The Magic of Life » Educational

The Olden Days of the Greater Los Angeles

Merlin — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:19:43 +0000

I ran into a very interesting collection of old photographs of Los Angeles and its surroundings and I could not help imagining how my children might look at photos of today and have the same nostalgic feeling about the good old 10s.

Look at that, the cars had wheels and were driving on the ground!

I sure hope that they will be able to say something like that. When I was a kid and started to read science fiction I was sure that by the time I was the age that I am now, we would have hover cars, colonies on the moon and on Mars.

OK, we got the internet instead but I would actually prefer at least solar system wide tourism, if not a decent hyper drive.

My son now has no such notion that it is desirable to have those gadgets and travel options (except maybe the hover board as in Back to the Future II) so that it is more likely that he will actually get it. If Kurzweil is right he might have another unexpected big change coming to him – like the internet for me – which actually might make it inevitable for him to have hover cars during his life time – - just because it is unlimited.

But let’s put these thoughts away and enjoy some nostalgia, Los Angeles Style…

Excessive Dringking Offers Same Benefits as Yoga

Merlin — Sun, 23 May 2010 21:58:28 +0000

Alex reports that recent research confirms that drinking gives you the same benefits yoga.

Here the scientific proof:

Savasana

Position of total relaxation.

Balasana

Position that brings the sensation of peace and calm.

Setu Bandha Sarvangasana

This position calms the brain and heals tired legs.

Marjayasana

Position stimulates the midriff area and the spinal column.

Halasana

Excellent for back pain and insomnia.

Dolphin

Excellent for the shoulder area, thorax, legs, and arms.

Salambhasana

Great exercise to stimulate the lumbar area, legs, and arms.

Ananda Balasana

This position is great for massaging the hip area.

Malasana

This position, for ankles and back muscles.

Subject: DRINKING OFFERS SAME BENEFITS AS YOGA
Research confirms that drinking gives you the same benefits yoga does !!!
Savasana
Position of total relaxation.

Balasana
Position that brings the sensation of peace and calm.

Setu Bandha Sarvangasana
This position calms the brain and heals tired legs.

Marjayasana
Position stimulates the midriff area and the spinal column.

Halasana
Excellent for back pain and insomnia.

Dolphin
Excellent for the shoulder area, thorax, legs, and arms.

Salambhasana
Great exercise to stimulate the lumbar area, legs, and arms.

Ananda Balasana
This position is great for massaging the hip area.

Malasana
This position, for ankles and back muscles.

Let the Government Teach Kids about Money

Merlin — Sun, 02 May 2010 09:17:45 +0000

My recent quest of understanding what a stateless society could look like and while investigating ways on how to obtain anarchy (no, not the chaos definition, the other other one: from ἀναρχία anarchía, “without ruler”) I also ran into a podcast called School Sucks.

I had already understood the value of public education (the value is not for me or the kid) so I had avoided public education for my child from the very start and tried private schools with a varying degree of success. For the last year I am on my second attempt of home schooling. I chose a middle way of actually enrolling him in a charter school that pays money for material and extra-curricular activities out of the state’s coffer. My excuse for accepting something from the state is that in fact I just get a part of that money back that was taken from me under threat of violence (called property tax.)

But this school recently gave me a good chuckle when I got the following email:

Money Smart Curriculum – FREE!

Money Smart for Young Adults

The FDIC’s Money Smart for Young Adults curriculum helps youth ages 12-20 learn the basics of handling their money and finances, including how to create positive relationships with financial institutions. Equipping young people in their formative years with the basics of financial education can give them the knowledge, skills, and confidence they need to manage their finances once they enter the real world. Money Smart for Young Adults consists of eight instructor-led modules. Each module includes a fully scripted instructor guide, participant guide, and overhead slides. The materials also include an optional computer-based scenario that allows students to complete realistic exercises based on each module.

Computer-Based Instruction

The Money Smart Computer-Based Instruction (CBI) is a friendly and easy to use learning tool that teaches the 10 modules of the Money Smart curriculum through a computer. The CBI can complement formal classes or enable people to study independently at their own pace.

Each module generally takes between 20-30 minutes to complete. Students receive ongoing feedback and, upon successful completion of each module, can print out a personalized certificate of completion.

Order Money Smart – FREE – Here:
http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/moneysmart/young.html

The government teaching kids how to handle money?? Don’t you also think this is the joke of the century? And they say that with a straight face, and probably even believe that. The only part that is more scary than funny is that the poor kids in all the schools out there will learn that stuff as truth without a parental regulating element like me.

Just imagine if that would really work – all the young entrepreneurs with business models of offering some service – anything will do – and forcing people at gun point to buy it. But maybe the government is actually shooting itself in the foot because as Ron Paul points out: “Don’t steal – the government hates competition” - and isn’t it actually training competition here?

Global Warming and Faith

Merlin — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 02:14:03 +0000

I had heard of Lord Monckton only in passing and that Al Gore had chickened out of a debate with him the last minute, but after watching the following video, I have to say I want to know more about him.

Usually you consider a title of nobility with the ruling class, so I have to shed this preconception now and have to admit that you can find friends in the most unlikely places – and obviously enemies in places where you would not expect them, like in the people you vote in to represent you. Ok, ok, you got me there – I have given up the idea a long time ago that somebody who bums my vote does not do it for my benefit.

But now, without further ado, pure logic taking apart Greenpeace-faith…

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, where can I find out more about Lord Monckton?

A good place to start is his Wikipedia entry, and then – there is Google…

The origin of the name Google – where it really comes from

Merlin — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:04:57 +0000

Have you ever wondered where Google got its name from. There are some of these companies that have become household names and nobody really considers any more where their names come from – Amazon, Yahoo, et al.

But somebody must have sad down and really thought about it. It is rare that something is materializing out of thin air. Often we get an inspiration from something that passes by – even if only fleeting.

Google, after being known around the world and even becoming a verb now could not possibly admit that its name would not reflect deep thought (pun intended) and consideration, so the official version is that Google comes from the mathematical term “googol”, to equal 10¹⁰⁰, a number much larger than even the atoms in this universe.

But here I now have for you the real source of the name:

Today I re-read, for the xth time, Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and there it was – plain and simple:

In the story of this (must read) book where the two programmers Lunkwill and Fook talk to the computer Deep Thought the first time after its completion to find out if it will indeed be able to compute an easy answer to all the questions about life, the universe and everything, and this computer classifies itself as only the second most powerful computer in the universe, the following dialog pursues:

“There must be a mistake,” he [Lunkwill] said, “are you not a greater computer than the Millard Gigantubrain at Maximegalon which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond?”

“The Millard Gigantubrain?” Said Deep Thought with unconcealed contempt. “A mere abacus – mention it not.”

“And are you not,” said Fook leaning anxiously forward, ” a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabat Beta sand blizzard?”

“A five-week sand blizzard?” said Deep Thought laughingly. “You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.”

There you have it – modest Google does not (yet) compare itself with Deep Thought.

A little side note that other well know subjects have been inspired by Douglas Adams. Many of you will know the TIFF file format used to store image data. This format is a tagged format and one of the initial tags that identifies the file as a TIFF file has a value of 42 and the official comment was that this value was chosen for the deep meaning of this particular value. The drafters did not quite come out with the full credits for this value which took seven and a half million years to compute, but made this tongue in cheek choice for all those geeks who know TIFF and Douglas Adams.

Summer Camp – or Wasting Time

Merlin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:59:24 +0000

For the first eight summers we have been following what modern parents do – send kids to camps and have them entertained, offer them programs and generally take away from them the opportunity to create their own summer.

That is so different to the way I grew up. OK, it might have been once or twice that the whole family went on some vacation trip, but that was for maybe two weeks while the summer vacation from school was at least six weeks. So I did have the need and opportunity to invent my own summer, and I don’t remember ever being bored.

I had kept some of my sanity when I became a parent myself to a degree and did not cover all corners with padding, and my general idea about child safety was that if the damage was not permanent then it was OK. But we did make the mistake of not giving the kid time to explore on his own, there was always a class to go to and a program to be in.

Lately there are more and more things coming into my life that indicate that the situation is being restored to proper working. One of them is Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids. Ms. Skenazy gained notoriety by letting her son take the subway all by himself to get home – and talk about it. Her blog has become a center for parents, who want to let their kids gain confidence by doing things themselves, to congregate and share their experiences. There is also Ms. Skenazy’s book Free Range Kids available at Amazon, but I have to admit that I did not read it yet myself.

Today I ran into a TED talk by the founder of the Tinkering School, Gever Tulley, demonstrating that it is OK to have kids work with power tools. This talk was just the last drop that made me think about writing this all up.

Yes, it is a camp, but I believe it is different enough to set a good example of not over protecting our children.

Now, what do I do about all this? This year, at the age of nearly ten, we did not sign our son up for any summer camp. Instead we are up there in the mountains in a little cabin and the junior has to find something to do while I work. Fortunately I do work from the house, otherwise I don’t think it would be possible without going straight to jail.

What is the experience so far? There were a few upsets and mis-emotions, and we are not quite there yet where junior uses his time wisely (by my irrelevant standards), but he has gone beyond the initial mostly playing computer games to learning how to get videos of those game plays onto YouTube, and just today, probably in response to my teasing that after the summer he will be the proud owner of a big butt, he started to exercise without any prompting.

So, yeah, I think we are going in the right direction here. Any other experiences with summers without camps that I can learn from?

The IT Crowd – Revisited

Merlin — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:13:27 +0000

Cory Doctorow of boing-boing introduced me, and I believe a whole bunch of the boing-boing readers to the BBC comedy series “The IT Crowd” from which I learned the most important lesson for all IT work: “IT – - have you tried to turn it off and on again?”

Up to the beginning Cory had been very good in reminding us all to check the torrents whenever a new show had aired. Poor people outside the UK had to resort to that sort of piracy as the BBC online viewing was confined to the UK.

After quite a bit of a hiatus after the end of the second season I was ready for my third season and I immediately find the first show of season 3 and enjoyed it immensely.

But, Cory, either I did not read boing boing with enough attention or you slacked off because I did not learn of the following show.

Finally I remembered the other day, went ISO hunting and found out that the third season was already over. Sad in a way, but good in another because there was a torrent with all six episodes in one file.

Believe it or not – I had an IT Crowd marathon that night and it was so good that now I am revisiting the first two seasons again. For all of you, to save you the searching, here are all three season in one place…

Each of the files is about one Gig, so be prepared for some download time – but it’s so worth it.

How to make a baby – help for helpless parents

Merlin — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:51:36 +0000

Finally a good way to explain to your 9 or 10 year old how this all works – with all technical details…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Careful – Totally Contagious Baby Laughs

Rockwell Retro Encabulator

Merlin — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:06:04 +0000

Here is finally somebody explaining the unilateral phase detractor and explains how cardinal grammeters can be synchronized – something all of you engineers are capable of enjoying. Is there somebody who could transcribe this whole training session so that I can add it to this article in order for others to read along and not miss the tiniest nugget of engineering wisdom.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Before this video did you ever fully understand modio interaction of magneto reluctance and capacitance directives - now you do!

The Female Language Lesson

Merlin — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:31:27 +0000

We all have heard, and hopefully understand, that men and women do not speak the same language, even though they might use the same words and passed the same SAT.

A good treatize is to be found in the book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray, Ph.D. – but sometimes you need some quick crash course and this is where this article comes in.

Once you know these nine essential female words you are all set – - – mostly…

Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.
Five Minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.
Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in fine.
Go Ahead: This is a dare, not permission. Don’t Do It!
Loud Sigh: This is actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about nothing. (Refer back to # 3 for the meaning of nothing.)
That’s Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a women can make to a man. That’s okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.
Thanks: A woman is thanking you, do not question, or faint. Just say you’re welcome. (I want to add in a clause here – This is true, unless she says ‘Thanks a lot’ – that is PURE sarcasm and she is not thanking you at all. DO NOT say ‘you’re welcome’. that will bring on a ‘whatever’).
Whatever: Is a woman’s way of saying F— YOU!
Don’t worry about it, I got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking ‘What’s wrong?’ For the woman’s response refer to # 3.