Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 39

• Necessity by Jo Walton: Plato, Socrates, religion, aliens, and spaceships!

  By ljd42 on December 24, 2020

  

  It’s always sad to get to the last page of the last volume of a much-loved trilogy. Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy consists of three novels (what a surprise), the first two of which I reviewed previously in these pages. Here… Read More ›

• Dr. Fauci recalls taking ancient Greek, Latin, and philosophy…

  By ljd42 on December 23, 2020

  

  My cousin Mike Laskey interviewed Dr. Fauci on a podcast! Among other important things, we learn that Dr. Fauci was most heavily influenced by his college courses in Greek, Latin, and philosophy. As you can surmise from his public persona,… Read More ›

• The true history of the birth of Jesus (plus some related remarks about 10th grade and the irreverent reverend)

  By ljd42 on December 21, 2020

  

  Raise your hand if you have personal knowledge of the true story of the Nativity. OK, most of us were not there at the time, Connie Willis to the contrary notwithstanding, so we have to rely on the words of… Read More ›

• “Christmas with your Jewish Boyfriend”

  By ljd42 on December 20, 2020

  This goes out to a surprising number of couples I know. (I could have sent it to Barbara before we got married, but not now, as husband ≠ boyfriend.) I heard it on the Unorthodox podcast a little over a… Read More ›

• Who reads poetry anyway?

  By ljd42 on December 19, 2020

  

  Most likely you expect that I’m going to answer the question in the title by saying “Not me. I don’t read poetry.” If you’re a pedant — or if you believe that I am — you expect that I’ll say… Read More ›

• Keeping warm

  By ljd42 on December 18, 2020

  

  Skinny little Vincent keeps warm by curling up with his fat, furry, and much larger sister, Mollie:

• The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book

  By ljd42 on December 17, 2020

  

  I just wish this book had been published 20 years ago! Alex Bellos has compiled an amazing collection of language-related puzzles in the Language Lover’s Puzzle Book, released a few month ago in the UK and more recently elsewhere in the English-speaking… Read More ›

• A Christmas Song for 2020

  By ljd42 on December 15, 2020

  

  For a variety of reasons there are almost no Christmas songs that I Iike. But I can recommend a new one that I heard yesterday — a song that was specially written for the year 2020: Don’t Wait For Me… Read More ›

• When will I ever use this in real life? (No one ever “solves for x”! (Or do they?))

  By ljd42 on December 14, 2020

  

  As I wrote eight years ago, it seems that I discuss this topic every couple of years. But there’s always a new reason to do so. Here is the 2020 reason, expressed in this cartoon: What we have here is a… Read More ›

• Model Citizens

  By ljd42 on December 12, 2020

  

  Are you a model citizen? If you subscribe to Amazon Prime (and who doesn’t, these days?), go watch their excellent new video titled Model Citizens. Yes, you guessed it, it’s all about model railroaders: who we are, what we do, why we… Read More ›

• Surreal numbers

  By ljd42 on December 10, 2020

  

  Surrealism. That’s Dali and Magritte, right? Well, yes… but surrealism is not just in art. It also pops up in mathematics — mathematics of all things, much to the surprise of those who are not in the world of Donald… Read More ›

• Role-playing games: based on linguistics???

  By ljd42 on December 8, 2020

  

  For some obscure reason (I don’t really understand why) I’ve just never been into D&D or any other role-playing games. And yet… …and yet I keep running into various aspects of RPGs (role-playing games) that definitely interest me. Unsurprisingly these… Read More ›

• Can turtle graphics really help you solve cubic equations? Sounds unlikely…

  By ljd42 on December 6, 2020

  

  Wow! In less than half an hour, you’ll learn lots of exciting new math from Burkard the Mathologer! So watch his Turtle Math, in which you’ll learn how to use turtle graphics to solve cubic equations. Along the way you’ll… Read More ›

• Automated translation? What could possibly go wrong?

  By ljd42 on December 4, 2020

  

  It was 1968. Fully automated translation was just around the corner. Or so I learned in a computer science class. Of course there was officially no such discipline at the time, so it was actually an applied math class, but… Read More ›

• One of Our Own

  By ljd42 on December 3, 2020

  

  Was Gregor Demarkian really the “Armenian-American Hercule Poirot”? That’s what the popular press called him. Jane Haddam presents his last case in One of Our Own, the final and 30th novel in her insufficiently famous Demarkian series. She finished writing it shortly… Read More ›

• How do you spell царь in English? Czar, tsar, csar, or tzar?

  By ljd42 on December 2, 2020

  Take a word that’s written in one alphabet (Cyrillic, say). Now spell it in another alphabet (Roman, say). Why? Well, Russian is written in Cyrillic, but it’s often necessary to write Russian words in English, using the familiar Roman alphabet…. Read More ›

• A Whiff of Death, by Isaac Asimov

  By ljd42 on December 1, 2020

  

  Another academic mystery, this time by Isaac Asimov. Yes, Asimov was a prolific writer of science fiction and science fact, but he also wrote mysteries — mostly related to science fiction and science fact. A Whiff of Death was one of those… Read More ›

• English is weird.

  By ljd42 on November 30, 2020

  

  No, I’m not talking about the notorious difficulties of English spelling. Nor am I talking about the oddities of English idioms and compound words, such as the all-too-well-known “Why do we drive on a parkway and park in a driveway?”… Read More ›

• I know it’s hard to believe, but you too can use a simple formula to generate all the prime numbers!

  By ljd42 on November 28, 2020

  

  You probably thought that there is no such formula — one that will generate all and only the prime numbers (formula, not sieve). Right? Well, it turns out that there is! (More or less.) Keep reading… Just start with the… Read More ›

• Linguists

  By ljd42 on November 27, 2020

  

  Mouse-over text: “Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you’re currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out.”

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