Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 56

• 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:

• Diversity and majorities in Boston elections

  By ljd42 on September 25, 2019

  

  Boston just had a preliminary election yesterday (more or less what other places call a primary, though it’s non-partisan). As you know from my post of September 22, one of the topics that I teach in my Quantitative Reasoning class is… Read More ›

• Batman uses linguistics! Who’d’a thunk it?

  By ljd42 on September 24, 2019

  

  Yes, it’s a couple of days late for Batman Day — but that’s OK. I was astonished to learn that there are not just one but two episodes of School of Batman in which linguistics plays a major role. First… Read More ›

• Looking back from the 23rd Century

  By ljd42 on September 23, 2019

  It’s too had that the Times editors had to write “The opinion piece below is a work of fiction,” but I guess nobody recognizes satire anymore. If they had managed to date it “September 23, 2021,” I don’t suppose anyone… Read More ›

• What is “quantitative reasoning”?

  By ljd42 on September 22, 2019

  

  If you read this blog regularly, you know that I teach a course with the strange title of “Quantitative Reasoning.” What does that mean? I’ll describe the course in general, followed by specifics of all four units. Generally referred to… Read More ›

• Jiffy? Centijiffy? Decijiffy?

  By ljd42 on September 20, 2019

  

  “I’ll be with you in a jiffy.” How long is a jiffy? What about a centijiffy? Before we get to the urgent question of how long a jiffy is, I want to comment on a surprising error (or is it… Read More ›

• People speak [insert language name here] really quickly, don’t they?

  By ljd42 on September 18, 2019

  

  We’ve all had the experience of listening to someone speak an unfamiliar language and perceiving their speech as being particularly rapid. It seems like a stereotype — depending on the language, that is — so we’re naturally skeptical. Maybe it’s… Read More ›

• The answers you’ve been waiting for!

  By ljd42 on September 16, 2019

  

  Here are answers to the puzzle from a few days ago, the one that asked you to identify 13 different languages: 1. French 2. Italian 3. Spanish 4. Portuguese 5. Ladino 6. Galician 7. Aragonese 8. Catalan 9. Occitan 10…. Read More ›

• What Has Become of You

  By ljd42 on September 15, 2019

  

  Academic settings… disturbed and/or disturbing people… why do I keep reading such novels? Well, we know why the academic settings appeal to me. As for the characters, that’s harder to analyze. I suppose I’d like to understand some of the… Read More ›

• Gyu-Kaku

  By ljd42 on September 13, 2019

  

  Gyu-Kaku recently opened a new restaurant at South Bay Center in Dorchester, its third location in Massachusetts (Harvard Square and Brookline predate it). This turns out to be an enormous chain — with over 700 restaurants world-wide, 90% of which… Read More ›

• Easier (perhaps?) languages to identify

  By ljd42 on September 12, 2019

  

  A sentence is shown below in 13 different languages, which are obviously related but how many can you identify? Some of them are going to be easier than the languages on the Mars bar the other day. I can give a… Read More ›

• High Society

  By ljd42 on September 10, 2019

  

  Why hadn’t I ever seen this movie before? I’m referring to the 1956 version of High Society, with a cast that includes Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Celeste Holm, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra. Most importantly, it has lyrics and music by… Read More ›

• Literally

  By ljd42 on September 8, 2019

  

  Kory Stamper’s typically excellent article in The Cut is literally the best thing ever. What did you think of that sentence? Did the figurative/emphatic use of literally bug you? If so — or even if not — you should read “The 300-Year… Read More ›

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