Edward Snowden being treated like a criminal instead of a hero really opened my eyes. He's a patriot who tried to warn us about a government agency reaching far beyond the powers granted to it by the people...and he is called a traitor? It's the most outrageous thing I've ever witnessed in this country. We need Snowden back. He put his life on the line for the people of this country. I can't say I know anyone in Washington with an equal commitment to the people.
While I agree Snowden did a heroic thing, he is very visible due to being a whistleblower. There are potentially lots of people doing selfless and principled things that stay secret, since secrecy really is important in that business.
There is a tension between citizens need to keep their government from going astray and the government's need to outwit its adversaries. It's pretty clear to me we have gone too far in the direction of a surveillance state, but those agencies still serve a good purpose, too.
I do the same, but it's not a protest, it's because I literally can't pay. They have sued me though, and they won, but nothing happened after the lawsuit closed. This country is headed towards mad max territory.Yippee ki yay boys, I'll see you on the road.
He was against writing... in 370 BC. Although, having seen the blank faces of students in lecture halls mindlessly taking notes, I know there's some truth to it. When a good professor lectures, there's a lot of information expressed as pace, stress, and so on. It's like when I read Shakespeare's plays for the first time and thought the world was really crazy to put such high value on seemingly nonsensical words, but then I saw an actor speak them and the performance added the additional emotional overtones which decoded how the words were meant to be understood. That extra layer on top of words is surprisingly neglected.
The central dynamic when someone is lecturing is that there is some sort of audience learning from the lecture. Hopefully willingly :)
Listening to a lecturer is very helpful if the listener already has a fair grasp of a topic and uses it as an opportunity to critique and refine their own opinions. I've been to lots of lectures in my time and I found it very counterintuitive that I got more out of lectures when I already had a deep understanding of the topic. They are much better used to figure out what a smart person's perspective is rather than for picking up facts (better done from a reference manual or other book).
I might have a bias towards technical lectures with a few equations on the board, but most students in a lecture hall that I've seen don't understand the subject well enough to get much out of the lecture. It becomes more a process of reading the slides to them rather than anything that a lecturer is needed for. There will be three types of students in the hall, in order of best to worst performance; not taking notes because they already understand the topic; taking notes to aid them in private study, and not taking notes because although they don't understand the lecture they also don't know how to use notes in private study later on.
I take notes because it’s part of my process. It’s like thinking out loud without bothering the people around me. If I’m new to the topic it helps me absorb it (even if I’ve come having already read up on the topic). If I’m not it helps me absorb the lecturers ideas/opinions. I’m writing down my points of agreement/disagreement or things to research or things I want to prove or disprove, or a wild tangent, or a possible connection to another topic... etc
Even skimming the subject matter for 5 minutes beforehand helps you get more out of the lecture, by preloading the basics (structure and terminology).
I try to understand during the lecture (there's little to revise where I succeed). I can do this while taking notes.
In the past, I'd take semantic notes, based on my understanding, flagging keys, as an aide de memoire to trigger my memory rather than be it. But now I try to follow the precise words, in case there's some nuance missing from my understanding.
The lectures I best remember are the ones I took notes in. Every now and then again, I like to flip through old notebooks and the feel of those moments come back, the general atmosphere created by the professor, the subject, the feel of the class, the turning of the season, that visceral sense of having been alive in another time and space and I'm very glad to have left a record.
It's possible that information which a person reads doesn't synthesise as well with other ideas and information once it's in the mind.
When you discuss something complex with a teacher in an interactive way, the teacher can probe for subtle gaps in your knowledge to make your understanding more complete.
With reading, you build a foundation of knowledge with many gaps and you just hope that they will consolidate over time but the foundation is weaker and so you can't synthesise that knowledge as well until those gaps are closed off through random learning events.
It requires a more flexible kind of intelligence and a modest personality to be able to constantly keep adjusting your old knowledge.
That's why you go to the lecture at all. But if you didn't read about the subject, your knowledge is all a gap, and you get no benefit from interacting with the teacher.
This is key, we've made some progress in punctuation since his day, probably since Shakespears too. The greeks were experimenting with full stops but others like spaces in words
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_(punctuation) ) came much later. We still can't encode emotions in textual information well but we have other methods to convey important concepts, we can make them stand out or have a list of bullet points, these weren't available to Socrates.
I think you hit the nail on the head that one of the most important things a good teacher does is stress the important information.
You can pick up a book on anything (calculus, computer science, philosophy, etc) and just due to information-density, get lost in the minutia. A good teacher stresses the important points so you can get a broader understanding. Then you can go back for the minutia when it is needed.
The information conveyed as stress and pace, keeps you focused bit longer, but you loose focus anyway. It will be completely forgotten. That is why notes taking for me - keeps me listening instead of zoning out aaand learning from own notes later if faster then from someone elses material. Dunno why, but I think that act of writing itself helps me to learn.
It is sometimes said that the typical university lecture is way to transfer the notes of the professor to the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either party.
Thanks for the paper! I just learned the basics of Parsec[1] in Haskell and was shocked how effortlessly I could construct a parser. Learning Haskell made me fall in love with programming again.
I write a lot. I can tell from my own experience that what I'm feeling when I write translates into my handwriting in subtle ways. You may object to some particular method that I'm unaware of, but I don't think "handwriting analysis" in general is absurd. It's data and so there are models of it and inferences.
Personal feelings are not how we evaluate a scientific discipline. It's phrenology level nonsense.
A coworker once told me that his chiropractor told him he could help him with hemroids. This not only made me dubious about her ability to cure hemroids. It made me dubious that she could do anything about back pain. Capable people don't spew nonsense within the scope of their capabilities.
The second his analyst registered an opinion about the personality of the writer I became dubious that she could even tell who wrote it.
People felt the same way about Einstein's cosmic intuition. Things evolve in stages, from intuition and anecdotes to more formal developments or refutations. I didn't say handwriting analysis is a fully legitimate area. I said as a writer I see how my writing changes and don't find the concept as absurd as many here do because of my anecdotal experience. You may hand wave that away because I don't have a statistical analysis here that is peer reviewed, and that's fine, but to me saying something is nonsense without a proof that it's nonsense is equally bad. Everything that isn't completely rigorous isn't nonsense. It's not good science, but not necessarily nonsense.
It’s not outside the realm of plausibility that certain chiropractic procedures could help with digestive issues linked to other issues. There’s been a decent amount of research recently into stimulating the vagus nerve for example and how it affects not only digestion but also mood and immune function. If a pinched spinal nerve is causing digestive issues perhaps it could lead to other issues. Curing every case? Likely not, but perhaps it could help some individuals. Now the chiropractic field is also full of half baked practitioners as well, imho.
Billions of neurons and we think we can reduce the nuances of our complex system into words such as "knowledge" and "understanding." To me, those terms are so vague, they don't mean anything.
Depends ont the MMO as well. For example I only play FFXIV and that's very very single player friendly with a huge focus on story. Same with FFXI that became single player friendly with the Trust system tho that's an old school MMO (akin to Everquest and such)
Even FFXIV (my current drug of choice) has limits to what you can do as a solo player. Even the MSQ - the most single-player content in the game - requires you to group up with others every other level and do dungeons. It’s a mostly seamless process with all the duty finder enhancements and roulettes that bring existing players back to the old content, but it’s still there.
The benefit of a clan/guild/free company can’t be understated. They will provide entertainment, support, and access to a set of content that’s otherwise very hard to do.
From ShB onwards, you can now use the Trust system to solo dungeons and MSQ events. I'd be willing to bet they will port this to older dungeons once New Game+ comes out, although I am not sure if they'll ever do this with roulettes.
