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05 July 2008
Sat, 05 Jul 2008 08:35:23 GMTPlaying the Piano for Pleasure
A fun read but not much learned. I already practice in mostly the same way this guy delineates, by taking one piece and working it until its perfect and setting it into my (tiny) repertoire.
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09 August 2007
Thu, 09 Aug 2007 11:30:05 GMT“BEE-yah!” my 18 month old daughter used to consistently squeal when excited. I was baffled, thinking it was only gibberish, until I heard several of her same-age daycare friends repeat the identical nonsensical phrase, as if some sort of secret toddler code. It would be months later that I would discover not only the meaning of her utterance, but a key approach to resourceful practicing. It dawned on me— the children were audiblizing something very close to what they were hearing, the word “Yippee!” They were just repeating it backwards, because at this stage of language development, their memory retained what they heard LAST.
What I noticed later as her speech patterns matured over the succeeding months, was that she could learn multi-syllable words much faster if we taught her the last syllable first, and worked our way forward, “Community:” (Cum-mun-da-ditty…)
Tee. (Tee)
Nih-Tee (Nih-Tee)
U-Nih-Tee (U-Nih-Tee)
Cum-U-Nih-Tee (Cum-U-Nih-Tee)
Community… -
06 November 2005
Sun, 06 Nov 2005 11:03:00 GMT Autodidacticismvia Kjell Olsen1125 days agoI think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker… I never learned anything at all in school and didn’t read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old. Stanley Kubrick
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21 October 2005
Fri, 21 Oct 2005 08:51:45 GMT Higher Education Podcastsvia Kjell Olsen1141 days agoMetaFilter rounds up podcast directories for Stanford, Princeton, and UW Madison.
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28 September 2005
Wed, 28 Sep 2005 21:23:42 GMT How to become a hackervia Kjell Olsen1163 days agoFind something to hack, and hack it.
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09 September 2005
Fri, 09 Sep 2005 00:09:00 GMTA bit more on college
So I’m still ambivalent about college. I don’t know how much it’s helping me learn. I’ve always been a fiercely individual learner, and I’m not yet sure whether or not college is the right place for me. I decided to attend college more by default, I didn’t quite have anything else to do that would satisfy me entirely. I thought I should at least give it a try. But I’m still only lukewarm at best about it’s value, and what the fuck am I doing here when I don’t think it’s the best thing for me?
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07 September 2005
Wed, 07 Sep 2005 20:49:48 GMT ChangeThis :: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourselfvia Kjell Olsen1184 days agoNice ideas on how to be more then just one of the pack.
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17 July 2005
Sun, 17 Jul 2005 07:44:50 GMT How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summaryvia Kjell Olsen1237 days agoA look at important skills and how to learn them.
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23 June 2005
Thu, 23 Jun 2005 12:45:00 GMT Feynman on PhysicsKjell Olsen1261 days agoA few of Richard Feynman’s lectures on physics, there’s a lot in here.
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09 May 2005
Mon, 09 May 2005 20:28:00 GMT Index of /deobfu/via Kjell Olsen1305 days agoFlorian Groß goes over entries into some ruby obfuscation contest, and I don’t understand a word of it. I need to look at this and learn from it à l’avenir.
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02 May 2005
Mon, 02 May 2005 20:43:00 GMT Mike Clark's Weblogvia Kjell Olsen1312 days agoLearning ruby through testing it feature by feature – nice idea. Not only do you have a quick reference of everything you’ve ever learned, but if something in the library changes, you’ll know about it quickly.
We have no idea if Ruby did what it should have done: we just know what it did. That is, we used the language as a tool to explore itself. In the same way that a test is better than a specification, the language is better than a description of the language. The test is definitive—when we ask Ruby what the answer to ‘Hello! ’ * 3 is, we’re going to the horse’s mouth. It doesn’t matter what the documentation says; what we’re testing is what actually happens. And that’s learning. So the test is both a learning test and a regression test.
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28 April 2005
Thu, 28 Apr 2005 12:06:00 GMT cityofsound: How devices learnvia Kjell Olsen1317 days agoI believe we need to find more interesting and useful ways of providing usable, enlgihtening, enjoyable interfaces which provide real people with real insight and real agency when it comes to sorting through an increasingly large music collection.
Either way, learning from listeners’ personal context is one way of providing agency and ease-of-use, and it would be worth thinking about the basic technical aggregators of that contextual information (to infer meaning from time, location, mood, backgrounded/foregrounded etc).
Devices and services which learn from user behaviour could provide a richly variegated middle-ground between the very different models of how most people listen to music and how digital music service users listen to music.
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30 March 2005
Wed, 30 Mar 2005 00:03:04 GMT Bhargav's Collectionvia Kjell Olsen1346 days ago“The Collection,” a nice bit of academic reading materials (textbooks and lecture notes!). I love the internet. I’m tempted to wget the entire site – but I’m running out of hard disk (doh!).
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Also somewhat recently
