Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 29

• The Queen’s Gambit: what’s it all about?

  By ljd42 on December 13, 2021

  Is it about chess? You may be tempted to say yes. It seems to be about chess. In high school English—a hundred years ago or so—I learned to distinguish plot from theme. If we’re talking plot, then The Queen’s Gambit… Read More ›

• Everyone mispronounces omicron! (Well, almost everyone.) And it means more than just a COVID-19 variant…

  By ljd42 on December 10, 2021

  Right now—with good reason—everyone is focused on Omicron as the name of the new COVID variant. But most people are unsure how to pronounce the word, or they (confidently) mispronounce it. And they also don’t know what it means. I’m… Read More ›

• The hidden meaning of crypto

  By ljd42 on December 8, 2021

  What does the word “crypto” mean to you? For many decades it has been a term of art in applied mathematics—shorthand for both “cryptography” and “cryptology,” being thereby particularly useful for those of us who don’t want to argue about… Read More ›

• People love dead Jews.

  By ljd42 on December 6, 2021

  Yes, I too cringe at the title of this best-selling book of interrelated essays. But unfortunately it’s altogether appropriate. Mark Oppenheimer of the Unorthodox podcast calls it “the best collection of essays that I have read in a long, long… Read More ›

• We miss Nanina’s!

  By ljd42 on December 4, 2021

  When we moved to Dorchester in 1985, we started to frequent our local neighborhood restaurant, Nanina’s. The food was reliably good, and our favorite server soon knew us and knew what we wanted to order. Nineteen years later, in 2004,… Read More ›

• Never—no, always—take the shortcut!

  By ljd42 on December 3, 2021

  “Abjure the hypotenuse!” That’s what our busy high school dean (also assistant headmaster and sole college counselor) George Grenville Benedict—called G2 by the students (behind his back)—was famous for saying. As my classmate Alba Briggs publicly observed on screen in… Read More ›

• The answer is “Ladino, not Yiddish.” What is the question?

  By ljd42 on December 1, 2021

  Well, the question is “Which Indo-European language, spoken by many Jews mostly around the Mediterranean, is derived from Old Spanish but is not Castilian nor Catalan nor any other language that most Americans have heard of?” The answer, as you… Read More ›

• A work of (mostly) fiction by Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny

  By ljd42 on November 29, 2021

  Fasten your seatbelt; it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Those are (or should be) the pilot’s instructions as you begin reading the novel State of Terror, co-written by Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny. Perhaps it’s not surprising that this… Read More ›

• West Side Chanukah Story…and Goodbye to Stephen Sondheim

  By ljd42 on November 27, 2021

  Chanukah story? Or the greatest musical of all time, West Side Story? This magnificent five-minute a cappella performance by the Manhattan Jewish Experience is both. Shoutout to David Schwartz for the link! As with all take-offs and parodies, it helps… Read More ›

• “The Awful German Language”

  By ljd42 on November 26, 2021

  For the past eight weeks I have been trying every day to use Duolingo to review my once-decent-but-now-rusty knowledge of German. It has been going pretty well. I suppose it ought to. My parents, after all, used to tell me… Read More ›

• Are we really all related? How many degrees of separation?

  By ljd42 on November 24, 2021

  We are all related—or so they say. And the new science of DNA will prove it. That, at any rate, is the thesis of well-known writer A.J. Jacobs, whom I wrote about just over seven years ago in a very… Read More ›

• “But Chinese is such a simple language,” he says. “It has no grammar!” 

  By ljd42 on November 22, 2021

  The problem here is not what you’re thinking if you’re a non-linguist: most non-linguists think of language as writing, and they know that written Chinese looks intimidating. But language is primarily speaking, not writing, and the person quoted here is… Read More ›

• Not Rizzoli and Isles

  By ljd42 on November 20, 2021

  It’s not about Rizzoli and Isles. But it is a Tess Gerritsen mystery (you may or may not know that Gerritsen is the author of the Rizzoli and Isles mysteries, upon which the television shows are based); it’s pretty good,… Read More ›

• The Best Years of our Lives

  By ljd42 on November 18, 2021

  Even if you don’t know this classic 1946 movie—even if you’ve never heard of it—you will surely suspect that the title is meant ironically. The movie poster (below) even contains scare quotes that belie the obligatory smiles. So yes, the… Read More ›

• Music to our ears

  By ljd42 on November 16, 2021

  All math teachers and mathematicians love music, but not all musicians love math. That has been my experience, at any rate, based on a fairly large sample. Recently I listened to a Freakonomics episode featuring British mathematician Sarah Hart, in… Read More ›

• Whining about Daylight Saving Time

  By ljd42 on November 13, 2021

  If I were a pedant (which of course I’m not), I would feel compelled to articulate four pet peeves related to Daylight Saving Time: Some people—I’m thinking of you, Ethel—call it Daylight Savings Time! (Apparently it has something to do… Read More ›

• Look it up! But first understand the purpose of dictionaries.

  By ljd42 on November 11, 2021

  A dictionary in every room. That was an essential feature of our home when I was growing up. That way, when a question came up in conversation, no matter which room we were in, we could always look up a… Read More ›

• Don’t read this book if you’re a Donald Trump fan! (It will only infuriate you.)

  By ljd42 on November 10, 2021

  “Raging fascist oaf” is one subtle description of The Former Guy in the satirical novel Squeeze Me, by Carl Hiaasen. As you know, there are two kinds of satire: the dark ones, like 1984, and the humorous ones, like Squeeze… Read More ›

• Are you a Renaissance man?

  By ljd42 on November 8, 2021

  You may wonder why on earth you would want to read a book about Renaissance education. Perhaps you’re under the illusion that education during the Renaissance was like the image in this cartoon: But no, as you see from the… Read More ›

• Should you switch?

  By ljd42 on November 6, 2021

  No, I don’t mean switch from Coke to Pepsi, nor from math to linguistics. I am not even referring to the Monty Hall problem, though that seems more likely under the circumstances. I am talking about the fascinating two-envelope paradox…. Read More ›

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