultimately it is just snark.
He's better in print than he is live. His style is. Bad as this is in print, it's still better than him actually saying it. Nobody gets his snarky silly crap.
I almost made a post of this but probably better to be nit picky and annoying in the comments.
The sentence reads:
Because as Ben Franklin sagely observed, you can't make a magnet with cloven meat.
Please edit that sentence out. It is so distracting.
In the previous paragraph Obama says congress is not using a scalpel but rather a meat cleaver and leaving the meat cleaver called sequester on the table. It gutted everything, the military, investments, jobs, growth, education and research needed to make this country a magnet for good jobs.
Simple enough. Bullshit, but simple enough.
So Taranto has "magnet" and "meat cleaver" , thus "cloven meat" magnet for cloven meat. I see no relevance to Ben Franklin whatsoever. Franklin is introduced for the literalism magnet for cloven meat. Just pulled out... from somewhere. Most frustrating when you are trying to understand what the fpoint is to it. It would be too clever by half if it were clever at all but it is not. Just annoying.
I learned there was some hellacious blogability all pent up in a few of the old Althouse commenters!
I learned you better tape or spray small trees before they get girdled by rabbits. I had this nice young sugar maple that just started to really take off and it just started to wilt. I checked and sure enough, girdled all around.
I also learned some interesting group theory.
As in mathematical groups with a binary operator?
I learned that those who want to start afresh, breaking old patterns of interacting, can do so.
Okay, I already knew that, but seeing it happen was very encouraging. It was also very gratifying to see others allow them to do it.
All right, I helped someone replace the seal under a toilet. This was a first. That was a few weeks ago.
I learned some basics how to edit a web site using Adobe's Contribute - that's a new venture.
My SO does this learning stuff better than I do at this age though. I'll probably go senile first.
We need to replace a ceiling fan+light in the dining room - we tried and got stymied, although I video taped the Home Depot guy explainnig to us what to do. We lost it b/c it was a dimmer switch and the color wires weren't meshing with what we expected to find.
Maybe edutcher can fix it for us. Bring the Blonde over, we'll cook dinner, you and I can have a couple of postprandial cigars and call each other names afterwards.
Good wishes.
I'd like to see President Mom Pants invited to make a post. It would be interesting. I know he could make a post on Garbage that would get my seal of authenticity but I wonder if he's got something else to share that I could relate to.
Sorry, President Mom Jeans. I'm getting old.
Today I learned Taranto owes ChipA $50.00.
I'd want AJ Lynch front and center on a post, too.
Wait a minute... I think I passed that sentence at a high rate of speed.
It would be too clever by half if it were clever at all but it is not.
Taranto owes Chip $100.00, or a Ben Franklin, whichever you prefer .
I'm learning how much chess has changed in 40 years. For a few hundred dollars these days a club player can put together a computer software/database setup worthy of training a grandmaster.
Back when Fischer challenged Spassky in 1972, the thoroughness of his preparation was unusual. Using books and magazines plus his phenomenal intelligence, Fischer memorized all of Spassky's published tournament games before he played Spassky in Reykjavik.
In those dark days you had to assemble the games yourself and play them over by hand with a physical chess set. Look at the book for the next move, look at the board, pick up the piece, put it down, assess the new position, etc. Switching constantly between the board and the book really disrupts your concentration and it was easy to lose your place.
Now you can go to chessgames.com, search for Spassky, pick one game from the thousands available, and play the game over on the screen by clicking the forward and reverse buttons.
I learned that trying to live in your house while doing extensive drywalling is stupid, irritating, and disgusting. You would have to be an idiot to do it twice.
I also learned that idiocy is a chronic disease that can return every couple years without warning, and seems to be a virus you catch at Home Depot.
I learned there is a thing called "Maternal DNA." It comes from Mitochondria, which exist in our cells, but were probably bacteria at one point in time, that have learned to coexist with our cells.
An egg has tens of thousands of Mitochondria in them, but sperm have only a handful of them. When the sperm hits the egg, it jettisons the mitochondria it used as an energy source, so all Mitochondria is solely derived from the mother.
Because of this property of Mitochondrial DNA, it is possible to trace to original mothers tens of thousands and more of years ago, by following mutation chains. Interestingly, it is possible to do this with the alive population: you don't need to find remains with DNA intact, and you can also estimate how long ago the mothers lived by using statistical techniques.
You have to really be some kind of chattering class, ivory tower asshole to ridicule porpoises? They live in the ocean and breath air, which was a really unfortunate choice. What most people don't realize is that they thrive on those plastic six pack webs - I've seen photos -, but they also have no hands to take the cans out. I can only feel pity. That's how I know I'm a good person.
By the way, for most Americans, Spassky was the Soviet has-been dethroned by our own Bobby Fischer. True, it was a glamorous victory, and Fischer was a one-of-a-kind guy.
But Spassky was almost as impressive. He too was a prodigy who marched into the grandmaster ranks while still a teenager. He too was an extraordinary player whom almost no one could beat. Until the championship match, Fischer had never managed to defeat Spassky.
However, unlike Fischer, Spassky was a full human being. He was a gentleman, never said anything bad about anyone, and in his prime looked like Clint Eastwood. The Soviet authorities allowed him to move to France. He settled there with dual citizenship, married a French woman and has lived a good life.
Spassky is now 74. His hair is still full, but snow-white.
bagoh20 said...
I learned that trying to live in your house while doing extensive drywalling is stupid, irritating, and disgusting.
I've done this. Vacuum, don't wash the floors.
What creeley23 said.
I'd like to add this about Boris Spassky, a man. You can partially take his measure by reading the words he used to describe another great chess player, Paul Keres, who was one of the strongest people never to have become the World Chess Champion.
This is how a man speaks:
"I loved Paul Petrovitch with a kind of special, filial feeling. Honesty, correctness, discipline, diligence, astonishing modesty – these were the characteristics that caught the eye of the people who came into contact with Keres during his lifetime. But there was also something mysterious about him. I had an acute feeling that Keres was carrying some kind of a heavy burden all through his life. Now I understand that this burden was the infinite love for the land of his ancestors, an attempt to endure all the ordeals, to have full responsibility for his every step. I have never met a person with an equal sense of responsibility. This man with internally free and independent character was at the same time a very well disciplined person. Back then I did not realise that it is discipline that largely determines internal freedom. For me, Paul Keres was the last Mohican, the carrier of the best traditions of classical chess and – if I could put it this way – the Pope of chess. Why did he not become the champion? I know it from personal experience that in order to reach the top, a person is thinking solely of the goal, he has to forget everything else in this world, toss aside everything unnecessary – or else you are doomed. How could Keres forget everything else?"
I finally learnt how to make a quick and dirty GUI application, using Python and PyQt.
By the way Chip, Taranto is at the Wall Street Journal. I read Best of the Web a few times a week. I think it's usually pretty entertaining.
I haven't quite learned it yet, but I've been using Khan Academy to learn (with much more clarity)calculus. I like it a hell of a lot more than I did in high school & college.
I learned to successfully grow cilantro from seed. I had a few failed attempts last year. There's something so satisfying about heading outside, chopping off a bit of cilantro, and putting it on your dinner that night.
Nice! I had a failed attempt at the last year. Your post gives me hope.
As in mathematical groups with a binary operator?
Yes.
I learned that Crack is right about France...
I learned how to solder a copper pipe that has a continuous drip running through it by using the amazing bread technique. And best of all, when you turn the water back on, a baguette pops out of the spigot!
Patrick said...
I haven't quite learned it yet, but I've been using Khan Academy to learn (with much more clarity)calculus. I like it a hell of a lot more than I did in high school & college.
I have also worked through parts of the Khan Academy oeuvre, by myself and with my daughter. Among all the currently free sites on the internets I would be most likely to give them money. A truly outstanding site.
There has recently been a bit of coverage of the high failure rates of the Massive Open Online Courses run by San Jose State University. If you have ever taught anything or done an online course this will come as no surprise. A few topics lend themselves to online learning, most notably math, but most topics don't. Teaching is not going to be automated any time soon.
Learned how to make good Brown rice. Not a complex piece of cookery, but a first baby step.
Teaching is not going to be automated any time soon.
I agree. I do both classroom and online teaching on the side. Definite downsides to online teaching. Plus the whole aspect of leaving the house and going to college at a time when you are straining at the end of your parents' leash; that's not going to change.
If you look at construction projects at colleges, at least on the East Coast, they are alive and well. Despite the systemic issues with higher education, they are not going to be replaced by online degrees anytime soon.
Learned I could quit Althouse.com cold turkey. But alas, I could only stop talking about Althouse for (6) mos.
And now that she has closed her comment section lol.
ok, ok, right after I started posting at Althouse, I quit for (3) mos. And after her and Meade's WI union protest minutiae I quit posting for another (3) mos. so (6) mos. wasn't that remarkable.
Learned several folk had an intense stake in the Althouse empire. ok, already knew that.
Indeed, as life is a learning process ...
I learned that Edutcher is the Larry King of blog posters.
Apologies to Larry King ...
I learned I like edutcher. If you take away the idiotic politics that divide people, and over which most of us have ZERO influence and can do NOTHING about anyway, people are usually pretty cool on their own. Edutcher has a style about him.
I learned that I like phx, despite his liking edutcher.
I learned how to make great wild rice: The slow cooker is fabulous. You can adjust the time to make it whatever level of cookness you want. You can do it on the stove too, but you are more likely to screw it up. At least this will probably not burn the house down.
I learned I like shiloh.
Ha, just kidding. I learned I don't hate him. The female version is freaking hot though.
phx said...
I learned I like edutcher. If you take away the idiotic politics that divide people, and over which most of us have ZERO influence and can do NOTHING about anyway, people are usually pretty cool on their own. Edutcher has a style about him.
I suspect that I am learning that the almost universal outbreak of comity amongst the commentariat will eventually kill this site.
I think we need some left-leaning posts for the commentators to really hate on. Just sitting around and nodding heads about how evil Obama and Trayvon are is not going to cut it in the long run.
phx: Great Spassky quote! That's the man.
I began to realize Spassky was something else when he joined the audience clapping for Fischer after Fischer defeated Spassky in round six with a beautiful game.
In 2004 Spassky appealed to President Bush to pardon Fischer for playing their match in Yugoslavia, when that country was under sanction by the US State Dept.
The letter's conclusion:
It is clear that the law is the law. But Fischer's case is not usual. I am an old friend of Bobby since 1960 when we played in Mar-del-Plata and shared 1-2 places. Bobby is a tragic personality. I realized this at that time. He is an honest and good natured man. Absolutely not social. He is not adaptable to everybody's standards of life. He has a very high sense of justice and is unwilling to compromise as well as with his own conscience as with surrounding people. He is a person who is doing almost everything against himself.
I would not like to defend or justify Bobby Fischer. He is what he is. I am asking only for one thing. For mercy, charity.
If for some reason it is impossible, I would like to ask you the following: Please correct the mistake of President Francois Mitterand in 1992. Bobby and myself committed the same crime. Put sanctions against me also. Arrest me. And put me in the same cell with Bobby Fischer. And give us a chess set.
Boris Spassky
10-th Chess World Champion
08.07.2004
I suspect that I am learning that the almost universal outbreak of comity amongst the commentariat will eventually kill this site.
ARM: That could be true. The tension was a key ingredient at TOP. If it wasn't left vs. right, it was everyone against Althouse.
I learned that telepathy may exist.
I have a Kindle book called The Complete Book of Questions: 1001 Conversation Starters for Any Occasion by Garry Poole. This morning it occurred to be that Comment Home might utilize this approach. Periodically a question might be posed, as edutcher / deborah did today.
The book questions are grouped into 10 categories:
Light & Easy - Simple, light-hearted topics
Personal Profile - Personality traits and behaviours
Preferences - Likes and dislikes, favourites
Blast from the Past - Past personal experiences
Just Imagine - Speculation and imagination
Viewpoints - Opinions and perspectives
Hard-Hitting - Deep and challenging themes
From the Heart - Feelings and emotions
Spiritually Speaking - Basic spiritual subjects
Extreme Spiritual Matters - Complex spiritual issues
If deborah, edutcher or any of Comment Home contributors wish more information about the book I would be glad to e-mail them sample questions.
I learned that mean people suck.
tech update.
The mobile app is going to take a while to go into effect.
I learned to beware of feral French cats...
Lem, I assume that is something you learned today!
Yes. Beta Rube, thank you for that correction.
I wanted to sign up for regular e-mail notices to keep up with Taranto, actually, because he is interesting along with all those little "okay what are you on about now?" things that he likes, I thought I could with a click like twitter, but they presented a subscription to the whole place so I left.
I have "people" to install, clean, repair, feed, deliver, wash, care for rare clumber.
It makes life so much easier.
tits that are extremely pointy.
I learn through "books" and the "arts" and shit like that.
But not with my hands.
Although.....my hands can identify just about every cocks third world origin.
I learned that edutcher can give good blog.
Congratulations on getting a spot here. Nobody deserves it more.
ARM: That could be true. The tension was a key ingredient at TOP. If it wasn't left vs. right, it was everyone against Althouse.
I took what I consider a legitimate left-side swipe at the right-wing author of the post on the GOP candidates for 2016 - nobody said I was a moron or a cunt, seems to have been ignored.
I think that's pretty freaking good from the Althouse diaspora. We should be able to make legitimate points against each other, argue them hard or ignore them, then have a beer in the next nonpolitical thread.
I thought AlanS was going to have a shit-fit all over me, and he didn't. I give respect.
I learned that edutcher can give good blog.
Yeah I'd like to see edutcher post regularly.
phx your hero Michael Dukakis had a favorite saying:
"A fish rots from it's head."
TY I don't get your point.
And where guys like you go wrong is your foolish assumptions. "Your hero Michael Dukakis."
Show some skills, man.
See. I don't pull any punches. And I'll be happy to have a drink with TY when it's all said and done. Provided he can get over the fact that he just took a shot to his glass jaw.
This is the way it should be. At Althouse it felt like it was all babies, all the time.
phx said...
I took what I consider a legitimate left-side swipe at the right-wing author of the post on the GOP candidates for 2016 - nobody said I was a moron or a cunt, seems to have been ignored.
I think that's pretty freaking good from the Althouse diaspora. We should be able to make legitimate points against each other, argue them hard or ignore them, then have a beer in the next nonpolitical thread.
One thing with Althouse was that she tried, often desperately, to put a political spin on pretty much everything. Posters here are making an effort to present neutral topics in a neutral fashion, which facilitates a more balanced discussion. At the moment the blog is still a bit of a mess and needs an editors touch but they are making progress. At least everyone seems to have finally figured out how to post in the same font size, which helps the look of the blog. There needs to be a limit on how much text appears above the fold, which some posters understand and others not so much. I would like to see things to work out, but it is a competitive business.
That came off more like a love tap than not pulling punches, phx.
Am I detecting puppy love?
I learned how to rebuild a carburetor. Okay, it was only a lawnmower, but I still learned.
Oh, and I also learned how to divide by zero.
Oh, and I also learned how to divide by zero.
Anything divided by zero is zero.
"Teaching is not going to be automated any time soon.
I agree. I do both classroom and online teaching on the side. Definite downsides to online teaching. Plus the whole aspect of leaving the house and going to college at a time when you are straining at the end of your parents' leash; that's not going to change.
If you look at construction projects at colleges, at least on the East Coast, they are alive and well. Despite the systemic issues with higher education, they are not going to be replaced by online degrees anytime soon."
I think college and the military fulfill similar ends; the mixing of the gene pool. And with the higher colleges, networking in overdrive.
TY I don't get your point.
I think he's talking about the proprietress and contingent environment at a certain OTHER blog...
I learned again that good people will come to the aid of a stranger when seeing some thug try to publicly humiliate and bully him.
Touche'
Touche' indeed.
Am I detecting puppy love?
Could be Beta.
And then they say you always hurt the one you love.
Aren't you making the scene with Icepick?
Nah, Icepick has taste.
Freeman,
Cool, abstract math. Curious what the motivation is (I used to love abstract math decades ago as an undergraduate).
He was a gentleman, never said anything bad about anyone, and in his prime looked like Clint Eastwood.
He's said bad things about people over the years, especially in the last year or so.
Spassky on Keres: "Why did [Keres] not become the champion? I know it from personal experience that in order to reach the top, a person is thinking solely of the goal, he has to forget everything else in this world, toss aside everything unnecessary – or else you are doomed. How could Keres forget everything else?"
Well let's not forget bad luck. A couple of games go slightly differently and he emerges to challenge Botvinnik from Curacao in 1962 instead of Petrosian. (Geller also had a bit of bad luck there.)
And let's not forget that Keres was in cahoots with Petrosian and Geller in 1962 to fix games at the Candidates Tournament. So he wasn't exactly a saint.
I haven't quite learned it yet, but I've been using Khan Academy to learn (with much more clarity)calculus. I like it a hell of a lot more than I did in high school & college.
Calculus is simply beautiful. I don't think you get anything else as powerful and beautiful in mathematics until you get to Galois theory.
I remember my Algebra II class (this would be Abstract Algebra, 4000 level for math majors) with Alex Turrell. The first day of class he told us to take a sheet of loose paper and take notes. That day we discussed many of the problems of antiquity: which polygons are constructable with compass and straight-edge; why isn't it possible to trisect every angle with compass and straight-edge; questions about roots of fifth degree and higher polynomials; etc. At the end of the lecture, he told us to put that sheet away, and that we'd come back to it.
Weeks later, we get to Galois theory. And one day he tells us to take out that sheet of paper from day one. Over the next fifty minutes we completely demolished these problems, some of which had resisted solution for thousands of years before Galois's theories were understood. Fifty minutes!
I still get goose bumps thinking about that experience....
Earlier this evening I learned that two things.
First, Hollywood has missed a great opportunity in not making a biopic of Arthur MacArthur, Jr, son of a Supreme Court Justice and father of Douglas MacArthur. That man led an extremely interesting life, with lots of natural 'Hollywood' moments in it.
Second, containment works.
I learned there two sizes of playing cards, bridge and standard/poker. Bridge cards are slightly smaller. I also learned that plastic cards are superior to paper or plastic coated paper cards because they don't deteriorate or collect oils. Plastic cards have a superior shuffle and can be washed.
Spassky does seem to be off-form lately.
I didn't have the time to figure out the recent crazy business where Spassky, as an old man having a medical crisis, decided that people in France were conspiring (or something) against him and he had to be spirited back to Russia.
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