I’ve been gone for a while...
Is tumblr better or worse than it was a year ago?
thelearningbrain reblogged
Timothy Harding
thelearningbrain reblogged
Bernard Frize
Janvier 06, 2007
Tempera and lacquer on glass
thelearningbrain reblogged
Haunted Bodies: A Collection of New Hybrid Drawings About Healing and Loss by Christina Mrozik
One of the best things about not being a teacher anymore.
I'm not freaking out every night worrying if I prepared enough for class.
Funny: saying 'I think I love you' to someone after knowing them for 5 seconds.
Pretty Funny: saying 'i think I love you' to someone after knowing them for 5 minutes.
Pretty Creepy: saying 'i think I love you' to someone after knowing them for 5 hours.
Creepy: saying 'i think I love you' to someone after knowing them for 5 days.
Kind of Sweet: saying 'i think I love you' to someone after knowing them for 5 weeks.
Pretty Sweet: saying 'i think I love you' to someone after knowing them for 5 Months.
Sweet: saying 'i think I love you' to someone after knowing them for 5 years.
Funny: saying 'i think I love you' to someone after knowing them for 5 decades.
thelearningbrain reblogged
thelearningbrain reblogged
During an earthquake coffins become underground maracas
thelearningbrain reblogged
The fascinating thing about putting human feet on things that aren’t human is that as you get further from the human baseline, it starts out funny, then becomes creepy, then goes back to being funny again. It’s not a continuum.
Like, human feet on a duck: funny.
Human feet on a crab: creepy.
Human feet on a refrigerator: hilarious.
I think roughly the reverse is true for putting nonhuman feet on a person, both in terms of intensity of reaction and the feeling evoked.
Furniture feet on a human: nonsensical to moderately discomforting.
Crab or other invertebrate feet on a human: intriguing aesthetic, artsy even
Duck feet on a human: No.
Let me tell you, my friends, of the story of me and this cursed tumbr post. I am enraged and horrified at the depths to which you have managed to plunge me, oh demons of intellectual curiosity.
Above you have the Post. Heinous as it is. There it stands. And upon reading the first half of its damnéd text, I thought to myself, “it’s not a linear continuum, it’s a sine wave.” Then I continued to read the thrice-bedeviled second passage, I said, “This is a shifted sine, or perhaps a cosine, methinks.”
At which point I found myself in Excel. With a spreadsheet. I don’t actually remember opening the spreadsheet, but I blame this upon the spell wrought by the discourse above. I dutifully and thoroughly considered the items, and several new ones, to the point of sketching a few of their designs. That calamitous and hellish paper has since been burned over the kitchen sink, as I found I could not look at it without getting sucked back into the mire of this hellish, devil-spawned post.
Here, however, are the final results of my gruesomely insatiable, rigorous analysis.
A table was all well and good but I found myself wondering if it were, indeed, a sine wave, and if so, what sort? And this led, my dear, misguided friends, to a graph.
It is a sine wave, I said, but not one wave, no, it is the addition of several sine waves, and after a three-hour session with the Goddess Desmos and an appeal to the Paragon of Mathematic Wisdom (commonly referred to as @deadhawke ), the closest we got to the mysterious wave was funniness factor = 2sin(what foot is on) + sin(0.5(what foot is on)). If anyone is able to find a closer estimate, they are free to read this tome of sacred text:
http://www.emptyloop.com/technotes/A%20tutorial%20on%20trigonometric%20curve%20fitting.pdf This very text, thanks be to Einstein, Curie, Tesla, and Hawking, was what served to break me from the spell of This Accursed, Most Evil Post, and brought me back to sanity with a cry of “WHY AM I ANALYSING THE ODDNESS OF MISPLACED FEET???” And with that, my friends, I go to bed.
I applaud your efforts friend, and I have more thoughts on this but it’s 1AM and too late/early to be drawing diagrams, and also I am bad at math.
My favorite thing about this post (I like a lot of things about this post) is that it’s a sideways lesson in data visualization and scientific communication, because if you rearranged the Things axis–Things is not an ordered list, so you could do it however you want–this would not look nearly as satisfying (or like a sine wave at all).
I did try to give the Things an order - from most human to least human. Which is a bit of an arbitrary order, but my thoughts went like this:
- Human: V human-like.
- Duck: has a spine. Has internal bones. More human-like than, say,
- Spiders/crabs/other invertebrates of the leggy sort: Alive, but not-human-like, mostly just weird
- Furniture: Not even alive, my dudes.
Which just proves I spent too much time on this.
Aha! A reasonable rubric (and I appreciate the reply!) though I’ll point out that the graph also posits that Human, Duck, Invertebrates, and Furniture are equally spaced along the axis of…um…let’s call it Thing. If I were designing a lesson plan to teach data literacy with this graph, this is the part where I would ask everyone to brainstorm what the units on the Thing axis might be.
Programming is fun.
So I have been in a new job for just about two months now, and I love it. I love the people and the place, but most importantly I love the work. For the past ten years or so I was an educator, teaching, coordinating professional development, and building academic programs in schools. It was ok, but it didn't light that fire inside me. After two months on the job, solving problems with code every day, I know I made the right decision. The best part is that I'm learning so much new stuff about Ruby and JavaScript and DevOps and Frameworks... and that's part of my job too! Before I used to do it in my off-time. Now I might even get back to the hobbies I put aside while I was learning to program.
In the past couple weeks I've been thinking about this blog and wondering how I might incorporate programming into it more.
We shall see...
In the meantime, if you have dreams, be patient with yourself, make decisions with them in mind, and don't give up.
thelearningbrain reblogged
thelearningbrain reblogged
Express your gratitude as often as possible.
thelearningbrain reblogged
crazy-sad-boy
me too.
Words that mean cool now but still feel weird to use
Tough
Chill
Lit
Dope
What is the order from least to most? What words are missing?
Weird dream
Among other things that took place in it, I had a dream last night where a young Anthony Bourdain was teaching me card tricks. What does that mean!?
I didn’t even really know who he was until the news of his death last week.
thelearningbrain reblogged
a dream
career.shift()
5 years ago I went abroad for 10 months, equipped only with a backpack and whatever I could carry in it. Looking back, I overestimated what I’d need (like, really what essentials I could survive on) and ended up tossing stuff as I went. I started in South-East India, in a town called Auroville, spent some time traveling through south-central India, and then found my way to SE Asia, moving my way up and down the Peninsula from Singapore to Bangkok. It was a remarkable time, where I learned a lot about myself and what I’m capable of on my own (in good ways and bad).
I met a lot of people on that trip and have stayed friends with some of them since. One pair of adventurers I befriended introduced me to the culture of Digital Nomadism. While not a programmer on his own, Guy was building a startup and would work regularly at co-working spaces in whatever country he was currently staying in. I met so many entrepreneurs and programmers while hanging out with Guy and was struck by this reality where they’d build their companies or do their work remotely in amazing locations.
The benefit of a digital nomad's lifestyle is that if you choose your country wisely, you don’t have to spend much on housing or food, you still make good money working remotely, and you get to enjoy experiencing new cultures and places.
I would meet programmers who decided to do this and kept on leaving those interactions thinking: “God what I’d give to do that”. My limiting factor was that I was not a programmer, but hanging out with these folks got me thinking that all I needed was self-discipline to get me to the level where I could break out of my teaching career and into web and app development.
That was 2013-14. Since then, I’ve been spending my free time learning to program, and in doing so, I’ve rediscovered my love of problem-solving, something that I remember especially taking classes like geometry in high school, but which over the years, I wasn’t nurturing. I have a background in a different type of problem solving: ART. Art demands that you develop your own rules and structures, that you find novel ways to revisit old problems, and that you look for inspiration in even the most mundane things. As someone who solved problems of Art, I found myself drawn to systems of logic and ways in which I could temper the creative urge with self-imposed limitations. Art is about seeking and practicing balance for me.
When I started to really dive into programming, I saw its problem-solving process as both different and similar to the way I practiced creating Art. In both you start with nothing. In art, I could choose a path -- at the beginning I might decide: “This is going to be a portrait”, or I might say - I am going to make no conscious decisions about what this will be. In programming, it doesn’t really make sense to program without having an end goal in mind. It’s kind of required. Before you create your first object, you need to know what it’s there for. Every piece of your code has a purpose and is contributing in its own purposeful way to the whole. The ethos of programming is essentialism. Useless code has no place in a program because the program’s purpose is to function. In Art there is an ethos of dualism, where every mark is an artifact of the journey to completing the work, and has a place in the completed work. Even mistakes are honored in Art. This is partly because art, as much as it’s about the object, is also about the artist or the mechanism by which the art was arrived at.
That last difference is the major difference between the two. Art and Programming both put value on the final product, but in Art, the process, the intention, the feeling, and the artist herself are woven into the way we experience and value it. Those aspects of problem-solving, as much as they are present in the problem-solving process when it comes to programming, are not at the forefront of how we evaluate the outcome of problem-solving in programming. Simply, we ask: “does it work”?
I’m sure I’ve oversimplified things, but my point is to highlight that there are similarities and differences in Art and programming, and that for me they both satisfy urges I have to express myself. In Art that expression is raw and more about exploring what lies within. In programming that expression is calculated and more about exploring how we relate to the world around us. They both force the mind to think in novel ways.
In a few weeks time, I’m going to start my first full-time job as a programmer, building products with a team. Not only am I excited to be surrounded by other people with similar interests and experiences I can learn from, but I’m also eager to be more saturated in an environment where we’re constantly using code and computation to solve problems.