Learning
The Sailmaker's Apprentice
The author covers both traditional and modern sail materials and sailmaking skills. He's not so much about design as technique. I particularly liked the associations with the history and self-sufficiency aspects of learning a skill like sailmaking. The book talks you through a simple version of making a ditty bag while giving you the skills to do it up to your liking. I've made two. One's served me well everywhere including at the top of my boat's mast. Get the book and then buy the materials and tools from SailRite.com and make your own.
Available from Amazon
Holding the needle.
*
In a crosscut sail the first panel, or cloth, is laid along the tack seam, which is the perpendicular from tack to leech.
*
Let gravity help feed a large sticky-taped sail through the sewing machine. Building a temporary chute can be a fun challenge. Tables, boards, cloth--in the door, out the window, up the stairs, whatever it takes to get a big enough run on both sides of the machine. The less friction there is, and the fewer bumps, the more smoothly the cloth will slide.
*
Pass the twine repeatedly back and forth through thimble and ring.
Comments (
3)
Favorite (15)The United States Constitution
The US Constitution is one of our most remarkable inventions of all time. A lot of people in other countries think so too. It is a robust self-correcting legal OS. But it was written in an arcane code long ago. To make any sense from it you need some help.
This lively graphic novel adaptation of the Constitution is by far the best aid I've found to deciphering its code. It is the comic book version, but rather than dumbing it down, it smartens it up. The graphic novel goes through the Constitution article by article, and explains what each bit means, why it is there, and how it came to be. Like the Bible, the Constitution doesn't say what you thought it did. I was surprised what was not there as well as what was. I learned tons from this annotation, despite studying it in high school. It renewed my respect for it, and in a way, also makes clear its limitation. I feel I can be a slightly better citizen. Best of all, this book does all that with pictures, which makes it a page-turner.
Recently my brother-in-law, who is an immigrant, had a lot of questions about the Constitution. I handed him this book and he came back very informed. I gave it to my son who would normally have nothing to do with such boring material. But it's a comic! You've always wanted to read it, and should. Here's the perfect excuse and ideal method.
If you want the unadorned, raw version, get a pocket version. This sturdy shirt-pocket-sized one contains both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I have a few friends who pack this pocket version in their travel bags. Good conversation starter.
The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation
2008, 160 pages
$12
Available from Amazon
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America
(Pocket)
2000, 58 pages
$5
Available from Amazon
The New Way Things Work
This illustration-rich book provides a peek under the hood of the mechanized world we inhabit. David Macaulay, with tech writer Neil Ardley, has that rare gift of technical understanding paired with an ability to convey complex concepts through visual imagery. Kids, parents, Lit. majors, curious people - all can learn, and laugh, from the interpretive drawings that fill this wonderful tome, granting insight into the workings of everything from twin-rotor helicopters to printing presses to self-winding watches and even modems.
Remember floppy discs? The 1998 edition of this book (the most current) does feature some dated material regarding digital technology. Still, it’s an overwhelmingly relevant, educational reference -- awe-inspiring because of Macaulay’s talents as well as the achievements of human ingenuity on which his pictures shed light.
Available from Amazon
Inside the Mouse
The mouse rolls on a ball that turns two slotted wheels mounted at right angles. Each wheel has one or two pairs of light-emitting diodes and photodiodes. As the wheel turns, light shines through the slots and produces an electric signal in the photodiodes. The signals from the wheels give the changes in the mouse's position.
*
The Sewing Machine
The Feed-Dog: This moves the fabric forward. One train of cams and cranks moves the feed-dog forward and backward, while the other makes it rise and fall. Both are powered by a wheel driven by the electric motor, synchronizing their movements. The feed-dog rises and moves forward between stitches to shift the fabric and then dips and moves back.
*
Drill Chuck
The chuck of a power drill has to grip very strongly as it rotates the drill, yet it must be possible to loosen or tighten the chuck by hand. A compact arrangement of bevel gears and levers does the trick. The key pinion is turned to rotate the collar of the chuck, which turns the screw inside the chuck to move the jaws in or out. the screw is set at an angle so the the jaws open as they withdraw into the chuck, and close to grip the drill bit as they protrude from the chuck.
*
Automatic Transmission
Changing Down: As the governor rotates more slowly or the accelerator pedal is pressed, the throttle valve pressure exceeds the governor pressure. The shift valve moves back, and the low-gear piston engages low gear while the high-gear piston disengages high gear.
Infrastructure
For years, illustrator R. Crumb has kept sketch books filled with power lines and other everyday urban "junk" as reference for his work. To paraphrase: it's easier to copy than it is to invent, let alone comprehend. Of course, all that industrial bric-a-brac doesn't have to remain a mystery.
Combining photos and clear, occasionally poetic descriptions, this thorough almanac deconstructs the general architecture and much of the minutiae found throughout the modernized world. From power and water plants to railroads, highways, airports, bridges, dams, docks, municipal dumps, and industries like ag and mining, the book illuminates the subtle and not-so-subtle: Manhole covers are round, making them easy to roll and impossible to fall in; huge rotary kilns force water out of mineral products; AEI scanners monitor railroad cars; the rooflines of mill buildings cascade since these operations use gravity to move materials from one section down to the next.
The industrial ecology of a utility pole (excerpted below) and drill down on the power grid is what first hooked me. Choke coils, lightning arresters, bushings? I couldn't have picked them out of a police line-up if my life depended on it. Not anymore!
Excerpts & photos available at Industrial-Landscape.com
Available from Amazon
The Industrial Ecology of a Utility Pole
From top to bottom, here are some of the species you might observe in the utility-pole ecosystem:
- Primary distribution lines for electric power. These are the topmost wires. They are usually hung on a crossarm, and they come in groups of three, mounted on big insulators.
- Switches, fuses, and surge arresters. These connect to the primary distribution lines.
- Transformers. They are mounted below the primary distribution lines but above the secondary ones, with connections to both.
- Secondary distribution lines. Just below the transformer level, they are rubber-sheathed conductors carried on spool-type insulators or twisted around a steel messenger cable.
- Street-lighting fixtures. They draw their power from the secondary circuits.
- Traffic signals. These too are powered by the secondaries. The signal lights are often hung from a steel cable stretched between utility poles.
Everything from the top of the pole down to this level is the domain of the power company. Below is the realm of the communications lines, which operate on lower voltages and therefore don't need to be kept quite as far out of reach...
- Cable television feeders. These may be finger-thick coaxial cables, in either a black plastic sheath or a bare metal jacket. In newer systems the trunk lines that carry signals over longer distances are fiber-optic cables.
- Telephone cables. Often the thickest of all the wires strung on a pole, they are actually bundles of dozens or hundreds of pairs of fine copper wires. Fiber-optic cables also show up at this level.
Still lower -- indeed, reaching the ground -- are some wires that ought to have no voltage at all on them.
- Guy wires. Their function is strictly mechanical; they help to hold the pole up. There may be an insulator inserted into the guy wire for safety, iin case a power conductor should tough the upper part.
- Grounding lead. A pole with a transformer generally has a copper grounding wire that runs down the side of the pole and into the ground.
Finally, at eye level, comes the bottommost ecological stratum of the urban or suburban utility pole:
- The yard-sale zone, where the wood bristles with a thousand rusty staples.
*
not a tree: disguised cellular telephone antenna tower, Cary, NC
*
sewage-sludge digesters, Deer Island, MA
An Ax To Grind
I've never felled a tree and can count with my hands how many times I've chopped wood. Enough swings to have stumbled on the sweetspot, but also uncomfortably close to injury. This guide published by the USDA Forest Service is an incredible resource for everything ax-related, from beginner to advanced (and it's free!). Filled with succinct and wise passages, clear photos and helpful diagrams, the book explains the in's and out's of felling, limbing, splitting, chopping, bucking, and hewing. Plus, no-nonsense tips on how to swing, grip, sharpen, maintain, select and purchase the right ax for the right job. The subtitle is right: practical.
-- Steven Leckart
An Ax to Grind: A Practical Ax Manual
Bernie Weisgerber
1999, 68 pages
Available from USDA Forest Service in HTML
Also available from Scoutmaster's Clarke Green as a PDF
On a knotty, gnarly block of wood you'll need to start your split from the outside edges and slab off the sides. Inevitably, your ax will become stuck in the block you are trying to split. The best way to remove it without damaging the ax is to rap the end of the handle sharply downward with the palm of your hand without holding the handle.
*
Accuracy is the only thing that counts; the force of the swing is not nearly as important as its placement. Chop with a series of strokes: the top, the bottom, and then the middle (Figure 80). If you chop in that order (top, bottom, middle) with both the forehand swing and the backhand swing, the chip will fly out after your last cut. On your last cut in the middle on the backhand swing, you should give a slight twist to the ax as you sink it into the wood to pop the chip out. Swing with a natural rhythmic and unforced motion. Always watch your aim. Leaving one edge of your ax blade exposed will help ensure it doesn't get stuck in the log.
*
Clamp the ax to the bench at a comfortable height (Figure 65). Put on gloves to protect your hands. Hold the file as shown. Because you file into the edge of the ax, not away from it, you need gloves in case of a minor slip. Always file into the edge, toward the center of the ax handle, because this creates the least amount of burr to remove on the other side. The single-cut file sharpens only on the push stroke. Lift it away from the ax head on the return stroke. If you "saw" with your file, it will fill with metal particles. It will not cut well and it can also be ruined as the file edges are peened over. Occasionally brush the metal particles from the file with a file card. Always store and transport your files so they are protected from each other and other metal tools. Banging them together will dull their edges.
*
Always check the ax for sharpness. A honed ax will cut faster, be safer to use, and stay sharp longer. If you look directly into the edge of your ax with the light over your shoulder (either sunlight or artificial light), the edge that you've just honed will reflect no light. If you see any light reflected from the edge, you need to go back and hone the ax with the stone. Occasionally, a ding or a nick in the edge will reflect light just at one point. It is not always necessary to remove these dings as they will disappear through repeated filings. A correctly honed edge is sharp with no wire edge. It reflects no light. If you followed procedures, your edge should be sharp enough to shave with (Figure 73). I sometimes check the sharpness by carefully dry shaving the hair on the back of my hand. This is a traditional method used in the woods for years. A safer and equally effective test is to carefully put your fingernail (not your finger) against the sharpened edge. The edge should bite into your fingernail and not slide down it.
*
Basics of Handle Selection
Hickory makes the best handles for percussion tools like axes. You seldom see any species other than hickory offered by ax-handle companies...
Grain: The highest grade does not have over 17 annual rings per inch of radius, a characteristic of faster-growing second growth trees. The orientation of the grain is critically important. If the handle is not straight-grained, it is likely to break...
Defects: Various defects, including stain, holes, knots, splits, streaks, and grain deviations all diminish the grade of the handle.
Camouflaged Defects: Many less-than-perfect ax handles, often on bargain or utility axes, have defects that are camouflaged. This often helps make the ax look better, but you should recognize that good looks can hide defects. Some common techniques include staining, painting, or fire-finishing, which hardens and darkens the handle's surface...
Most ax manufacturers also offer axes with fiberglass or other plastic composite handles. While these may be durable and sturdy and perhaps adequate for splitting mauls, they do not provide the feel that a hickory handle offers. You also cannot customize a fiberglass handle. They are not traditional, which matters to me. And besides, they are just flat ugly.
DIY language learning
This handbook teaches you how to learn any language on your own, in the language's home turf, by teaching a native speaker to be your teacher.
The trick is to instruct your local agent to teach you something he/she is hardly aware of -- the structure of their language. You will supply the plan and so are teaching yourself through them. Comprende? It's done slowly, naturally, and playfully - the way you learned English. Your assistant doesn't even have to speak your language.
You begin using a few easy words, trying to make as many mistakes as you possibly can, entertaining the folks in the marketplace or anywhere else they'll put up with your blabberings. Then you systematically add additional words in steady daily use, guiding your guide in what you want to learn next. This well-tested method was devised by missionaries trying to learn languages lacking scripts, courses, or guidebooks, and works great for dialects, or indeed any language you want to learn.
The text of this workbook shows you how to construct your own exercises that fit the language you are after and later how to discover its grammar by yourself. The goal is multiculturalism, inseparable from multilingualism. Like realizing that you don't need a degree in anything to build your own house, learning that you can become fluent in another language without a course or classroom is deliciously radical.
If you like this approach check out other online texts by missionary linguists which take the same approach of enabling an intermediate to become your language teacher.
This DIY process works best on location, rather than before you arrive.
-- KK
Language Acquisition Made Practical
E. Thomas Brewster and Elizabeth Brewster
1976 (1998 printing); 384 pp.
Available from Amazon
or $15 from Lingua House
Author's website:
Lingua House
P.O. Box 704
Pasadena, CA 91102 - 0704
626/ 500-6278
LinguaHouse@LAMP.Bizland.com
There's more of the same approach (different book) here at SIL, also a language site for missionaries.
To prepare for a Comprehension drill, you need to plan a list of related activities and have Kino make up a 3 x 5 card with activities written in his language. The activities for the first day might include sit, stand, squat down, clap your hands, scratch your leg, stretch your arms. In the drill, Kino will instruct you in his language to do an activity; for example, "stand up." He will stand up and you observe and then mimic the action by standing yourself. Do not say what he says. Kino then introduces the second item, performing the activity while giving you the verbal instructions. You mimic the activity - for example, "sit down." Kino then again gives the first instruction, "stand up," and you respond by standing. Then Kino can give the instructions without acting them out himself - "sit down," "stand up," and you respond to his verbal directions. When doing comprehension drills, respond rapidly without hesitation and make a distinct robust response with your body.
*
*
Production of Modifiers
Kino says a sentence with modifiers. You repeat the basic sentence without modifiers.
Kino: "The blue jug with the pretty flowers is on the high wooden shelf."
You: "The jug is on the shelf."
Then reverse roles -- he says a simple sentence and you embellish it.
Kino: "This is a book."
You: "This is a good book about the people of this country."
Kino: "This is a candle."
You: "This is a red candle."
Look around you. You can talk about virtually any object, then restate it with modifiers.
*
*
By using these sentence patterns you can get extra drill on new vocabulary while talking with people. You can touch an object and ask "What is this?" They may answer, "This is Kefala." You can then touch a similar object and ask "Is this Kefala?" and they will answer positively or negatively.
If you are talking with children, this can become quite a game and give you lots of practice with new words. Children will often catch on, and participate with you in the game. First, you can ask the questions while they answer. Then you can trade roles and let them ask the questions while you try to answer. If you enter into the spirit of the game, everybody can have fun while you practice vocabulary.
*
Survival Japanese
I planned my first trip to Japan six months out with every intention of studying basic language skills in advance. I subscribed to a podcast, looked into Rosetta Stone, and added a few foreign films to our Netflix queue. Easier said than done. After five months of procrastination (just being honest), I picked up this book as a last-ditch effort to learn at least a little as we traveled. For a two-week trip, we brought five guides, including the previously-reviewed Japan's Hidden Hot Springs. Survival Japanese is the only one I consulted everyday -- at least one-third of its pages are now dog-eared. Rather than overwhelm with long word lists or complex explanations of how to form unique sentences, the book is broken into scenarios with simple phrases listed in English, Japanese (Romanized), Japanese characters and, most importantly, spelled phonetically in English. You just flip to whatever situation you're prepping for or have found yourself in... in a taxi, greeting people, paying bills, apologizing, asking questions, at the station, in a bar, visiting a home, medical emergencies (thankfully, we had none) and more. Sure an extensive glossary with many more words would be nice; additional phrases for the same and other scenarios would also be useful. That's not the point with this one. If you're a true beginner, the book provides just enough in a package you won't mind stashing in a jacket pocket or tossing in a day bag. I still wish I'd learned more beforehand. Nevertheless, my new (and very polite) Japanese friends gave me an A for effort.
-- Steven Leckart
Survival Japanese
Boye Lafayette De Mente
160 pages, 2003 (revised ed.)
$7
Available from Amazon
If you want to save money and have the time to create a DIY pocketguide (I did not), this wikitravel phrasebook is a great resource; also, please note that below are just a few select phrases from a few sections -- SL
Books That Changed My Life
This is my library. I guess you would have to say all the rest of these books are books that did not change my life, although they tried.
Books still have the power to change lives. Which ones have changed yours?
I don't mean merely great books, or memorable ones, or favorite ones. I mean books that altered your behavior, changed your mind, redirected the course of your life. Books as levers.
Here's my list, in the order they entered my life. (I'm not the only one affected by these books because each of these titles has a Wikipedia entry, linked here, if you'd like to know more.)
Childhood's End -- For a kid growing up without TV in the boring enclaves of suburbia in the 50s and early 60s, science fiction opened up my universe. I devoured any and all science fiction our public library contained. Arthur C. Clarke's stories in particular birthed a life-long interest in science, and a deep respect for the power of imagination. This story of a singularity always stuck with me as something to prepare for. (Available from Amazon)
Whole Earth Catalog -- When I was 17 this big catalog of choices gave me permission to have my own ideas, make my own tools, follow my two loves of art and science unabashedly, and invent my own life. Decades later, I worked at the Catalog in my first real job. Cool Tools is just the electronic version of this book. (Available from Amazon)
The Fountainhead -- I got sucked into reading this over-the-top manifesto of self-reliance during finals of my first year of college. By the end of the book I decided to drop out of school. I never returned. It was the best decision of my life. (Available from Amazon)
Leaves of Grass -- While reading this classic poetic ode to America and possibilities ("I am multitude!") my gasket blew and I became seized with an unstoppable urge to travel. I set the book down and bought a ticket to Asia. I roamed there off and on for 8 years. It was my university. (Available from Amazon)
My Experiments with Truth -- This autobiography of Gandhi curiously led me to Jesus. Gandhi's stance of radical honesty prompted me to attempt the same. I was surprised it took a tough Hindu to make me a tender Christian. (Available from Amazon)
The Bible -- Reading this all the way through, beginning to end, shattered all expectations I had of such a foundational text. It was weirder, stranger, more disturbing and more powerful than I was lead to believe. I've read through several times more and it never fails to disturb me. (Available from Amazon)
Godel, Escher, Bach -- I was amazed and impressed by the brilliance of GEB when I first read it, but it didn't change my life. However over the years I kept finding myself returning to its insights, and each time I would arrive at them at a deeper level. Now I find them my own thoughts, and I realize I now see the world through a similar lens. (Available from Amazon)
The Ultimate Resource -- Another book whose influence took time to establish. Simon's clarifying insight -- that mind and intelligence can overcome any physical limitations, and is therefore the only scarce resource -- has become a big idea that colors much of what I look at. (Available from Amazon)
Finite and Infinite Games -- This small, short book provided me a vocabulary to think about the meaning of life -- not just my life, but all life! It gave me a mathematical framework for my own spirituality. As it says, the game is to prolong the game, to rope all beings into playing infinite vs finite (win-loose) games, and to realize that there is only one infinite game. (Available from Amazon)
What's your list of Books That Changed Your Life? It has to be more than a list. A book cannot be said to change your life unless it can be annotated with the tangible consequences you made as a result of reading it.
Here are a few qualifying lists by others I have encountered in my clickage.
Peter Turney, AI researcher (Peter's list prompted this posting.)
Tim O'Reilly, Publisher
Steven Leckart, Editor
Mark Reid, AI researcher
Trent Hamm, financial blogger
Eric Rawlins, data architect
Larry Winget, motivational speaker
Mark Verber, software architect
Duane Johnson, software architect
Lucas Doran, road burn chaser
Ryan Holiday, blogger
I get a lot from reading these love letters to books. Why doesn't everyone do a list like this?
Send me links (kk at kk dot org) -- of yours or others you respect -- and I'll add them to the list if appropriate.
-- KK
21st Century Vinyl
I'm an iPod boom box guy, so I haven't owned a proper stereo in six years. Just don't tell that to the boxes of LPs and 7 inches stashed in my closet. I've always intended on revisiting my lonely analog collection, but what little I knew about properly using and maintaining a turntable has kept me at bay. Changing a cartridge? Setting horizontal geometry? Overhang? Zenith geometry? This DVD confirms how intricate it can get, but proves that a little bit of knowledge, practice and zen-like patience goes a long way. Michael Fremer, a writer for Stereophile magazine (and a former comedian), does everything step by step in real time without skipping the minute details or sugarcoating: "When they show this in the book, it takes up one paragraph. When you do it in real life, it takes a little more time..." Among the thorough, user-friendly segments are how to change a cartridge (tip #1: be in a good mood; tip #2: beginners should use an inexpensive cartridge just in case anything goes awry). There's also a solid rundown of which tools you need and why (tip: go for hex screwdrivers rather than keys because they're longer and easier to maneuver), and why or why not to opt for that top of the line pressure gauge. Fremer keeps things pretty lively, too, with the occasional Julia Child impersonation or self-deprecating, light-hearted quip: "It's more fun watching paint chip isn't it?" or "It's not like watching Terminator 2." I'm still shopping around for my new table, but as soon as I get it, I'll be re-watching and copying his every move.
-- Steven Leckart
21st Century Vinyl: Michael Fremer's Practical Guide to Turntable Set-Up
2006,
$23
Available from Insound
Or $27 from Amazon
Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:
Stumble Upon
Stumble Upon is a community-based website recommendation engine that serves up fantastic random websites. Completely addictive, it still does that. But now that they have added search (including video and image search), it has moved from frivolous to useful, and Stumble Upon is beginning to replace Google as my primary search engine. You cannot yet add Stumble Search as the primary search engine in your browser, but the Stumble Upon tool bar makes it nearly as convenient.
Let's say you are looking for a new dining room table. If you put "dining table" into Google you get a gazillion crappy tables. If you put the same search entry into Stumble Upon you get 100 of the coolest tables on the net. The same is true in its video and image search engine. For instance, when I wanted to find a video for my wife who was learning Roller Derby, I searched You Tube and got thousands of results, almost all of them below mediocre. But when I searched Stumble Upon Video I got only 10 results, and all of them were awesome.
The key to the system is that for every site that you "stumble upon" in your web surfing, you can give it a thumbs up or down (or tag or comment it). Really cool content propagates through the network fast, yet people trying to game the system to give their pages high stumble ranks get voted down very quickly. When I met the founders of Stumble Upon recently I asked how they managed to do this so well, and they said that they did not write a single line of code until they had worked out the anti-spam strategy. While there are several recommendation engines on the web like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, Stumble Upon's interface, huge active community, and easy tools make it the one that always delivers the highest level of cool stuff. It is basically how I find everything that I blog about.
-- Alexander Rose
Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:
Ken Libbrecht's Field Guide to Snowflakes
A gorgeous key to the surprising variety of snowflakes. There's more diversity than you think. The taxonomy of snow is categorized succinctly here. You can also find the same information on the author's densely packed website. He offers a companion book of a gallery snowflake photos, and prints, "wallpaper," and US postage stamps! However this small book is the handiest form for all this goodness.
-- KK
Ken Libbrecht's Field Guide to Snowflakes
2006, 112 pages
$11
Available from Amazon
Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:
Stellar plates often show distinctive ridges that point to the corners between adjacent prism facets. When these ridges are especially prominent, the crystals are called sectored plates.The simplest sectored plates are hexagonal crystals that are divided into six equal pieces, like the slices of a hexagonal pie. More complex specimens show prominent ridges on broad, flat branches.
*
*
Rules of Thumb
I'm a big fan of rules of thumb. Like: "Count the number of times a cricket chirps in 15 seconds, and add 37. That's the temperature in Fahrenheit." They are great estimating tools. At the Whole Earth Catalog we first published Tom Parker's collection of these portable estimates, soliciting others from readers. I suggested a few rules of my own, which made their way into one of Parker's later books. Since I remember -- and use -- a number of these rough recipes, I have always regretted that the books were out of print. If ever there was knowledge ideal for the web, rules of thumb are it. Tom Parker has recently digitized all the rules he has collected. He posts one old rule per day, and one new one suggested by readers. As the rules are tagged over time to make searching easier, we'll finally have the world-wide database of guesstimates that short-cut-takers like myself have always wanted.
You can find inexpensive used copies of the books, Rules of Thumb, and Rules of Thumb 2, but the web site really is a much better way to use and discover these. Parker has refined his explanation of what rules of thumb are, and why they are cool tools. He writes:
"A rule of thumb is a homemade recipe for making a guess. It is an easy-to-remember guide that falls somewhere between a mathematical formula and a shot in the dark. Rules of thumb are a kind of tool. They help you appraise a problem or situation. They make it easier to consider the subtleties of the topic at hand; they give you a feel for a subject. A rule of thumb is not a joke or a ditty. It is not a Murphy's Law. Murphy says that things will take longer than we think; a rule of thumb says how much longer. While a proverb says that a stitch in time saves nine, a rule of thumb says to allow one inch of yarn for every stitch on a knitting needle."
I've spent a lot of time reading through these over the years. I now subscribe to the Rules of Thumb RSS feed from Parker's site. My new rule of thumb: "One in 25 rules of thumb will be useful to you." YMMV, but I find that a pretty good hit rate.
-- KK
Sample excerpts:
The best way to make money in residential real estate is to buy the worst home on the best street.
The moon covers half a degree of sky.
When digging a grave by hand, haul away 17 wheelbarrow loads of dirt and pile the rest by the hole. You will have just the right amount to backfill.
For marketing purposes, elderly consumers think they are 15 years younger than they actually are.
The price of a telescope increases proportionately to the cube of the lens diameter.
Recovering an unused physical skill takes one month for each year of layoff.
If you walk into a bar where a lot of people wear baseball caps, it's a good place to sell lottery tickets.
Eclipses often come in pairs. A lunar eclipse is followed frequently by a solar eclipse two weeks later, and vice versa.
If the cats aren't sleeping on the radiators, turn down the heat.
One chemical toilet serves 15 employees per week.
It takes two minutes for the sun to drop out of sight once it touches the horizon.
If a woman can walk around during contractions, she is not fully dilated.
When you are working in the vicinity of high voltage, keep 1 foot of distance between you and the power source for each 1,000 volts. For instance, stay 13 feet away from a 13,000 volt power source.
Related items previously reviewed on Cool Tools
Motion Mountain
This is not your father's physics textbook. It is the self-published 1,500-page (!!), still-unfinished physics textbook written and designed by your polymath genius uncle who dwells on a mountain with the spirits of departed philosophers (whom he quotes, in German). It's what a physics textbook would be like if a poet wrote it and made no mistakes. The book is massively visual. There is minimal math. It's a textbook with soul.
The guiding metaphor of Motion Moutain, and thus its name, is to frame physics as varieties of motion and change. When it gets to quantum mechanics it considers this in almost Taoist terms, as the "smallest change."
This textbook is a work of art. Unlike standard texts, it is an enthusiastically personal masterpiece, yet still has exercise problems for students to practice. It sprawls across topics you won't find in any other physics textbook: semantics, lying, color theory, the physics of pleasure. In many ways it reminds me of Godel, Escher, Bach in its witty brilliance, stupendous range, and self-designed idiosyncrasies. Motion Moutain is an amazing portrait of the physical world as flux. It has the power to equip you with the intellectual tools to work with, and love, this flux. Studying it is an adventure in understanding.
Best of all, it is a free PDF book. A PDF means that it is hyperlinked to footnotes and intensely cross-referenced. And it is easily searchable. Every student -- anywhere -- can download a copy.
-- KK
Motion Mountain: An Adventure in Physics
By Christoph Schiller
2007, 1498 pages
Free
Available at Motion Mountain
Sample excerpts:
Why do change and motion exist?
How does a rainbow form?
What is the most fantastic voyage possible?
Is 'empty space' really empty?
How can one levitate things?
At what distance between two points does it become
impossible to find room for a third one in between?
What does 'quantum' mean?
Which problems in physics are unsolved?
Astonishingly, it is actually impossible to distinguish an original picture of nature from its mirror image if it does not contain any human traces. In other words, everyday nature is somehow left-right symmetric. This observation is so common that all candidate exceptions, from the jaw movement of ruminating cows to the helical growth of plants, such as hops, or the spiral direction of snail shells, have been extensively studied. Can you name a few more? The left-right symmetry of nature appears because everyday nature is described by gravitation and, as we will see, by electromagnetism. Both interactions share an important property: substituting all coordinates in their equations by the negative of their values leaves the equations unchanged. This means that for any solution of these equations, i.e., for any naturally occurring system, a mirror image is a possibility that can also occur naturally. Everyday nature thus cannot distinguish between right and left. Indeed, there are right and left handers, people with their heart on the left and others with their heart on the right side, etc.
Do all objects on Earth fall with the same acceleration of 9.8 m/s2, assuming that air resistance can be neglected? No; every housekeeper knows that. You can check this by yourself. A broom angled at around 35 degrees hits the floor before a stone, as the sounds of impact confirm. Are you able to explain why?
Sexual Preferences in Physics
Fluctuating entities can be seen to answer an old and not-so-serious question. When we discussed the definition of nature as made of tiny balls moving in a vacuum, we described this as a typically male idea. This implies that the female part is missing. Which part would that be? From the present point of view, the female part of physics might be the quantum description of the vacuum. The unravelling of the structure of the vacuum, as an extended container of localized balls, could be seen as the female half of physics. If women had developed physics, the order of its discoveries would surely have been different. Instead of studying matter, as men did, women might have studied the vacuum first.
When do clocks exist?
In general relativity, we found out that purely gravitational clocks do not exist, because there is no unit of time that can be formed using the constants c and G. Clocks, like any measurement standard, need matter and non-gravitational interactions to work. This is the domain of quantum theory. Let us see what the situation is in this case.... In short, quantum theory shows that exact clocks do not exist in nature. Quantum theory states that any clock can only be approximate. Obviously, this result is of importance for high precision clocks. The quantum of action implies that a precise clock motor has a position indeterminacy. The clock precision is thus limited.Worse, like any quantum system, the motor has a small, but finite probability to stop or to run backwards for a while. You can check this prediction yourself. Just have a look at a clock when its battery is almost empty, or when the weight driving the pendulum has almost reached the bottom position. It will start doing funny things, like going backwards a bit or jumping back and forward.When the clock works normally, this behavior is strongly suppressed; however, it is still possible, though with low probability. This is true even for a sundial.
Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:
The Looming Tower
This book connects the dots. It answers the question of why 9/11 happened. It weaves together the many diverse strands from Arabia, Yemmen, Egypt, Sudan, Afghanistan, Germany and the US that lead to both al-Queda and the bombing of the Twin Towers. You see the final tapestry and say, Aha! The depth of the international research supporting the book is astounding. Every page is full of news. I was stunned both by how much intelligence insiders knew of Bin Laden, and how much the agencies failed to act on their knowledge. The book traces the saga of the Bin Laden family, the trajectory of Osama, who was a hero in Islam long before the Towers, the role of the heretics who influenced him, the fierce persecutions these radicals faced in their home country, and the sad, tragic turf wars and cultural ignorance in the US that blinded us to the looming disaster. This book will make you realize how ignorant we still are. No matter what side of the political fence you are on, it should be required reading before the next election.
-- KK
The Looming Tower
Lawrence Wright
2007, 576 pages
$11
Available from Amazon
Sample excerpts:
Bin Laden's [father's] fortunes began to lift as the American engineers, under pressure from the Saudi government to train and hire more local workers, began giving him projects that were too modest for the major firms. He was quickly recognized as an exacting and honest builder. He was a small, handsome man, with one glass eye -- the result of a blow a teacher had given him in his first days of schooling. Bin Laden never returned to school, and as a result he was illiterate -- "his signature was like that of a kid," one of his sons remembered. He was nonetheless brilliant with figures, which he could effortlessly calculate in his head, and he never forgot a measurement. An American who knew him in the 1950s described him as "dark, friendly, and energetic." Aramco began a program that granted employees a leave for a year in order to try their luck in business. If they failed, they could return to the company with no loss in status. The Mohammed bin Laden Company was one of many enterprises that got its start with Aramco sponsorship.
Saudi Arabia needed roads. Even into the fifties, there was only one well-paved road, from Riyadh to Dhahran. Bin Laden looked at his giant rival, Bechtel, and realized that without equipment he could never compete for the really important contracts. He began acquiring machinery, and within a very brief span of time he was the largest customer of Caterpillar earth-moving equipment in the world. From now on, he would build nearly every important road in the Kingdom.
*
Ayman al-Zawahiri was defendant number 113 of the 302 who were charged with aiding or planning the October 1981 assassination of Anwar al-Sadat. He became spokesperson for the defendants because of his superior English. He is shown here delivering his lecture to the world press in December 1982. Many blame the torture of prisoners in the Egyptian prisons for the savagery of the Islamist movement. "They kicked us, they beat us, they whipped us with electric cables! They shocked us with electricity! And they used the wild dogs!"
*
In 1995 [Osama] Bin Laden began to have second thoughts about his life. He was struggling to keep his businesses afloat and his organization from flying apart. He could no longer afford to be a dilettante, but he was unwilling to cut loose his unprofitable projects and was paralyzed by the unfamiliar predicament of being broke. He was also pining for the familiar. "I am tired," he told one of his followers. "I miss living in Medina. Only God knows how nostalgic I am." Al-Qaeda so far had come to nothing. It was another of his tantalizing enthusiasms that had no leadership and no clear direction. Al-Qaeda's treasurer, Medani al-Tayeb, who had married Osama's niece, had been urging bin Laden to reconcile with the king as a way of rectifying the organization's dire finances. The Saudi government sent several delegations to see him in Khartoum. According to bin Laden, the government offered to return his passport and his money provided that "I say through the media that the king is a good Muslim." He also claimed that the Saudis offered two billion riyals ($533 million) to his family if he abandoned jihad. He was torn between his righteous stance against the king and his sudden need for funds to keep al-Qaeda alive. When he rejected the offer, Tayeb defected, causing panic among the members when he turned up back in Saudi Arabia.
*
Moussaoui was probably intended to be part of a second wave of al-Qaeda attacks that would follow 9/11, most likely on the West Coast. If the agents in Minneapolis had been allowed to thoroughly investigate Moussaoui, they would have made the connection to Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was sending him money. Moussaoui carried a letter of employment from Infocus Tech,which was signed by Yazid Sufaat. That name meant nothing to the FBI, since the CIA kept secret the information about the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which took place in Sufaat's condo. The bureau failed to put together the warning from its own office in Minneapolis with that of Kenneth Williams in Phoenix. Typically, it withheld the information from Dick Clarke and the White House, so no one had a complete picture.
Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Who knew that Bill Bryson would be the ideal guide to the history of the universe? Bryson has a reputation (at least in my family) of being hilariously funny as a best-selling travel writer. But here he has written a refreshingly brilliant introduction to the basics of physics, chemistry, geology, evolution and the rest of the cosmos. I'm not sure how he does it. He takes well-worn topics (atoms, black holes, molecules, DNA), inverts them, and presents entirely new ways of seeing them. And he still manages to be funny. He is not a scientist, but a storyteller. He's at his best when he recounts the feuds between ideas, and the unpredictable, often round-about route they take before they are accepted as "obvious." He delivers perspective, rather than facts. This is the best Science 101 course you'll ever take.
-- KK
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
560 pages, 2004
$12
Available from Amazon
Sample excerpts:
It isn't easy to become a fossil... Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today - that's 270 million people with 206 bones each - will only be about 50 bones, one-quarter of a complete skeleton. That's not to say, of course, that any of these bones will ever actually be found. Bearing in mind that they can be buried anywhere within an area of slightly over 9.3 million square kilometers, little of which will ever be turned over, much less examined, it would be something of a miracle if they ever were.
*
We now know that there are a lot of microbes living deep within the Earth... Some scientists now think that there could be as much as 100 trillion tons of bacteria living beneath our feet in what are known as subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems... Thomas Gold of Cornell has estimated that if you took all the bacteria out of the Earth's interior and dumped it on the surface, it would cover the planet to a depth of five feet. If the estimates are correct, there could be more life under the Earth than on top of it.
*
The most striking thing about our atmosphere is that there isn't very much of it. It extends upward for about 120 miles, which might seem reasonably bounteous when viewed from ground level, but if you shrank the Earth to the size of a standard desktop globe it would only be about the thickness of a couple of coats of varnish.
*
"Oh, probably none," said Anderson breezily. "It wouldn't be visible to the naked eye until it warmed up, and that wouldn't happen until it hit the atmosphere, which would be about one second before it hit the Earth. You're talking about something moving many tens of times faster than the fastest bullet. Unless it had been seen by someone with a telescope, and that's by no means a certainty, it would take us completely by surprise."
*
You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 x 1018 joules of potential energy -- enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. We're just not very good at taking it out. Even a uranium bomb -the most energetic thing we have produced yet- releases less than 1 percent of the energy it could release if only we were more cunning.
*
Neutrons and protons occupy the atom's nucleus. The nucleus of an atom is tiny -- only one-millionth of a billionth of the full volume of the atom -- but fantastically dense, since it contains virtually all the atom's mass. As Cropper has put it, if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be only about the size of a fly -- but a fly many times heavier than the cathedral.
*
The distance from the surface of Earth to the center is 3,959 miles, which isn't so very far. It has been calculated that if you sunk a well to the center and dropped a brick into it, it would take only forty-five minutes for it to hit the bottom... Our own attempts to penetrate toward the middle have been modest indeed. One or two South African gold mines reach to a depth of two miles, but most mines on Earth go no more than about a quarter of a mile beneath the surface. If the planet were an apple, we wouldn't yet have broken through the skin.
Uclue Answers
Google Answers was a great service I used and recommended. Sadly it was closed. Many of the free-lance researches from Google Answers moved to a new independently owned site, Uclue, that offers a similar service. You ask a question, announce a price you think an answer is worth, and if a top-notch researcher thinks your fee is fair, they will research your question. Questions can be quickies worth $5, or more complicated queries costing $200.
In my experience their answers are solid and reliable. You can always ask for clarifications. As with Google Answers, the results are public. That means it pays to search the site for previous similar questions. It also means that your answer won't be confidential. (Indeed. The answer to a question I commissioned on Uclue was Slashdotted.)
If you want advice, go to the free and free-wheeling Yahoo Answers. You'll get your money's worth. If you want help on a particular question that the exact right person can answer quickly, I think Ask Metafilter is by far the best guru (and it is free for members). But if what you need is some real research and serious sleuthing, the kind of answer that is not just sitting in someone's head, I believe your best bet will be Uclue.
Figure how long it might take you to answer your own question -- if you could at all -- and you'll see that Uclue answers are a real bargain.
-- KK
Compact Oxford English Dictionary
The classic, Compact OED is a smaller, handy version of what is the best English dictionary, bar none, the famous OED. Because it's photo-reduced, it contains the entire OED, all 20 large volumes in one convenient reference (it comes with a reading glass). Aside from saving space on your shelf, it's also significantly cheaper. It's quite large, but you could definitely fit it in a regular backpack, if you're a student or need to transport it (although it is about 10 pounds!). I've been using it for 3 years now, at least twice a week for general queries, as I enjoy discovering and using obscure words and I also often look up words and dive into etymology as part of my Wikipedia editing. For example, recently I used my OED to look up an archaic usage of the word "quaint". Apparently Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" makes use of the old meaning where "quaint" also refers to female anatomy. Who knew?!
-- Gwern Branwen
Compact Oxford English Dictionary
E. S. C. Weiner, J. A. Simpson (Editors)
1991, 2424 pages
$240
Available from Amazon
Sample page:
Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:
Dictionary of Symbols
In art, literature, film and life, even the littlest image or reference can open a world of interpretation. This thick encyclopedia, with contributions from scholars in various disciplines, is an excellent guide to the major and more esoteric origins of seemingly everything -- from "abracadabra" to "Zodiac." There are a ton of spiritual, mythological and/or cultural tangents that hopscotch the globe and back in time. Whenever I pick it up, I learn something new. I find the animal and food-related facts particularly enlightening (ex; oranges, a fertility symbol, are given to young married couples in Vietnam; and in Ancient China a formal offer of marriage was accompanied by a gift of oranges to the girl). The book's title is somewhat misleading. It does not have illustrations -- it's all text. Some entries are a couple sentences, others stretch for a few pages. If you have plans to deconstruct the next season of Lost, you might find this one handy.
-- Steven Leckart
Dictionary of Symbols
Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant
1996 (current translation), 1184 pages
$15
Available from Amazon
Sample Excerpts:
abracadabra
This charm was used throughout the Middle Ages. 'One only had to write it down in the triangular pattern shown below and wear it round one's neck as a sort of phylactery or charm to be protected from various diseases and to be cured of fever':
ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRAC
ABRA
ABR
AB
A
The word derives from the Hebrew abreg ad habra meaning to 'strike dead with thy lightning.' In Hebrew it comprises nine letters. 'Placing aleph on the left side of the triangle - and its ninefold repetition - is the magical element.' By arranging the letters in a reverse triangle, the celestial energies which the charm claims to entrap are directed downwards. According, the figure should be seen three-dimensionally as a funnel… Like amulets, talismans and pentacles, this charm seeks to give the individual a sense of protection through communication with the higher powers and with the mysterious laws which govern the universe.
almond (Italian: mandorla)
Because of its husk, the almond is generally taken to symbolize the substance hidden within its accidents; spirituality masked by dogma and ritual; reality concealed by outward appearance; and, according to the secret doctrine, the eternally hidden Truth, Treasure and Fountain… The almond is Christ because his divine nature was hidden in the human, or in the womb of his virgin mother. It is also, according to Adam of St Victor, the mystery of light, that is to say the end of contemplation, the secret of inner illumination… The geometrical shape of the almond associates it with the symbolism of the LOZENGE, since it is a lozenge with the lateral angels rounded off. Like the lozenge it symbolizes the union of Heaven and Earth, of the upper and the lower worlds and, for this reason alone, would be ideally suited to frame the figures of the saints. It symbolizes the harmonious marriage which transcends the dualism of matter and spirit, fire and water, Heaven and Earth… In esoteric tradition the almond symbolizes the secret (a treasure) which is hidden in some dark place and which must be discovered in order to nourish the finder. The husk around it is compared with a wall or a gate. To find the almond or to eat the almond means to discover or to share in a secret.
otter
The otter, which rises to the surface of the water and then dives below it, posses lunar symbolism and from this derive the properties for which it is used in initiation. Otter-skin is used in initiation societies both among North American Indians and among Black Africans, especially the Bantu of Cameroon and Gabon… The shamans of the North American Ojibwa Indians keep their magic shells in an otter-skin bag. The messenger of the Great Spirit, who acts as intercessor between him and mankind, is supposed to have seen the wretched state of human weakness and disease and to have revealed the most sublime secrets to the otter and interfused its body with Migis (symbols of the Mide or members of the Midewiwin Medicine Lodge) so that the creature became immortal and could, by initiating humans, make them holy. All members of the Midewiwin carry otter-skin medicine bags. These are the bags which are aimed at the candidate at initiation ceremonies as if they were fire-arms and 'kill' him. They are then laid on his body until he is restored to life. After song and feasting the shamans present the new initiate with his own otter-skin bag. The otter is therefore an initiating spirit which kills and restores to life.
Rule The Web
All our other major devices have user manuals, so why not the web? It's the gadget we use the most these days. Mark Frauenfelder, an editor with me at Wired magazine and later founder of Boing Boing, has written the missing manual for the web. I thought I was pretty web savvy, but after reading Mark's book of tips (written in a FAQ format), I felt like a slack-jawed newbie. I didn't know anything, while Mark seems to know everything and to explain it brilliantly. I bow to him. I dog-eared a hundred pages of the book highlighting great tips for optimizing my web habits. Since I spend so much time online, this is a big deal. Unlike most nerds caught up in the treasures of the web, Mark can put things into perspective, and increase your effectiveness, rather than computer time. This is the user manual to give anyone who is online, which is everyone. The smartest, hard-core, geeky, know-it-all web head will learn tons from it. I hope Mark keeps it updated -- on the web of course.
-- KK
Rule the Web
Mark Frauenfelder
2007, 416 pages
$11
Available from Amazon
Rule the Web website
Sample excerpts:
How Can I Listen to Three Hours of Podcasts in Two Hours?
Speed up playback of your podcasts in QuickTime. I learned this trick from Phil Windley's Technometria blog (
Here's how:
1. In iTunes, select the podcast you want to listen to and rightclick it.
2. Select "Show song file" from the contextual menu.
3. Right-click the file and select "Open with...QuickTime Player."
4. Select "Show A/V Controls" from QuickTime's Windows menu (see page 52).
5. Adjust the Playback speed slider while playing the podcast until you find a speed that still allows you to understand what's being said. Note that the pitch of the recording remains the same at different speeds, which prevents the narrator from sounding like a chipmunk.
Windley says that a 1.5-times increase in playback speed usually works, but when he really needs to think about what's being said, he will slide it back to 1.2. You can also speed up audiobooks and podcasts on your iPod. Select "Settings" --> "Audiobooks" --> "faster."
*
Where Can I Get Free Sound Effects for My Videos?
Choose from thousands of copyright-free sound effects at the Freesound Project. Home videos are much better with a soundtrack. It's easy enough to import a song into your video-editing program, but you can further enhance video with some well-placed sound effects. Add a "boing" to a clip of your kitten pouncing on your napping uncle's belly, or spice up footage of your kid riding her bike with the scream of a dragster engine. You can find almost any sound clip you might need at the Freesound Project (freesound.iua.upf.edu), a treasure trove of over 25,000 sound files, from the crunch of walking on gravel to the shake of a can of spray paint. If you use these sounds for a video you plan to upload for public viewing, remember that you need to credit the creator of the sound effects you use from this excellent archive.
*
How Can I Find Someone's Phone Number Even If It's Unlisted?
Use Zabasearch to find almost anyone. As a freelance journalist, I need to hunt around a lot for phone numbers. All of the big search engines offer some kind of peoplefinder service, but they are little more than online phone books. If a person has an unlisted number, you are out of luck. But not if you use Zabasearch (zabasearch.com). The search engine, which gets its information from public databases that aren't directly linked to the Web, has got the goods on almost everyone. Even though many of the addresses and phone numbers in it are outdated, I've used it successfully more than once to track down someone I needed to get in touch with for a story I was writing. One such person, a well known author, asked me how I got his phone number. When I told him about Zabasearch, he checked out the site himself and emailed me back, thanking me for introducing him to this useful
service.
*
Find a word within a Web page. It can be frustrating to search Google for a certain term and then go to one of the Web sites it returns only to discover you can't find the term you searched for. a quick way to find the term is by typing Ctrl-F (Cmd-F on Mac) and entering the word. By typing Ctrl-G (Cmd-G on Mac) you'll be taken to the next occurrence of the term on the page. You can also click the "Highlight All" button at the bottom of Firefox's window to give all occurrences a yellow highlight.
Rosetta Stone Language Learning
The slogan "The Fastest Way To Learn A Language. Guaranteed" may sound like a gimmicky promise, but none of the other "language lessons in a box" that you can get without joining the military, NASA, or the US Diplomatic core even remotely compares to this computer-based immersion program.
The genius of the process involves using pictures to teach you how to listen, speak, read, and write, rather than teaching by translation, as virtually all other language programs do. So as you learn your new language you associate the new words, phrases, and grammatical structures directly with the pictures rather than mentally translating through your native language. Using this method, most people can use a Rosetta Stone program regardless of native tongue, cutting out a major limitation of the translation-based language programs.
After a salesman at a mall gave me a demo for Vietnamese (which I've never studied before), I ordered a three-month subscription to the Russian program. I studied Russian in both high school and college, and went to Russia on "People to People" in 1991. At one point, I was getting very conversant, but couldn't say anything beyond the simplest phrases without mentally translating them into English. But after seven years of not actively studying Russian and rarely speaking it, my skills began to deteriorate. I was starting to be able to say things only on a very piecemealish basis (specific words, canned phrases, and common songs). Translation: I was losing my third language (I am fluent in Spanish).
Two months into the Rosetta Stone, which can be as as addictive as a video game, I was able to enjoy the fast-talking film "Nochnoy dozor" ("Nightwatch") without the subtitles. I have also found that I can now think, speak, and read in Russian without doing a mental translation into English like I used to do. And I think that when I get the money to travel to Russia again, I will become permanently fluent.
It is true that I used the program as a refresher course, rather than to learn a language from scratch. But as a relative veteran when it comes to learning foreign languages with different teachers and methods -- I've also studied German and picked up a good deal of French while traveling in Europe (forgot it in a matter of months) -- here is my take:
If somebody wants to learn a language from scratch, most people could finish Level 2 with excellent conversational skills (a feat that took me 3 months, but would probably take a beginner more like 6 months). If you are starting from scratch, doing Level 1 would still be a good foundation and you could easily survive "in country" when it comes to day to day living [note: Rosetta Stone sells programs for 30 major world languages, but they only offer Level 2 for certain languages, and only Level 3 for Latin American Spanish and English (US)].
For the people who are learning from scratch, there might still be some value in more conventional methods of teaching. And, of course, being in a community where the language was spoken would speed up the process. A determined English speaker with a high aptitude for language could probably do the Latin American Spanish up to Level 3, and then zone in on fluency very easily with no other formal instruction. But for languages with non-Roman alphabets and more divergent grammar systems, conventional teaching would not become irrelevant.
If you studied a language in school and got good grades, but can't really speak it, Rosetta Stone would be a really fun way to narrow the gap between book learning and real use. In short, I don't think an excellent language teacher has anything to fear from this tool, whether he/she works in a public school, university, a private language school, or as a private tutor. But the makers of all those crummy "language in a box" tools on the market have reason to be very, very afraid for their business.
-- Amy Scanlon
Rosetta Stone Language Learning
$210 - $260 (depending on level)
$340 (Levels 1 & 2)
$510 (Levels 1, 2 & 3: English [US] and Spanish [Latin America] only)
Available from and manufactured by Fairfield Language Technologies
[There are also online subscriptions that are cheaper. ex; In the case of Spanish Levels 1 & 2, $110 gets you three months, while $160 gets you six months of access -- sl]
There's an even cheaper alternative: free. Many public libraries purchase Rosetta Stone and some even make it available online. Patrons can access it free, anywhere, using their library card number.
Example: Palo Alto Public Library
-- Marv K.
SmartFlix
SmartFlix will rent you nearly four thousand How-To DVDs in English. Subjects range from construction techniques (tile laying, cabinet making, timber framing), outdoor activities (kayaking, archery), and self-help, to such specialties as welding, lock-picking, and primitive fire-making.
The quality of the instruction varies tremendously. Some DVDs are smart and effective, some aren't. Some are old, some brand new. All come from various publishers. The SmartFlix site smartly provides customer reviews (although not all DVDs have reviews). I have found the reviews tend to be generous; I mentally deduct one star from the ratings.
It's amazing what you can learn from how-to books and videos. Most of my livelihood skills I learned this way, out of school and without teachers. A great book or video can equal, or at least compliment, an okay teacher. Through years of watching instructional videos, I've found I need to view them more than once. First I watch before I do anything; then I review parts in the midst of doing; and lastly I watch it again after I'm done, when I finally understand what they were trying to say. You to rent these videos for one week (it should be longer).
Renting these DVDs is not as cheap as using Netflix, but they are nearly as handy with their postage-paid mail-back carton and clear website. The cost is $10 per rental for a week, which works out to about half or a third or more of what buying them would be. None of these how-to's are available on Netflix, and no where else are they gathered together with such easy search, ordering, and evaluation.
SmartFlix was formerly known as Technical Video Rental; they are currently selling off all their video tapes and only rent DVDs now. The site and service is still young. As more members rent and review these very specialized factual films, this service will increase in value.
-- KK
SmartFlix
$10 per film
Available from SmartFlix
Starfall.com
Remember that greeting card company and famous-in-the-late-90s website Blue Mountain Arts? Well the extremely talented and philanthropic founders have started a learning-to-read website, totally free, called Starfall.com. My daughters, ages 6 and 7, have literally gotten more educational value out of this than their schools. And now their schools are using it in their classes once a week! Super site, makes the most out of flash and audio on a broadband connection, and really a treasure for young kids (aimed at first graders and below) who want to get going with reading (at no cost).
-- Jeff Blackburn
The Aviation Instructor's Handbook
This old-school government manual for flight instructors is the best how-to guide I have come across for teaching, learning, communication and professionalism about any subject. It says almost nothing about aviation, and everything about how to teach. It's called "The Aviation Instructor's Handbook"; the full text is available for free as a PDF download.
-- Ronald Fuller
It's really pretty good. Covers all kinds of pedagogical approaches, and is especially good for teaching material where both head and body skills are needed. Think of it as a general "Instructor's Handbook." Short of signing up for a teacher's degree, I haven't seen anything else as thorough, explicit, and succinct in how to teach teaching.
-- KK
The Aviation Instructor's Handbook
Available from the FAA
Sample excerpts:
Student Tells -- Instructor Does
This is a transition between the second and third steps in the teaching process. It is the most obvious departure from the demonstration-performance technique, and may provide the most significant advantages. In this step, the student actually plays the role of instructor, telling the instructor what to do and how to do it. Two benefits accrue from this step. First, being freed from the need to concentrate on performance of the maneuver and from concern about its outcome, the student should be able to organize his or her thoughts regarding the steps involved and the techniques to be used. In the process of explaining the maneuver as the instructor performs it, perceptions begin to develop into insights. Mental habits begin to form with repetition of the instructions previously received. Second, with the student doing the talking, the instructor is able to evaluate the student's understanding of the factors involved in performance of the maneuver. According to the principle of primacy, it is important for the instructor to make sure the student gets it right the first time. The student should also understand the correct sequence and be aware of safety precautions for each procedure or maneuver. If a misunderstanding exists, it can be corrected before the student becomes absorbed in controlling the airplane.
*
*
Trick questions, unimportant details, ambiguities, and leading questions should be avoided, since they do not contribute to effective evaluation in any way. Instead, they tend to confuse and antagonize the student. Instructors often justify use of trick questions as testing for attention to detail. If attention to detail is an objective, detailed construction of alternatives is preferable to trick questions.
*
Questions containing double negatives invariably cause confusion. If a word, such as "not" or "false," appears in the stem, avoid using another negative word in the stem or any of the responses.
The Cloudspotter's Guide
If weather is your religion, this book is good news. It's the best cloud identification guide I've seen. It's excellence comes in part because great photos of each cloud species have been selected from the world-wide fan club for clouds called the Cloud Appreciation Society. (They also have a great online gallery of unusual cloud photos.) Additional goodness stems from the enthusiastic, clear and lyrical descriptions of the author, who is Chief Cloud Appreciator. Better than anyone else, he's made the reasons behind cloud differences clear to me. I've become more of a cloud connoisseur, able to read the weather a bit better. Finally much of the charm of this book comes from its handsome presentation; the welcoming design is a throwback to an earlier era of bookmaking with clear tables and clear figures.
In short, this is the clearest guide to clouds I've encountered.
-- KK
The Cloudspotter's Guide
Gavin Pretor-Pinney
2006, 320 pages
$5
Available from Amazon
Sample excerpts:
We pledge to fight 'blue-sky thinking' wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day. We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the atmosphere's moods, and can be read like those of a person's countenance.
*
This rare Cirrus formation is known as a Kelvin-Helmholtz wave cloud and can form in the region between shearing winds, moving in different directions.
*
The mamma cloud formations, sometimes known as 'mammatus', are named after the Latin for 'breasts'. As described earlier, these can appear on the underside of a number of different cloud types - Cirrus, Cirrocumulus, Altocumulus, Altostratus, Stratocumulus, and Cumulonimbus - and at their most dramatic look like a field of smooth, globular udders.
They are at their most impressive when wed to a mighty Cumulonimbus. Forming on the underside of its incus, mamma appear when the top of the anvil cools, by radiating heat up into the atmosphere, and parts of it sink into the air below. When this air is relatively warm and humid, some of its water vapour condenses into cloud droplets as it mixes with the cold air. The process is like the reverse of convection currents forming into Cumulus clouds: rather than air warming at the ground level and rising to forum clouds, here air is cooling at the top of the troposphere and sinking to form them.
Mamma tend to be far less dramatic on the other cloud types. On the whole they are only plump, full and abundant when there is a mighty thunderstorm in the vicinity. The more powerful the Cumulonimbus, the more buxom the mamma.
Nolo Self-help Law Books
Nolo Self-help books are written by lawyers. They give clear, no nonsense instructions on how to deal with all sorts of issues, from getting your greencard, incorporating, writing your own will or trust to buying a house. I've used Nolo's books to do two out of that list so far, and am very happy with the results. No lawyer needed! Forms are included on CD-rom, as is excellent website support. Best of all, the books clearly state if and when you should consult a real lawyer. These are tools written by lawyers who are fed up with overcharging customers and making law inaccessible through complex language. Most solutions are common sense, and Nolo tells you how to do it without breaking the bank (or the law).
-- Wouter
I've used these as well, and recommend them. In addition to their admirable paperback books, Nolo Press also offers many of its best-selling titles, like the ones below, in an e-book (PDF) format, so that you can instantly download it if you are in a hurry. Some very specific topics, like Trademark Basics for Naming Your Small Business, are only offered in PDF booklet format. Nolo's free web articles are also extremely helpful. In fact their website is the first place I head when I need an orientation in legal matters.
-- KK
Digital Library Cards
I have constant need for scientific papers, and articles from obscure scholarly journals, or old newspaper clippings. A few years ago I would have trekked to the nearest university library whenever I required a journal article, to search through the stacks of bound volumes, haul them to the copy room and then xerox my findings. Now I stay at my desk and search through JSTOR, an online depository of the full text of most major scholarly and scientific journals, and download a PDF file of the same paper within minutes. Few academic books are available this way so far, but a surprising amount of the periodic portion of the digital library is now online.
This vast store of knowledge is found on the Invisible Web -- that part of the WWW that hides behind passwords and subscription fees, and is beyond the grasp of Google (although Google Scholar is working on this). This part of the web holds the databases that professionals and librarians pay to search, and includes the scholarly and scientific journals I crave, as well as marketing and business information, digitized magazines and newspapers, and several hundred of specialized databases built up over the years by fees -- but formerly only available to users at high prices. Very little of this material is available on the free web yet.
There are several ways to get to this stuff as an individual. 1) You can call a public librarian to do the occasional search. 2) You can purchase a subscription to a database vendor for personal access, or 3) You can use a digital library card for web access from your home via your local library system. For most of us, #3 is the way to go.
While coverage varies tremendously by region, it is very much worth your time trying your library system. Local library systems increasingly permit ordinary citizens access into for-pay databases. Our local system, the San Francisco Public Library, offers close to 100 databases remotely (and for free) to library card holders. The only downside for many systems is that you need to be a resident.
In most states, you can get a library card from a public library outside of your county of residence -- as long as you can prove state residence (true for the San Francisco Public Library). Often you will have to go the actual state library in person to pick up your card, but once in hand, you can access the library from the web. Fanatical researchers are known to have a wallet full of library cards from numerous public library systems within their respective states. Some states, Ohio and Michigan being two of the better known, have statewide consortiums of private, corporate and public libraries, which allows you access to the combined services and databases licensing power of them all.
If your local library system does not provide free online access to digital content databases, the cheapest way to get into these expensive databases is to pay for a library card from the New York Public Library. The NYPL offers membership to non-residents of New York, a privilege which also enables you to remotely access its online databases. For a $100 annual membership fee, non-residents will get a card that provides remote access to about 85 of its 300 online databases, although this card sadly does not include the JSTOR database of scientific journals. (New York residents can get the same card for free and obtain the same level of access.)
Another advantage of your digital library card to the NYPL (and others): They offer a rapidly increasing list of good e-books, audio books, and videos available for legal downloading. There's nothing like getting a squeaky-clean free copy of a best-selling "book-on-tape" to port to your mp3 player (but not iPods yet).
The New York Public Library is not the only major library to offer memberships to non-residents. If you live anywhere in California, I recommend getting a library card to the San Francisco Public Library, which is free, and which does give you access to the coveted JSTOR online journals. Only downside: you need to show up at the library in person to get your card.
This then illuminates the great bargain of the New York Public Library membership: you can apply for it online without ever setting foot in New York City, or State. When it ordinarily costs $3-5 to download a single article behind the pay-wall, the hundred dollars is a bargain on a larger research project. Again, you don't have to live in New York to get a card for the NYPL, or to show up to pick it up. You can simply apply online and receive your card through the mail. You do have to show up at the San Francisco Public Library to get theirs. Best is to inquire at your local, state or metro library.
I have a card for both the NYPL and the SFPL so I can access both from my home office. Just last night I was able to delve deep into scholarly journals to answer some questions that nothing on the Google-web could offer.
-- KK (with help from Michele McGinnis)
New York Public Library Card
$100 (non-residents)
Databases available from home
San Francisco Public Library Card
Free to residents
Databases availablefrom home
The Tarantula Keeper's Guide
I'm into very low maintenance "pets." I've got my autonomous brine shrimp and have been looking for other critters I can keep and then abandon on a two-week vacation without external care or worry. I was given two tarantulas that fit the bill.
Tarantulas are big, beautiful, active and fascinating. I feed mine crickets. Since they sit on my desk basking in the warmth of the computers and electronic adapters, they've grown quite large. They burrow, cling, and pounce. Every once in a while they crawl out of their skins and molt. They are far more entertaining than I imagined. That's not too hard because I knew nothing about such creatures.
This wonderful book cured my ignorance. It is the best and most complete of the few volumes on the subject, and far more organized than any of the many web sites. It got me going by answering most of my newbie questions, and hasn't exhausted my spider curiosity since. Like many insects, tarantulas have lives that need books to explain and that can mesmerize readers for hours. This guide serves up natural history and practical how-to instructions for keeping these wonderful arachnids in your home.
-- KK
The Tarantula Keeper's Guide
Stanley A. Schultz, Marguerite J. Schultz
1998, 208 pages
$10
Available from Amazon
Sample excerpts:
Picking up the tarantula
*
How can the right kind be selected? Remember, these creatures don't live for only a few months like hamsters. They will live for years, perhaps for decades. Once purchased, it could be yours for a major portion of your life.
*
Not So Deadly Tarantulas
Virtually every reference is anecdotal with no firm medical evidence or authoritative species identification. There are also allegations that some South American species are dangerously venomous (e.g., one or more Phrixotrichus species); but again, there is little factual evidence, merely unverified anecdotal attempts to impress the gullible tourist with giant spider stories.
Too many people have cried wolf too many times. To say that these authors are skeptical is a vast understatement. With the exception of those listed above, none of the species commonly sold in pet shops are dangerous, and most make safe, reliable pets for the novice. The experienced aficionado may wish to acquire some of the rarer varieties, but is urged to take precautions when handling them until their identity is confirmed and verifiable evidence of the effects of their venom is obtainable. Other than that, neither the enthusiast, roommates, the spouse, nor the mother need worry.
*
The fresh exuvium [shed skin] of Brachypelma emilia. How much of the anatomy can you identify?
Consensus Web Filters
Like a lot of people, I find that the web is becoming my main source of news. Some of the sites I read are published by individuals, but I find the most informative sites are those published by groups of writers/editors/correspondents, including those put out by Main Steam Media (MSM). However for the past three months my main source of "what's new" has been a new breed of website that collaboratively votes on the best links.
This genre does not have an official name yet, but each of these sites supplies readers with pointers to news items that are ranked by other readers. None of these sites generates news; they only point to it by filtering the links to newsy items. Using different formulas they rank an ever moving list of links on the web. The velocity of their lists varies by site, but some will have a 100% turnover in a few days. I check them daily.
This new genre fits into a whitespace between already occupied niches of social web sites. In the established center are the group-produced sites such as Slashdot, BoingBoing, WorldChaning, Huffington Post, to name just four very popular ones, where a very small cast of editors (under a dozen or so) collaboratively filter and annotate the links to other sources. A daring and effective extension of this method was devised by the fantastic group at MetaFilter.Here the editors are a very smart mob of 25,000 users. One by one readers recommend the cool new stuff they find. Their filter is simply the emergent one of their collective discretion and taste; no one votes or ranks links. At the other end of the axis of collaborative filtering is the likes of Google and Yahoo News, which use the entire collaboration inherent in the web and many Googleish algorithms to programmatically generate a list of what's new based on who is linking stuff, the most "important" item at the top.No humans explicitly vote on the items.
These new uncategorized sites, which have emerged this year (and reviewed below), fall in between the positions above. They take the smart mob approach of MetaFilter and add the algorithms of search engines. So, readers themselves vote on the importance of linked items suggested by other readers; these votes are then subjected to a complex formula to produce rankings. The sites use various flavors of algorithms to balance and refine the votes and selection of smart mobs. Or they use the action of tagging or bookmarking a site as a type of vote. Each site uses a different algorithm, yielding slightly different mixes of links, and a different personality. The best sites maintain a balance between providing a sense of what everyone is reading (consensus popularity) and some novel items that not everyone is reading (yet). In the reviews below I try to capture some sense of distinctive style for each site.
How I use these consensus tools: By scanning these lists daily I get a fantastic sense of what the web is reading, and an early glimpse of what will reach the MSM in the next day or so. But most important for me is the large volume of very interesting news that will not become "news." This is the kind of material that is more interesting than random pages but which lacks an appealing hook to place it on the front page of a magazine or even a news website. Often these items are timeless; they don't make the front page because they could be run at any time. But they are more valuable than odd curiosities. Because of the voting, tagging, bookmarking process enough people find the item worthwhile that they rise to notice. What emerges for me is a delightful counter-news, or what we used to call at CoEvolution Quarterly, "news that stays news." I have encountered no other process in the world that is better at surfacing "news that stays news" and "news that will be news" better than these collaborative filtering sites.
I imagine in the near future there will be many dozens, if not hundreds, of tweaks on this scheme. Readers will gravitate to a formula that suits their own personal taste. Inevitably, there'll be some meta-operation that will seek out the overlaps among all the collab-voting sites and extract its own meta-list. Or, eventually, you'll be able to tweak your own mix of others' votes to roll your own collabvote site.
Given the rate of innovation, I'm sure I've missed some already in progress. If you find a new one at all useful, let me know about it.
-- KK
*
Digg
My first stop. I only look at their top stories page, an approach which some devotees find whimpy; true Diggers look at the real-time stream of suggested items before they have too many votes.
*
Reddit
If I had to pick only one of these I would pick Reddit. It gives me the best balance between the lesser-seen and the over-seen. Some folks don't like it because users can down-vote items which may make the list more manipulated. But I feel it brings me a little more variety than Digg. I find I click on more stories here than any other consensus site.
*
NewsVine
I have their science thread bookmarked. It's the best link for breaking science news. And their world news thread is very fine too. (I find the their top story thread to be polluted by popularity.)
*
Fantacular
A new one. Still learning its personality, but so far it delivers fairly techie posts, closer to Slashdot themes. It does not churn as fast as Slashdot or Digg and Reddit.
*
180 News
Good for getting the latest news in the last five minutes. There's no attempt to weed out duplicates, as in say Google News, so you get a raw stream of voted items, many of them the same story reported by different sources. Their technology stream resembles the mix of Fantacular and Digg, but faster. I also like their World News bookmark. It feels like Yahoo or Google news, but still faster.
*
Gather
The type of stories that rise to the top here reminds me of a cross between Reader's Digest and NPR's Weekend Edition -- light, offbeat, humorous, encouraging, sometimes odd, inspiring. If you like a collaborative group hug, this is your place. It's just not me.
*
The above websites use voting to rank links to other sites. Another set of new websites use shared bookmarks to rank links. Delicious was the first well-known shared, or social bookmarking site. As readers bookmark interesting pages they would tag (categorize) and share these bookmarks with other readers through Delicious. The original idea was that one could search bookmarks by tags to find listings of cool sites by subject. But folks discovered that by compiling a list of the most popular shared bookmarks an ever-changing ranked list of sites would also emerge. There are now at least 15 different social bookmarking sites. Some of them provide a ranking of most popularly bookmark pages of the moment. I use this ranking function without bothering with the tagging part of sites.
Del.icio.us
I look at the "popular" page on Delicious. It features 4 or 5 popular links for five sample subjects at one time. The subjects seem to change every few days. There's a lot of action, and the links are generally high quality.
*
Oishii
This is my preferred way to "read" Delicious. It polls the front page of Delicious and posts any item that is bookmarked by at least 30 people. Quick, fast, one page.
*
Blogmarks
I like Blogmarks for one great innovation: they display a thumbnail of the front page of the sites they link to. Why don't all of these sites do that?
*
Blinklist
Blinklist also displays thumbnails of listed sites but not consistently.
*
Furl
Choose the "day" mode, otherwise the list refreshes too slowly.
*
Simpy
A lot of very geeky links, with an occasional keeper.
*
Spurl
Scarce traffic keeps the change in the list slow.
Where There's a Will There's an A
I used this video by Professor Claude Olney of Arizona State University when I was in school. The video is rich with specific hints on getting better grades without working harder. For instance: show up for class, sit in the front row, use your highlighter on items you didn't know instead of the important items, etc. It was a great help to me as an undergrad at MIT (one B and the rest A's). I'm reminded of it now because I'm watching it again with my daughter as she gets started on 9th grade. (We are using the college version although Olney offers versions for high school and grade school.) Bottom line: this video is a fantastic tool for getting better grades, presented with a nice bit of humor.
-- Keith S. Jackson
This an extremely practical set of lessons, with a lot of wisdom and smartness. Although presented in very boring format -- a teacher at a lectern podium -- my high school kids benefited from watching the college version too.
-- KK
Where There's a Will There's an A
How to Get Better Grades (in College)
By Claude Olney
DVD, 161 minutes
$20
Available from Amazon
Or $47 from
Olney Seminars
Also available used (hopefully) from Ebay for $8+
Ebay
Lynda.com
Lynda.com is a great resource for digital-video tutorials of some of the more advanced design tools. You can buy discs or subscribe for $25 a month for Quicktime online access (a real deal). I find the tutorials quite useful--it's fun to see how much more I have to learn even in the programs I have used for a long time (Photoshop for example). It's also instructive to see how others accomplish the same tasks and do it from a completely different angle.
-- Chuck Green
I tried some of the free sample classes streamed on Lynda.com and found that I remembered much more from these movie tutorials than I did from the many guidebooks I usually use. Must be how my brain works. I retain the tip, shortcut, or method long afterwards, which is not true after I am done with most computer manuals. Normally I close the book, and then have to look it up months later when I forget again. If you think visually (and most of the software covered here has a visual basis) then you might find this style of learning superior, as I do. But it is harder to search/find a solution to a specific nagging problem with this online library, because they do not yet have a fine-grained index or search beyond section headings. For expanding your reach with software packages, their subscription deal for online tutorials is a fine bargain; for hunting down a needed fix, I'd use your standard software bible.
-- KK
Ask Metafilter
This is where you go when Google shrugs. A community of 20,000 of the smartest people you know will answer your question. I use Ask Metafilter when I have a question that can't be reduced to a key word search. Say you want to know the name of that song that was played during the closing credits in a science fiction film that begins in a boy's bedroom, or you've been curious what that bumper sticker you keep seeing is, or maybe you need advice about whether you should see a therapist, or a psychologist, or a psychiatrist? You need a human for these inquiries. Ask Metafilter is not great for questions requiring detailed and heavily researched answers. For that use Google Answers for a small fee. What Ask Metafilter is great for, are things that a smart friend could easily answer if only you knew which friend to ask. The Metafilter community is your all-purpose smartest friend.
There is a one-time fee of $5 to join the community in order to post a question (but its free to read). To keep the frantic rate of new questions under control you are limited to asking no more than one a week. (You can answer all you want, and please do.) The quality of answers varies, but in general the tips, referrals and advice are pretty good, and often astoundingly on the mark. For example, here are some fairly typical questions I've asked (with fairly typical answers).
I've tried a couple of other "ask your question" sites on the web and generally their answer to question ratio is so low I've found them worthless. Ask Metafilter has managed to retain its intelligence while scaling up sufficiently to cover all subjects; that's a magical balance.
In fact, even when I don't have a question I find myself reading Ask Metafilter everyday because people will ask questions that I didn't even know I wanted to know until they asked it, and then I realize I've been dying to ask that. It's a true hive mind and it really works.
[Ask Metafilter is one service of the Metafilter community blog. Reading is free. Registration allows you to post questions and answers as well as posts to the other parts of the blog.]
-- KK
Ask Metafilter
$5 registration
IT Conversations
You can hear the best presentations at some of the best high tech conferences without paying large attendance fees and without travel. Just click on over to IT Conversations where you can stream or download keynote speeches, interviews, and talks by the likes of Jeff Bezos, Malcom Gladwell, Tim O'Reilly, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gibson and others in the digital limelight who have recently given talks at high-priced conferences. It's a great service. Audio quality is fine. (This site will soon offer the monthly Long Now Seminar series on long-term thinking I'm involved with.) I hope they can land other fine venues. It's a much more civilized way to keep current. [Suggested by Vincent Crisci]
-- KK
IT Converstaions
Free registration
Sample offering:
David Brin, at Accelerating Change 2004 Conference
Runtime: 00:44:21, 20.3 mb, recorded 2004-11-0
Horizon Evaluation is a process for exploring what threats and opportunities may await us beyond the near term. It can suggest plausible scenarios for science fiction stories. It can also suggest ways to minimize threats and maximize opportunities. It may be particularly relevant for determining where to make investments.
Our civilization has already developed techniques that work well at exploring some sectors of the Possibility Horizon. Nearly all of these techniques rely upon rapid discovery of errors before those errors can prove fatal. Transparency of information flow appears to be the one common element. Only an open society would appear to have a chance of succeeding and taking advantage of the opportunities that lie ahead.
The Teaching Company
The concept is exquisite. Scour the world for the best professors and record their lectures. Paying customers get world-class university courses, at less than world-class university prices, while attending the class at their convenience. I've audited a dozen classes this way (while driving). My favorite so far is Robert Greenberg's celebrated forty-eight lessons on "How to Understand and Listen to Great Music." It was absolutely superb. No, it was stellar. More than a music appreciation class, it was a view of western civilization through music. Professionally recorded, lively, insightful, fast-paced, authoritative, and memorable. What more could you want from college on a cassette? Other favorites have been an overview of Egyptian history taught by a mummy expert and a decent introduction to western philosophy. The Teaching Company catalog lists an eclectic range of other seminars; I'd love to hear recommendations from others. One caveat: these courses seem expensive for many individuals. But they are a) way cheap for college, and b) way cheap by the tape (most courses are at least forty or so tapes; also available on DC, DVD, and other formats). You can also check your library, which is where I borrow mine from, or form a course club to share costs.
-- KK
Zome System
Geodesic structures have always been tricky to mess around with because the vertices have to be precise, which often equals expensive. This reasonably priced system provides highly machined plastic connectors and sufficient highly engineered struts in various lengths to build scores of geodesic forms. The possibilities of shape are open-ended so that even small kids can build with it (struts are color-coded to ease assembly), and yet logical and complex enough that the same components can be used in a high school math or even college engineering classes. They also offer a selection of lesson plans built around this research toy. I had my first "aha" experience of geodesics while building with it: crystals are geodesic!
-- KK
Zome
Kits range in price from $10 for a 72-piece starter kit to $125 for a set with almost 1,000 pieces.
1526 South Pearl Street, Denver, CO 80211, 303-733-2880, 888/966-3386
Zomes are used to teach symmetry, projections, geometry, tilings and mosaics, architectural space frames and truss structures, crystallography, and chemical structures.
The minimum kit makes a cubic structure which can be dunked into soap water to generate soap films
Holes in the connector balls are shape coded to only accept the proper length strut at the correct angle.
A truncated icosahedron, otherwise known as a Buckyball.
Oxymoronica
At the bottom of reality lies a paradox: self-created creation, either the universe or God. This conundrum of self-causation afflicts all life and consciousness and great art. Occasionally the recursive nature of our existence is captured by a simple witty loop. Here is a fine collection of hundreds of highly evolved self-cancelling/self-generating circuits, called oxymoronics. This handsome and intelligent book is classic cybernetics. I use these witticisms as meditative koans.
-- KK
Oxymoronica: Paradoxical Wit & Wisdom From History's Greatest Wordsmiths
Marty Grothe
$11
Amazon
Sample excerpts:
The superfluous is the most necessary.
Voltaire
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
Margaret Mead
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Georg Hegel
We are never prepared for what we expect.
James Michener
To be believed, make the truth unbelievable.
Napoleon Bonaparte
The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions.
Maurice Chapelain
What we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.
Sydney J. Harris
When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.
Henry David Thoreau
Always be sincere, even if you don't mean it.
Harry S. Truman
Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable.
Oscar Wilde
War is a series of catastrophes which result in a victory.
Georges Clemenceau
First I dream my painting, then I paint my dream.
Vincent van Gogh
We are confronted by insurmountable opportunities.
Walt Kelly, From Pogo
A man chases a woman until she catches him.
Anonymous
I want peace and I'm willing to fight for it.
Harry S. Truman
Study the past, if you would divine the future.
Confucius, in Analects
Love is a kind of warfare.
Ovid
All works of art should begin...at the end.
Edgar Allan Poe
An oxymoron has been wisely described as "a compressed paradox." Looking at it the other way around, I think of a paradox as "an extended oxymoron." To me, they're close cousins because they both link up contradictory or incongruous elements. And they both play around in the most fascinating way with the difference between literal truth and figurative truth. For this reason, I include both oxymoronic and paradoxical observations (and a few others, as you shall soon see) under the rubric of oxymoronica.
French in Action
French In Action is a video-based course created by Pierre Capretz of Yale University. I know of no better way to rapidly obtain a knowledge of day-to-day French. This course is so excellent it almost justifies the invention of television.
The French in Action course is focused around 52 half-hour video lessons which assume you have no prior knowledge of the language. The course starts in French from the first instant. You may feel like an idiot at first, but the fact is you can mess up genders, adjectival forms, and much of verb conjugation in French and still be understood perfectly well on the street.
Get this course and play one video per day, each and every day, week in and week out. Just pick a 30 minute time period in your day, and work your way through the videos from number 1 through number 52, one per day. When you get to the end, go back to the beginning and start over again. Repeat until you understand perfectly and have ceased to improve. Even if you don't have time to read the accompanying text, or practice with the workbooks, or use the audio cassettes, make the 30 minute slot for the video a permanent part of your life. The first time through you'll probably miss about 90% at first hearing. The second time, you'll get about half, and by the third time you'll understand almost everything. Your very progress provides strong reinforcement as you follow the course. Simply by watching this series of 52 videos through two times, you could parachute into Abidjan and get along in day to day life from the moment you hit the ground. It's that good. Really.
-- John Walker
French in Action
Streaming video on demand, click the "VoD" button following each segment
DVD purchase
For library borrowing see note in Destinos.
Destinos
Based on a recommendation from John Walker, founder of AutoDesk, now living in a French-speaking part of Switzerland, I tried out the French in Action series. It is all that he promises. I was amazed how far I got so quickly merely by watching and responding to this series of ever deepening complexity. The key to progress is the vivid visuals, body language and corny involvement that the videos cultivate.
Inspired by the French method, however, I sought out a Spanish equivalent and found it in Destinos. Like French in Action, Destinos is a highly structured, highly-evolved video program based on an innovative professor's work, and published by the Annenberg Foundation. In Destinos, you again start off with no Spanish and very rapidly become sucked into a long Spanish telenovela. The story is cleverly designed to start basic and steadily leverage in sophisticated terms, so that by the 52nd show you can understand nearly everything in the first show. And then you start over.
Having gone through both courses, there are some differences. In French in Action you get a wild-haired French professor gesturing emphatically to convey weird French grammar, while cute little clips from French movies repeat a phrase in many voices so you can get used to hearing it spoken live. And the love story that forms the backbone narrative is heavily diagrammed in a French logical way. Destinos, on the other hand, is more relaxed and focuses almost exclusively on a very high-production detective mystery/soap opera which was filmed in 5 countries on 3 continents. It is easy to let yourself get hooked on the story, even though you are only catching 10% of it. Because Spanish is less distant to English speakers, there is less emphasis than the French on grammar and pronunciation. Destinos is more casual, go with the flow and you'll pick it up, while French in Action is more pedagogical and well... French.
The ideal way to learn a language is immersion, where you are forced to both listen, speak and read. Because of the nature of this medium -- a series of videos -- listening is the primary action stressed, although both programs give plenty of opportunity for reading and speaking. At the end of even the third time through your fluency will be primarily in comprehension -- but you'll be in a great position to take it much further very fast.
Both of these programs share another very important feature; both are funded by Annenberg/CPB, a non-profit promoting innovation in schools. Recognizing the value of educational videos, Annenberg has funded the purchase of these series for public libraries. This means that almost every library system in the US has a copy of the series.
These shows are also occasionally broadcast on PBS so you can set your TiVo to capture them. Some local PBS stations conveniently run the series consecutively on a few nights to make them easier to tape.
They are outrageously expensive to purchase: $500 for the series of 12 DVDs and $400 for 14 VHS tapes. DVDs could be a good deal for those traveling to Spanish or French speaking lands, where the videos are extremely effective with local practice.
However, if you don't mind sitting in front of your computer you can get a completely free video stream of either Destinos or French in Action from the Annenberg website.
Me? I borrowed mine from the library.
In a perfect world, someone wise would fund a similar well-crafted soap opera language series in Chinese for learning Mandarin, which is only spoken by 1 billion or so people. Or Arabic, Swahili, German, and so on.
In the meantime, buena suerte, or bonne chance!
-- KK
French in Action
Streaming video on demand, click the "VoD" button following each segment
DVD purchase
Destinos
Streaming video on demand, click the "VoD" button following each segment
DVD purchase
Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers
This is one of those hefty references you don't need to own; you just need to know where to find it. It's like an oracle; if you want to know what some obscure mathematical concept or theorem is (What's a Cantor Set?), you go here. The book has wit and humor; you'll need persistence.
-- KK
Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers
Jan Gullberg
1997, 1,093 pages
$34
W.W. Norton
Amazon
Excerpts:
A cycloid is the curve generated by a point on the circumference of a circle which rolls on a straight line in its plane.
The Conical Helix
The conical helix is a three-dimensional curve formed as if lying on a right circular cone, where it cuts the generators of the surface at a constant angle a.
Kid Pix
Still my favorite graphics program. It's more fun than Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes! Why can't Photoshop make cool sounds? Someday I'd like to do an entire comic using Kid Pix; it's that good.
-- Scott McCloud
Kid Pix Deluxe 3rd Edition
Macintosh or Windows
2000, $13
The Learning Company
Amazon
The Complete Home Learning Source Book
Herein is the richest trove of home schooling and self-educational resources I've seen anywhere. Thousands of textbooks, software, games, journals, and books--all gallantly reviewed and evaluated by a homeschool mom who must never sleep.
-- KK
The Complete Home Learning Source Book
Rebecca Rupp
1998, 865 pages
$20
Amazon
Excerpts:
The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbooks
I know these are supposed to be joke books, but they contain sensible answers to sensible questions. Why not rehearse the solution to a worst case scenario if it ups your chances of survival even a few percent?
-- KK
The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel
Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht
2001, 190 pages, $10
Amazon
The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook
Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht
1991, 176 pages, $10
Amazon
Both from Chronicle Books
San Francisco
Excerpt:
How to Jump from a Moving Train
Stuff blankets, clothing, or seat cushions underneath your clothes. Wear a thick or rugged jacket if possible. Use a belt to secure some padding around your head, but make certain you can see clearly. Pad your knees, elbows, and hips.
Cover and protect your head with your hands and arms, and roll like a log when you land. do not try to land on your feet. Keep your body straight and try to land so that all parts of your body hit the ground at the same time. You will absorb the impact over a wider area. if you land on your feet, you will most likely break your ankles or legs. Do NOT roll head over heels as if doing a forward somersault.
*
How to Fend off a Shark
Hit back. If a shark is coming toward you or attacks you, use anything you have in your possession - a camera, probe, harpoon gun, your fist - to hit the shark's eyes or gills, which are the areas most sensitive to pain. Make quick, sharp, repeated jabs in these areas. Sharks are predators and will usually only follow through on an attack if they have the advantage, so making the shark unsure of its advantage in any way possible will increase your chances of survival. Contrary to popular opinion, the shark's nose is not the area to attack, unless you cannot reach the eyes or gills. Hitting the shark simply tells it that you are not defenseless.
*
How to Perform a Tracheotomy
This procedure, technically called a cricothyroidotomy, should be undertaken only when a person with a throat obstruction is not able to breath at all - no gasping sounds, no coughing - and only after you have attempted to perform the Heimlich maneuver three times without dislodging the obstruction. If possible, someone should call for paramedics while you proceed.
Country Wisdom Bulletins
All you need to learn about a subject can often be reduced to a phamplet. Why fill a book with yet another 20 examples? Country Wisdom has been dispensing pithy brochures of country living how-to for 30 years, but now they have a nifty new distribution model which keeps customer costs low. Go to the Simple Living website and for a few bucks each you can download a PDF file of your preferred bulletin. Print it out yourself, or if you are really cheap, read it on the screen. Note to other publishers: a new economy business is alive and kicking here.
�KK
Country Wisdom Bulletins
PDF downloads
$4 each
The Simple Living Network, Inc.
509-395-2323
800-318-5725
Google Answers
I drive an old van, my socks have holes, and I cut my own hair -- but I employ a personal full-time research librarian as the only employee in my home office. I can't tell you how fantastic this luxury is. When I have questions, Michele McGinnis has answers. I rarely stump her. Within minutes or at best hours, anything I want to know (that is known) is handed to me. How many songs are written each year? What's the best place to rent an inflatable jumper? The price of eggs in 1000 AD? Best introduction to process theology? Source of an Einstein quote? The phone number for this cartoonist? Where to see a digital projection of the Matrix? As I confess, having a researcher an elbow away is an outright luxury, one I realize not everyone needs.
What *you* might need are a few deeply researched answers every now and then, of the same quality as Michele, a degreed research librarian, might provide. I have a solution for you: Google Answers.
You post your question on Google Answers and (this is key) the amount of money you are willing to pay someone to answer it. One of 500 Google-approved researchers will then claim it and answer it within four to eight hours, depending on how much you have offered. Generally they won't touch a hard question for less than $10, but many questions are answered very thoroughly for only $10. A higher bid will usually ensure your query is tackled immediately and completely.
Past questions and their answers are archived on the site so you have a clear idea of the quality of the research and some idea of how best to cast your question. Reading the postings reveals how amazingly complete an answer one can get for only a few dollars. A study by Cornell librarians determined that the answers from Google Answers were about as good on average as they would have provided. They note however, as you might expect, that Google Reasearchers primarily work from the web, and so questions that require fee-based searches, or any legwork in a library suffer from lower quality than a librarian would give you.
But this is a buyers market. There are more great Researchers than there are good questions, so even $4 Google questions get snapped up. (Sadly, researchers do not get paid if the questioner is unhappy with their answer for any reason.) I can assure you, a few questions a day at that rate will be a bargain compared to hiring a full-time researcher.
For most people, Google Answers is all you need.
--KK
[Recommended by Tom Ferguson]
A Guide to Oriental Classics * The New Lifetime Reading Plan
Now that you have finished reading all the great books of the West, you might want to turn your attention to the rest of the world. There is an equally vast and equally great classical literature in what is known as the East. Few of these works make it onto the lists of Best Books Ever; furthermore, guides to this wing of the universal library are rare. Given our interdependence with other cultures, introductions to this literary realm are vital and urgent.
For simple reading lists (sometimes the most enjoyable way to enter) I direct you to Robert Teeter's Great Books Lists, a handy website which convenes in one spot all the published lists of oriental (and western) classics. For a more annotated guide, with proper orientation of where you might want to head, I would start with A Guide to Oriental Classics, from Columbia University Press. The third edition of this indispensable work incorporates many works only recently translated into English, as well as an expanded number of secondary readings and glosses. I can�t think of any major works in the four regions of the Islamic world, India, China, and Japan that are not covered here. With each work you get a very short description and � very handy! � annotated pointers to available translations.
For a more contextual inclusion, I find The New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman to be superb. This revised and expanded fourth edition of his venerable book now covers many more eastern classics than in his previous editions. The list of eastern works is still way too short, but he offers them with two advantages. Because his plan is organized chronologically, one gets a better sense of how an eastern work relates to the West, and secondly, for each work he spends a few pages outlining to the reader its importance and a summary of its content, which A Guide to Oriental Classics does not. You�ll get a better perspective from his select list, but you�ll have more of an adventure with the Columbia University roster.
A Guide to Oriental Classics
Edited by Theodore De Bary
1989, 325 pages
$79
Columbia University Press
Amazon
The New Lifetime Reading Plan
The Classic Guide to World Literature, Revised and Expanded
Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major
1998, 378 pages
$11
Harper Perennial
Amazon
