Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 53

• Is that even a word? Is it in the dictionary?

  By ljd42 on October 22, 2019

  

  “That isn’t a word: it isn’t in the dictionary!” is heard all too frequently. There are two problems with statements like this: There is no such thing as THE dictionary; there are many different dictionaries, and no two lists of… Read More ›

• Translation and culture

  By ljd42 on October 21, 2019

  

  Translation is impossible. Traduttore, traditore. That’s the lovely word pairing in Italian — roughly “a translator is a traitor”, where there’s only a small vowel change and a doubled consonant distinguishing the two words. A recent article by Matthew Reynolds explored… Read More ›

• The bathroom is finally finished!

  By ljd42 on October 19, 2019

  

  It took nine weeks. First the workmen demolished everything, down to the studs. Then they built a complete new bathroom in the same space. Some fixtures from Kohler and Home Despot, but primarily from our local Norfolk Hardware and Home Center. (Shout-out… Read More ›

• Intertwingled/“Hypertext in the Age of Trump”

  By ljd42 on October 18, 2019

  

  Hypertext pioneer Mark Bernstein has just published Intertwingled, a collection of nine essays and one short story. No one could ever say that Bernstein is shy about expressing his opinions, so don’t expect some dry attempt at scientific “neutrality.” If you… Read More ›

• Graphing calculator prices: how TI cornered the market

  By ljd42 on October 16, 2019

  

  You’re a student. Why are you required to buy a Texas Instruments calculator? Why not something cheaper and better? Usually what you’re buying is a TI-84, a 15-year-old piece of expensive technology. Zachary Crockett explains how we got into this… Read More ›

• 224 Boston Street

  By ljd42 on October 15, 2019

  

  As I wrote on 12/12/2015 and 10/31/2010, Dorchester used to have a scarcity of good restaurants, but now there are a lot: Twenty-five years ago you could count the number of good restaurants in Dorchester  on the fingers of one… Read More ›

• Blue, green, and grue

  By ljd42 on October 14, 2019

  

  Color names are a mystery. At least to me. Take a look at the color chips in the image. If we limit ourselves to common English color names (excluding, that is, the myriad of names used by both types of… Read More ›

• Mollie and Vincent

  By ljd42 on October 12, 2019

  

  Mollie likes to sleep with one eye open, just in case. But she curls up with her brother Vincent, who will always  protect her.

• Trump’s language — and Obama’s

  By ljd42 on October 11, 2019

  

  What do you think about Donald Trump’s use of language? A lot of people criticize it. On the other side there were even people who criticized Obama’s language, so where does the truth lie? Frances Brown, who worked for the… Read More ›

• Comic Sans is back in the news.

  By ljd42 on October 10, 2019

  Oh nos, Comic Sans is back in the news! Three times in the past 20 years I’ve felt compelled to write about the Comic Sans font: in 2005, 2009, and 2016. And here we go again: Of all the things… Read More ›

• Linguistics in MetroWest

  By ljd42 on October 8, 2019

  

  For many years I inserted linguistic lagniappes into my honors geometry classes at Weston — typically for 15–20 minutes, twice a month. You may wonder what the connection between linguistics and geometry might be — but if you view honors geometry as… Read More ›

• “America’s math curriculum doesn’t add up,” observes Steve Levitt.

  By ljd42 on October 7, 2019

  Please listen to (or read) this week’s Freakonomics podcast. I will wait. No, actually, I’m going to discuss it without making any prior assumptions that you have listened to it or read it: If you’ve been reading this blog for… Read More ›

• Neal Stephenson’s Fall

  By ljd42 on October 6, 2019

  

  Another thousand-page tome from the wonderful Neal Stephenson! Well, no, it’s actually only 880 pages — but that’s close enough. It’s still worth every minute (or should I say “every day”?) that it takes to read it. Basically, Fall: Dodge… Read More ›

• Progress report on renovation of our first-floor bathroom

  By ljd42 on October 4, 2019

  

• What’s wrong with this picture?

  By ljd42 on October 3, 2019

  

  Cool new shirt (matching my trademark jacket), but… What”s wrong with this picture? (Thanks, Alison B., for noticing what I hadn’t noticed!)

• Molinari’s

  By ljd42 on October 1, 2019

  

  Barbara and I went to Molinari’s last night, as she had to work late, and JP Seafood (right near where she works) was closed. So we decided to try Molinari’s, which is less than a mile from where we live. Based on… Read More ›

• (Before the alt-right) An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards, 1953–2000

  By ljd42 on September 30, 2019

  

  White privilege and male privilege are alive and well in the Hugo awards, despite claims about “criminally overlooked” white males. All you have to do is look through the inestimable Jo Walton’s deeply annotated objective account of all the Hugo awards… Read More ›

• Do we need to upgrade the Constitution? Plus a parsing problem…

  By ljd42 on September 29, 2019

  

  According to my iPhone (see screen shot below), we can do so for only $1.99! Any suggestions? Also, we have this quotation from a Washington Post article: The whistleblower is not white,” one 4chan commenter asserted Thursday, probably misreading a… Read More ›

• Greek Script Hacking

  By ljd42 on September 28, 2019

  

  Four weeks ago I reviewed two of the Script Hacking books: Korean and Arabic. Now I turn to a script that I actually know — one that I know thoroughly, in fact: I studied Greek for six years, starting in… Read More ›

• A glorious morning…

  By ljd42 on September 26, 2019

  

  …say the purple morning glories next to our driveway:

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