Oops! Apparently I've accidentally deleted all of my images. I'll see about fixing that soon.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Talk Nerdy To Me

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.” ~Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature ofScience, 1954

I'm having a birthday. A such I'm going to talk about whatever I want today. (As if that's different from any other day haha)

So these are some of the things I've been finding myself interested in lately:

In case I hadn't mentioned previously, I've been trying to further my education here at home via the internet.  Part of what I'm learning is new to me, and part of it is re-learning old things I've learned before. (I had the worst Calculus teacher ever in HS and since I learned it wrong then I struggled with it in college. At this point it's been long enough I don't have to un-learn before I can re-learn the concepts and, amazingly, I'm actually understanding it pretty well this time.)  I'm using a variety of resources for each of the topics I'm learning including textbooks, MIT and Stanford free online courses, and a really helpful site called Sophia. (Go check it out. No really, I'll wait. Go.)


Sophia.org





I can't stop watching this:

This is just a preview - click through to the Animated Factorization Diagram for full awesomeness


For those of you that get sucked into watching and watching and watching it, you should know that it tops out at 10,000. I swear if I was going to start memorizing prime numbers I'd use this to do it.

And then there's this (not so happy) thing that I found.  If you click through to this study that shows Fashion's reliance on slave labor you can use the up and down arrows on the right (it didn't seem intuitive to me how to see the details of the report, but if you scroll down it's all there) you can see that for the companies monitored, each has been given a letter grade and the subsequent pages detail how they came to those conclusions.



On a happier note, this little Dachshund, Jasper, is part of a trial where they took cells from his nose and used it to give him function back in his hind end after a spinal cord break. That's awesome. And there's an interesting discussion about it over at It's Okay To Be Smart.


I've also been reading a lot over at a blog called Made by Hand. I'm not diving into men's suits just yet but it is fascinating and I feel like I'm learning a lot about construction and finishing.

via Made by Hand

On a sort of happy/sad note, recently the east coast of the United States was hit with a storm for which many places were unprepared.  The floodwaters that swept through New York and New Jersey have left a lot of people in some desperate circumstances, especially with the rather sudden onset of colder temperatures just after the the hurricane came through.  I know a lot of people have a lot of different views on FEMA (esp after New Orleans) and of the government's role in disaster relief and cleanup in general, but let's not forget that those people out there trying to help are individual people.

photo via mikeroweworks.com

My friend has spent the last month sleeping in cramped quarters on a boat and spent the holiday away from family (though her husband drove all the way out there to be with her on Thanksgiving) so she could work umpteen hours a day to help people out.  She's not a firefighter, an EMT, or an electrical repairman; she's with FEMA.  

photo via my friend's mobile
People have finally gotten used to the concept in this country that even if you don't support the politics behind whatever wars, you still treat the individual servicemen and women kindly. This is just a reminder that that should go for your other workers as well: the cable guys, the electricians, the plumbers, and the FEMA workers on the ground.

I hope it's ok that I posted this!

Well, I guess that's about it. I'm going to go eat some of the giant doughnut-shaped chocolate cake my husband baked for me and finish listening to Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals while I work on some holiday gift sewing.

If you haven't read the Discworld series, you really should.

Have a great day!

2 comments:

  1. Happy Birthday, Kimberly. Thank you so much for your visits to my blog.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Cennetta. I know I don't comment a lot but I always enjoy seeing what you're working on :)

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