How much have I changed? Andy McKenzie and Ben Casnocha wrote recently about the wisdom of former selves. Their posts reminded me of a note I jotted down the other day: Things that, while I was in college, I wish I’d had/made more time to learn about: film, psychology, business, economics. Things that, since college, [...]
Category Archives: Learning
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Sunday, December 14, 2008
“The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it.”—from a collection of McLuhanisms.
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Tuesday, December 2, 2008
“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.” —Stravinsky
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Sunday, November 16, 2008
Advice from Hal Varian’s monograph, How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time [pdf], most of which applies to things not related to economics: Look for ideas in the world, not in the journals. First make your model as simple as possible, then generalize it. Look at the literature later, not sooner. Model [...]
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Friday, November 14, 2008
“Most normal persons are now taught to neglect far too much the sort of excitement which the mind itself manufactures out of unexciting things.” —G.K. Chesterton on the Joy of Dullness
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Tuesday, November 11, 2008
The History of Visual Communication. Plenty of good stuff here. I like the care taken in the further readings & references at the bottom of each section.
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Thursday, September 25, 2008
Here are 9 ways to use space in your presentation, basically ways to use your body on stage while you’re speaking. This reminds me of Scott McCloud’s presentation here in Atlanta a couple weeks ago, when he said something along the lines of, “Any way you can describe a story has a spatial/visual equivalent.”
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Tuesday, September 23, 2008
The latest MacArthur Fellows got their genius grants today. Among them is one of my favorite writers, Alex Ross.
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Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Common phrases in Icelandic, a collection of videos and another cool resource I’ve found getting ready for vacation. Not too long ago, you wouldn’t be able to hear a native speaker until you got there. In the same way, when look on Flickr I can see recent photos in Reykjavik, see what folks are wearing, [...]
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Monday, August 11, 2008
At The Public School anyone can propose a course, anyone can sign up for courses, and if there’s enough money to fund it, the course is offered (flowchart). How hard is that? Take a look at the current offerings, or if you have expertise, the classes that need teachers. [via lined & unlined]
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Wednesday, July 30, 2008
A worthy bit from The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: The opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in [...]
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Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Dave Barry on college: After you’ve been in college for a year or so, you’re supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and [...]
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Tuesday, June 3, 2008
A wiki with a list of academic blogs divided by field. I love the category for “Professions and Useful Arts.”
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Sunday, April 6, 2008
Pecha Kucha Night is an informal gathering of presenters who are limited to 20 slides of 20 seconds each. So, theoretically, it’s a forum with less rambling and more variety in the course of an evening. Lots of cities are having them now. Could be cool. The next Atlanta Pecha Kucha will be next Sunday [...]
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Wednesday, January 2, 2008
This year’s question from edge.org: “What have you changed your mind about? Why?” Dozens of scientists, researchers, philosophers, writers, and thinkers respond.
≡Cloze, reading, learning, life
Saturday, December 29, 2007
While working on a little research paper a couple weeks ago, I came across cloze procedure. A cloze test is used to measure the difficulty of a text. In a cloze test, you take a text and replace every fifth word with a blank space. The reader, who has never seen the passage before, reads [...]
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Wednesday, December 26, 2007
I did not know that Wikipedia has a reference desk. Sort of like the super-helpful Ask MetaFilter.
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Thursday, December 20, 2007
PhD trivia: “Only 36.7 percent of humanities students have finished their dissertations by year 8, and only 49.1 percent have done so by year 10.” That sounds completely insane to me. Granted, I’ve never been in a PhD program, but… wow. Just wow. Some schools are implementing policies to encourage professors to help students complete [...]
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Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Lapham’s Quarterly looks like a worthy new periodical. Each volume covers a specific theme and the essays come from a wide range of historical texts. The current issue, “States of War,” draws on Patton, Ruskin, Lenin, Goebbels, bin Laden, Virgil, Tim O’Brien, Whitman, Vonnegut, Tolstoy…
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Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Merriam-Webster’s words of the year, with the lovable “w00t” winning the number one spot.
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Friday, November 23, 2007
Holy crap. I just noticed that there’s a LibX plug-in for Emory University libraries. There are a couple hundred other schools that use LibX. From the comfort of my own Firefox toolbar, I can search Emory’s catalog, journals, and databases, as well as Google Scholar and WorldCat. This makes me unreasonably happy.
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Monday, November 5, 2007
“Before a game of tournament Scrabble, the tiles being used that game are set out on the board, so that people can make sure that none are missing. One typical way of doing this is to make four 5×5 groups of tiles in the corners of the board… Dan Stock has recently determined that it’s [...]
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Thursday, October 11, 2007
Tonight I heard photographer Alec Soth speak at the High Museum, a guest of this month’s Atlanta Celebrates Photography events. It was incredibly cool. It was a walk through his career so far, his major projects and commissioned work, and what he’s been learning. I took several pages of notes in the Moleskine… and now [...]
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