Yeah. I'm doing really well with Spanish in Duolingo. And I am horrible at sewing, which I never learned as a younger person and am really failing to learn now.
I opted for Language Transfer over Duolingo because it is strictly audio, so I can do it in the car while I commute. I haven't ever tried Duolingo, but between standard (IB) high school Spanish and Language Transfer, the pedagogy of learning another language has vastly improved.
Duolingo is local, plus this is the first I heard of Language Transfer.
I hate Duolingo for not having Persian (which I've studied before in college but it's rusty and I'd like to brush up and take it further), a language with over 130 million speakers and one of the world's richest bodies of literature and some of the greatest cinema as well but it does have Klingon and fucking High Valyrian.
5 made me double take until I looked and found Iran has had like 30 million babies since the last time I checked.
I've had to relearn some multivariable calculus to help HS senior with his homework. I did well with it 25 years ago, but didn't use it for so long there are a lot of gaps. Still I was able to work through coordinate system conversions, and I did remember dot and cross products for the most part. Haven't gotten to eigenvectors yet but I think I can recall some of that. All the damn trig functions and identities, though- the parts you can reason through are fine but the memorization kills me.
6 Also Tajik and Dari are basically Persian
If you use the complex definitions of trig functions, then you can replace all the memorization with annoying algebra!
10 is the way!
Or if only one angle ever appears you can do the rational change of coordinates (cos x --> (1-t^2)/(t^2+1) and sin x --> 2t/(t^2-1)) and it becomes different annoying algebra.
https://mathnow.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/a-rational-parameterization-of-the-unit-circle/
I'm wondering myself how I'll do at helping oldest kid when she takes calculus in a couple years. Maybe I'll secretly review it between now and then and impress the family with my memory powers.
Find the right podcast and their admiration will be putty in your hands!
8- I think they get to it in the spring when they do some linear algebra. They're doing matrix math now so it's being set up.
I think my problem with learning things as an adult is less a lack of quickness and aptitude and more a function of time and resources. I don't seem to be markedly slower but I sure as hell don't have the time to be a novice at anything.
13: sin needs a plus in the denominator.
Holy mackerel I can't learn anything compared to my 17 year old. Every time I try something (getting a little better at piano for example) he sees me and in a few hours gets farther than I get in a month. I'm always looking over my shoulder. So unlike Cala I have the time but not the sponginess. Hanging on to old aptitudes as best I can.
That's why you're supposed to find something you already kinda know. It goes so much better!
Two weeks ago I started to learn archery, and I think I'm picking it up fairly quickly. We shall see.
I kept breaking arrows by shooting them into the wooden frame holding the hay bales behind the target.
Yes, I can also pick arrows up quickly.
If you can pass a very easy archery test and a background check, you can shoot deer in our park. But not during the afternoon when the kids might see it.
21 I did Korean archery for a couple of years here a few years ago, it was a lot of fun.
It is a delight and you get to feel like a goddamn genius to spring to life so readily.
This sounds so nice! I would love to go back to Russia and refresh my language from college. But that's not in the cards anytime soon. Plus, it would certainly break my Italian which I have acquired (slowly) in middle age (and on).
A few times in archery I've split a wooden arrow sticking in a target with another arrow. I'd like to claim that I actually was aiming to do that, but...
All the places I've done archery they don't let us use arrows sharp enough to do that.
I dd archery for a couple of years in my teens because a friend was going and his Dad wanted to take a few of his friends with him for company. I turned out I was quite good at it--relative to other 13-15 year olds in my club, not relative to any higher standard--but I had to stop because at a certain point you had to buy your own equipment rather than hire it from the club, and we just couldn't afford it at the time.
I'd really love to try it again, either just ordinary target archery or some kind of style (longbow, various East Asian styles, etc). When I've picked up a bow to shoot with my son at various historical reenactment type events I've still be reasonably OK compared to the median "Dad" in the same group.
There's at least one longbowman in the club I'm training with, and a guy who shoots a Central Asian horse bow (small but scarily powerful). They start you off on what I guess is a generic bow - synthetic material, recurve, long rod, 35-40lb draw - and recommend that you do a year of that to sort out the basic skills before getting into the specialist bows. Much like when you're learning to shoot a rifle they start you on iron sights and only move you up to optics later.
There are also apparently residential courses where you build your own longbow and take it home at the end, which sounds very tempting.
Clearly the next Unfoggedcon needs to be at Agincourt or somewhere. Sherwood Forest.
re: 30
Yeah, most of the local clubs around me do a 6 to 8 week beginner's course where you use a standard generic recurve type just like that. After that you can continue to hire a similar bow and pay a slightly higher fee for each session, or you can buy your own.
I like the idea of all of those kinds of "combat" sports: archery, fencing, various weapon-based martial arts, as they have all of the things I used to like about doing martial arts without some of the worse elements as no-one is under any illusions that being good at bonking people with a long bamboo stick makes them "hard". I was an OK fencer* at one point--Oxford, so the coach was the British Olympic foil coach at the time--but I'm too overweight and my knees are too fragile to give it a serious go at the moment.
* I fenced in the novice Blues match, for fencers who had less than 2 years of experience.
I am finding it very interesting because I've spent so long (the last thirty-six years, I guess, thinking about it) learning various sorts of firearm shooting, and archery is fascinatingly similar in many ways and fascinatingly completely different in others.
There's at least one longbowman in the club I'm training with, and a guy who shoots a Central Asian horse bow (small but scarily powerful).
When I was doing Korean archery there was one guy, a native Fremen, who would come to the class but used his own very expensive Mongolian recurve bow which uses a completely different shooting technique; he was also an accomplished equestrian and told me he often practiced shooting from horseback. He longed for the steppe and the horde.
re: 34
This might be up your street, Barry. I've been reading Christopher Beckwith's "The Scythian Empire" which is an interesting read, but which has a strong whiff of eccentricity/tinfoilhat about it. His basic thesis is that the Scythians are at the root of basically everything in the entire compass of the Persian Empire, western China, etc. There are places where my alarm bells start ringing because he seems to take evidence that's very slim and read quite large conclusions from it, or simultaneously take Herodotus as gospel when he agrees with Beckwith's theory, and to be ignored when he does not.
The thesis seems to be that the core of religious thought from Zoroastrianism through Buddhism, and the core political culture and bureaucratic organisation that is there from the Medes through the Persians, Alexander, etc is also basically entirely Scythian.
35 I love some wild historical crackpottery, like Allegro's Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, though the Beckwith sounds a little more grounded.
Michael Keaton may be a comet that returns to near where the Whole Foods used to be every 31 years.
I've been thinking about responding here. Odile and I took a basketweaving class back in the early part of the year and I am completely addicted. I think I've only made five more baskets but that's because I resist the urge and haven't budgeted the money or space more supplies and eventual baskets would need. But I bought some to fill in our chainlink gate and I haven't really seen people do that online but don't see why not.
I took to this very quickly but I think it's a combination of pushing myself hard in certain respects paired with doing enough needle crafts that I have instincts about tension and shaping and so on that apparently other beginners don't. On the other hand, this seems so easy that maybe it shouldn't count for anything? But simultaneously I've messed up my cervical vertebrae enough that I can't always feel or use my thumb and fingers well without extreme pain, so that's also a deterrent from doing anything I enjoy. I'm waiting to see if the new kind of spinal injection I got last week will work and I think it will because I'm not in pain when I wake up, only by midafternoon. So maybe that will keep improving? And then I absolutely have celebratory basket plans.
I reviewed my data set and now believe that Michael Keaton has an orbit of just under thirty years. He was in Shadyside in November 1994 and in East Liberty in September 2024. So now we wait for July 2054.
But I will remain
I'll be back again and again and again and again and again and again.