It's really nice that he's decided to do this awesome thing with his money, but the system that allows this is horrible. Instead of allocation of this helpful money by democracy, we've settled on a system that appears to be out of the middle ages. We have a set of wealthy lords who then decide what to do with all the money, with basically zero accountability.
"Philanthropy" is an unethical way to allocate society's resources. When something good comes out of it, we praise that particular "lord", but we've ignored all the others who squandered their money on jewels and yachts while poor people starve and die of diseases.
The problem with Pimsleur is that it's a low amount of content per minute. It's good for an intro, but it doesn't really get you anywhere great overall. For a step-by-step course, I far prefer any of the Assimil courses, because they are actually packed quite full of material, and have excellent audio.
Once you've bootstrapped yourself a little bit in the target language, I suggest going straight to real books in the language, in combination with the audiobook. I actually just wrote about getting started in a new language last week. The basic idea is that you need "comprehensible input", as the linguist Stephen Krashen would say. By trying to read a real book, you work with material that is interesting, and you can actually get a decent sense of the story even with only a minimal understanding of the language, as long as it's reasonably close to a language you already know.
I did this with German, where I couldn't understand books or tv, and I couldn't have a conversation, but I kept on reading Harry Potter in German while listening to the German audiobook. In book 1, I was pretty lost, but I kept on going, and by book 5 I understood almost everything.
I'm Canadian, I'm a well-paid Data Center Technician, and I pay less than 30% tax. My company also pays the minor extra fee for medical stuff, so I've actually never seen a medical bill or fee of any sort for years. And clearly, as the parent mentions, not all of my 30% tax rate is going to the medical system.
It's amusing to me that the world sees Vancouver as promoting these "green" olympic technologies, but we here in Vancouver are not fooled by the greenwashing (well, at least some of us). It's been nice and warm here lately, as is usual in Vancouver in the winter, so in order to keep snow on the local mountain where some of the skiing and snowboarding events are, they have to truck it in from another mountain that's quite some distance away. Then they use helicopters to bring the snow from where the dump trucks are, to the event location. The snowboarding halfpipe is actually constructed using hay bales stacked like lego blocks, and then they apply snow on top like icing on a cake. Any idea what the carbon footprint is of a helicopter bringing snow to the top of a mountain is? or the mining trucks used to haul it around?
Then there are the ~100,000 trees cleared for olympic venues, the massive highway expansion that was unnecessary for the games, the construction of huge buildings for various events at a time when homelessness has been increasing for years. The whole thing is a big PR scam, but for the past few weeks it seems like most of the vancouverites on facebook have been abuzz about how silly the whole thing is....except the opening ceremonies for some reason...everyone got all weirdly patriotic about that, which is unusual for Canadians.
The poster here is making a big mistake about government. He is assuming that politicians are dumb and uninformed, and have made these bad decisions through ignorance. This assumption leads to the idea that "if only they knew", then they'd choose to make good, smart decisions that benefit the rest of us. If this were the case, all we'd need to do is educate them and things would get better.
In fact, what we have is a group of wealthy smart businessmen whose financial interests conflict with ours. They have made a series of decisions that benefit themselves and their wealthy friends (who will scratch their backs later when they retire from politics and need a cushy position on someone's corporate board). They are not stupid, and quite often not so misinformed as we would like to think.
Typically what is happening in one of these situations where some certain politician has one of these "epiphanies" is that he just wants to change his position on something because he has decided that it will benefit him. He makes out like he's been misinformed and has discovered the light. By implying that the opposing side is an unjust position, he's making a persuasive argument for people to support his position.
Sorry, how many users are actually using the latest fully patched version of IE? Google is still trying desperately to phase out IE 6, of which there are still many users. Perhaps as a "neutral" gesture to throw MS a bone, they could make an announcement saying "Upgrade to the latest IE8, or to another browser such as Firefox, Chrome, etc. Your current version of IE is probably ass^H^H^Hinsecure".
Nice article! I thought it was an interesting way to bring a qualitative feel back into software development. In a word of mathematics and code, we often lose sight of those qualitative things in favour of hard numbers. I think developers too often live in the analytical world like european Chess when they should be combining intuition with analysis like in Go / Weiqi.
well shit, son. All the unicode chinese chars i wrote in that posting got nuked. i guess we won't be hearing from any chinese commenters any time soon.
It seems to me that there's a pretty big language barrier that prevents us from hearing much from most chinese internet users. The ones i met in china tended to stick to purely chinese sites, which i found quite hard to read with only my basic level of chinese.
("if we get some chinese comments, perhaps people here can translate them")
In order to learn it on your own, you want to enhance your curiousity at any chance you get. If you get the feeling that you're forcing yourself through it, you might not continue. To maximize curiousity, i suggest you find several math books. Each day, you set aside some time to do something, anything, without a preconception of what it will be (unless there's something you're really keen on doing). When you sit down, you bring out your 3 or 4 books and you flip through until you see something interesting and work on that.
Sometimes you'll find something that requires previous concepts that you don't yet have. This is fine, because now you can go look up those concepts with a sense of purpose. This will help you to your larger goal of the more interesting thing that you flipped to in the book. I did this when i picked up a book on fractals...lots of bright pictures, it seemed interesting. In there, they talked about integrals, which i hadn't learned yet, so i set out to find out what those were.
As for practical tips when you're learning one particular concept, reading textbooks is sorta like reading manpages in unix. it takes a certain mindset, and you usually want to pick out the relevant pieces from the page the first time around and then go back for specifics later. Textbooks are usually written very precisely and they sometimes have a lot of formal jargon or formulae that aren't useful the first time you read it, but can be helpful when you go back to get more details. So read it with that in mind. The first time through, don't expect to understand everything there. Just skip past the parts that are too hard and continue on, trying to get the general idea.
Next, do some of the easiest questions at the end of that section or chapter. Sometimes those questions may seem too easy, like you can just look at them and you think you know how to do it already. I suggest doing some anyway rather than skipping them. There's a difference between knowing the concept enough to recognize it in the questions, and actually knowing it well enough to do the questions quickly and correctly. Doing more questions is always good practice even when they seem easy at first glance.
When you've done several of the easy questions, you start to get more of an intuitive feel for the concept. Go on to the medium questions, and now you'll probably better understand the parts of the text that were difficult to understand on the first time you read the section. I suggest that you try hard to really understand the concepts in one chapter before you go onto the next one. If you have a solid grounding in the beginning, then the later stuff will be much easier and it'll be easier to get that intuitive understanding that lets you see the direction to the answer right from the start.
If you have several textbooks to choose from each time, then as you work your way through bits of each of them, you'll start to see the connections between different areas of math. This is something that most people don't get in their normal classes because they tend to focus too closely on one topic. If you wander through several topics following your curiousity, i think you'll get a better broad understanding of the connections, and it'll help you personally keep your motivation up so that you can continue to do it. remember to have fun with it. if it turns into a chore, then you'll stop doing it before you reach your goals.
saying that genocide is evil isn't the same as saying everything is evil. and telling the truth about american genocide and racism isn't the same as "hate the white man". try not to oversimplify things. I'm white, but i choose to try my best to be an anti-racist ally rather than trying to whitewash history by ignoring everything that was done wrong. I'm pretty sure we both agree that genocide is evil, but maybe you choose not to look for evidence that it happened. i think that with very little effort, you can find plenty of evidence that it did, and that many of the 'founding fathers' and later presidents approved it.
[Theodore] Roosevelt also once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."
i think we should try and look and many interpretations, and not just get stuck on the ones that say everything is peachy-keen and no american ever did anything wrong. This is part of critical thinking. we shouldn't need to blindly accept every favourable interpretation. it's our duty to seek out and learn about the parts of history that most people turn a blind eye to.
here's another quote from it, which references your response:
But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"
and i particularly like this one:
Obscuring bitter truths about historical crimes helps perpetuate the fantasy of American benevolence, which makes it easier to sell contemporary imperial adventures -- such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- as another benevolent action.
but sure, there are lots of times when we should celebrate friendship and family...let's just not make it into a fantastical fairy tale about a 'glorious' past.
"Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders."
Any attempt to complicate this story guarantees hostility from mainstream culture. After raising the barbarism of America's much-revered founding fathers in a lecture, I was once accused of trying to "humble our proud nation" and "undermine young people's faith in our country."
Yes, of course -- that is exactly what I would hope to achieve. We should practice the virtue of humility and avoid the excessive pride that can, when combined with great power, lead to great abuses of power.
gee, maybe your argument just says that the democratic party is conservative. Coke vs. Pepsi...the republicans and the democrats are just two branches of the corporate party. their policies benefit the rich.
you can get to 25-20 kyu pretty quickly, but most good players seem to suggest that you don't study joseki until you're like 5 kyu.
in my experience you don't need to. studying joseki is robotic. for a long time, you need more general principles instead of closing your mind to new possibilities.
and don't forget that Luddites were not "all-around luddites". the luddites were not anti-technology...they just chose to fight against technology that was allowing rich factory owners to screw with their lives. your description of the Amish process sounds pretty similar to the luddites.
i think open source ideas point us towards a different style of democracy. Right now, with a small number of "architects" in the legislatures of various countries, we're closer to the "Cathedral" model. They're making decisions that they like, and the rest of us have to live with them.
Instead, i think we'd get better (and fairer) decisions if vastly more people were involved in the decision-making process. I think we should have the ability to participate in decisions that affect our lives in proportion to how much we're affected by those decisions.
for one example of how this idea could work in practice, i recommend reading about the city of Porto Alegre in Brazil. They have a system called the "participatory budget" where thousands of people can take part in the decision making instead of just city council members. (after a really quick search, i found this article about it, but there's probably a better explanation around somewhere)
For those interested, see Roger Penrose's books "The Emperor's New Mind" and "Shadows of the Mind" to see why he thinks that consciousness is non-algorithmic.
If a person who speaks 3 languages is "trilingual" and a person who speaks 2 languages is "bilingual", then what do you call a person who speaks 1 language?
Answer: American
I think this illustrates the image that many people around the world have. Just about everyone in Europe seems to speak multiple languages. Perhaps Esperanto would be a good way for americans to get with the program globally;)
I guess that's even more extreme than "wind-fall fruitarians". That's always a fun one to bring up if annoying relatives try to bother you about being vegan. As long as there's a possibility of someone else being more "weird" than you, they seem to leave you alone.;)
commonly referred to as "Imperialism". The U.S. tries to force things that are in the interests of the U.S. on other countries. In many countries, the U.S. controls a puppet regime that does what it's told. The U.S. has also frequently subverted democractic elections when it looked like the result would be for someone that didn't match with U.S. "interests".
in U.S. propaganda speak, this is "protecting U.S. interests abroad". This is part of the story of why so many people are "critical of U.S. foreign policy".
Slashdot Mirror
It's really nice that he's decided to do this awesome thing with his money, but the system that allows this is horrible. Instead of allocation of this helpful money by democracy, we've settled on a system that appears to be out of the middle ages. We have a set of wealthy lords who then decide what to do with all the money, with basically zero accountability.
"Philanthropy" is an unethical way to allocate society's resources. When something good comes out of it, we praise that particular "lord", but we've ignored all the others who squandered their money on jewels and yachts while poor people starve and die of diseases.
The problem with Pimsleur is that it's a low amount of content per minute. It's good for an intro, but it doesn't really get you anywhere great overall. For a step-by-step course, I far prefer any of the Assimil courses, because they are actually packed quite full of material, and have excellent audio. Once you've bootstrapped yourself a little bit in the target language, I suggest going straight to real books in the language, in combination with the audiobook. I actually just wrote about getting started in a new language last week. The basic idea is that you need "comprehensible input", as the linguist Stephen Krashen would say. By trying to read a real book, you work with material that is interesting, and you can actually get a decent sense of the story even with only a minimal understanding of the language, as long as it's reasonably close to a language you already know. I did this with German, where I couldn't understand books or tv, and I couldn't have a conversation, but I kept on reading Harry Potter in German while listening to the German audiobook. In book 1, I was pretty lost, but I kept on going, and by book 5 I understood almost everything.
I'm Canadian, I'm a well-paid Data Center Technician, and I pay less than 30% tax. My company also pays the minor extra fee for medical stuff, so I've actually never seen a medical bill or fee of any sort for years. And clearly, as the parent mentions, not all of my 30% tax rate is going to the medical system.
It's amusing to me that the world sees Vancouver as promoting these "green" olympic technologies, but we here in Vancouver are not fooled by the greenwashing (well, at least some of us). It's been nice and warm here lately, as is usual in Vancouver in the winter, so in order to keep snow on the local mountain where some of the skiing and snowboarding events are, they have to truck it in from another mountain that's quite some distance away. Then they use helicopters to bring the snow from where the dump trucks are, to the event location. The snowboarding halfpipe is actually constructed using hay bales stacked like lego blocks, and then they apply snow on top like icing on a cake. Any idea what the carbon footprint is of a helicopter bringing snow to the top of a mountain is? or the mining trucks used to haul it around?
Then there are the ~100,000 trees cleared for olympic venues, the massive highway expansion that was unnecessary for the games, the construction of huge buildings for various events at a time when homelessness has been increasing for years. The whole thing is a big PR scam, but for the past few weeks it seems like most of the vancouverites on facebook have been abuzz about how silly the whole thing is....except the opening ceremonies for some reason...everyone got all weirdly patriotic about that, which is unusual for Canadians.
The poster here is making a big mistake about government. He is assuming that politicians are dumb and uninformed, and have made these bad decisions through ignorance. This assumption leads to the idea that "if only they knew", then they'd choose to make good, smart decisions that benefit the rest of us. If this were the case, all we'd need to do is educate them and things would get better.
In fact, what we have is a group of wealthy smart businessmen whose financial interests conflict with ours. They have made a series of decisions that benefit themselves and their wealthy friends (who will scratch their backs later when they retire from politics and need a cushy position on someone's corporate board). They are not stupid, and quite often not so misinformed as we would like to think.
Typically what is happening in one of these situations where some certain politician has one of these "epiphanies" is that he just wants to change his position on something because he has decided that it will benefit him. He makes out like he's been misinformed and has discovered the light. By implying that the opposing side is an unjust position, he's making a persuasive argument for people to support his position.
Sorry, how many users are actually using the latest fully patched version of IE? Google is still trying desperately to phase out IE 6, of which there are still many users. Perhaps as a "neutral" gesture to throw MS a bone, they could make an announcement saying "Upgrade to the latest IE8, or to another browser such as Firefox, Chrome, etc. Your current version of IE is probably ass^H^H^Hinsecure".
"works with wavelengths of light ranging from about 1 to 18 gigahertz"
frequency is in hertz.
wavelength is a length, so it will be in meters or feet or inches or volkswagen bugs.
that is all. </pedantic>
Nice article! I thought it was an interesting way to bring a qualitative feel back into software development. In a word of mathematics and code, we often lose sight of those qualitative things in favour of hard numbers. I think developers too often live in the analytical world like european Chess when they should be combining intuition with analysis like in Go / Weiqi.
well shit, son. All the unicode chinese chars i wrote in that posting got nuked. i guess we won't be hearing from any chinese commenters any time soon.
It seems to me that there's a pretty big language barrier that prevents us from hearing much from most chinese internet users. The ones i met in china tended to stick to purely chinese sites, which i found quite hard to read with only my basic level of chinese.
("if we get some chinese comments, perhaps people here can translate them")
In order to learn it on your own, you want to enhance your curiousity at any chance you get. If you get the feeling that you're forcing yourself through it, you might not continue. To maximize curiousity, i suggest you find several math books. Each day, you set aside some time to do something, anything, without a preconception of what it will be (unless there's something you're really keen on doing). When you sit down, you bring out your 3 or 4 books and you flip through until you see something interesting and work on that.
Sometimes you'll find something that requires previous concepts that you don't yet have. This is fine, because now you can go look up those concepts with a sense of purpose. This will help you to your larger goal of the more interesting thing that you flipped to in the book. I did this when i picked up a book on fractals...lots of bright pictures, it seemed interesting. In there, they talked about integrals, which i hadn't learned yet, so i set out to find out what those were.
As for practical tips when you're learning one particular concept, reading textbooks is sorta like reading manpages in unix. it takes a certain mindset, and you usually want to pick out the relevant pieces from the page the first time around and then go back for specifics later. Textbooks are usually written very precisely and they sometimes have a lot of formal jargon or formulae that aren't useful the first time you read it, but can be helpful when you go back to get more details. So read it with that in mind. The first time through, don't expect to understand everything there. Just skip past the parts that are too hard and continue on, trying to get the general idea.
Next, do some of the easiest questions at the end of that section or chapter. Sometimes those questions may seem too easy, like you can just look at them and you think you know how to do it already. I suggest doing some anyway rather than skipping them. There's a difference between knowing the concept enough to recognize it in the questions, and actually knowing it well enough to do the questions quickly and correctly. Doing more questions is always good practice even when they seem easy at first glance.
When you've done several of the easy questions, you start to get more of an intuitive feel for the concept. Go on to the medium questions, and now you'll probably better understand the parts of the text that were difficult to understand on the first time you read the section. I suggest that you try hard to really understand the concepts in one chapter before you go onto the next one. If you have a solid grounding in the beginning, then the later stuff will be much easier and it'll be easier to get that intuitive understanding that lets you see the direction to the answer right from the start.
If you have several textbooks to choose from each time, then as you work your way through bits of each of them, you'll start to see the connections between different areas of math. This is something that most people don't get in their normal classes because they tend to focus too closely on one topic. If you wander through several topics following your curiousity, i think you'll get a better broad understanding of the connections, and it'll help you personally keep your motivation up so that you can continue to do it. remember to have fun with it. if it turns into a chore, then you'll stop doing it before you reach your goals.
have fun!
from the article i posted:
i think we should try and look and many interpretations, and not just get stuck on the ones that say everything is peachy-keen and no american ever did anything wrong. This is part of critical thinking. we shouldn't need to blindly accept every favourable interpretation. it's our duty to seek out and learn about the parts of history that most people turn a blind eye to.
-doviende
here's another quote from it, which references your response:
and i particularly like this one:
but sure, there are lots of times when we should celebrate friendship and family...let's just not make it into a fantastical fairy tale about a 'glorious' past.
-doviende
here's another part of it i found interesting:
-doviende
gee, maybe your argument just says that the democratic party is conservative. Coke vs. Pepsi...the republicans and the democrats are just two branches of the corporate party. their policies benefit the rich.
you can get to 25-20 kyu pretty quickly, but most good players seem to suggest that you don't study joseki until you're like 5 kyu.
in my experience you don't need to. studying joseki is robotic. for a long time, you need more general principles instead of closing your mind to new possibilities.
-doviende
and don't forget that Luddites were not "all-around luddites". the luddites were not anti-technology...they just chose to fight against technology that was allowing rich factory owners to screw with their lives. your description of the Amish process sounds pretty similar to the luddites.
-Doviende
i think open source ideas point us towards a different style of democracy. Right now, with a small number of "architects" in the legislatures of various countries, we're closer to the "Cathedral" model. They're making decisions that they like, and the rest of us have to live with them.
Instead, i think we'd get better (and fairer) decisions if vastly more people were involved in the decision-making process. I think we should have the ability to participate in decisions that affect our lives in proportion to how much we're affected by those decisions.
for one example of how this idea could work in practice, i recommend reading about the city of Porto Alegre in Brazil. They have a system called the "participatory budget" where thousands of people can take part in the decision making instead of just city council members. (after a really quick search, i found this article about it, but there's probably a better explanation around somewhere)
-- Doviende
For those interested, see Roger Penrose's books "The Emperor's New Mind" and "Shadows of the Mind" to see why he thinks that consciousness is non-algorithmic.
- Doviende
a little modification, and it's just like the matrix.
If a person who speaks 3 languages is "trilingual" and a person who speaks 2 languages is "bilingual", then what do you call a person who speaks 1 language?
Answer: American
I think this illustrates the image that many people around the world have. Just about everyone in Europe seems to speak multiple languages. Perhaps Esperanto would be a good way for americans to get with the program globally ;)
I guess that's even more extreme than "wind-fall fruitarians". That's always a fun one to bring up if annoying relatives try to bother you about being vegan. As long as there's a possibility of someone else being more "weird" than you, they seem to leave you alone. ;)
This clearly translates as "w3 0wnz j00 wit R Linux l33tness."
i just found this article on these protests from the point of view of an anthropologist who's also an anarchist.
"The New Anarchists"
i found it quite amusing, and also informative. it goes over a lot of misconceptions found in the media.
in U.S. propaganda speak, this is "protecting U.S. interests abroad". This is part of the story of why so many people are "critical of U.S. foreign policy".