Yesterday, Abby and I finished the third and final session of “A Garden Primer”, a basic course on organic gardening offered by Grow Pittsburgh. We took this course because we would like to start our own little urban garden.

As an utter beginner with no experience, I thought the course was a very useful and friendly introduction to organic gardening.

In the past couple of months, I’ve made some large changes in my diet. Fundamentally, I’ve moved in a paleo direction. The largest change was breakfast, where I completely gave up my old breakfast and replaced it. After some experimentation, I’ve finally arrived at a breakfast template that seems optimal for me (as gauged by my morning energy level and other criteria I discuss below).

As an example, here is what I ate this morning:

The ingredients, and what has changed, and why:

On Saturday, Abby and I went for the first time to the latest meeting of a local French traditional social dance workshop and dance here in Pittsburgh.

It was a lot of fun!

Today, I was very sad to see a news article Children’s science questions “stump many parents”. I was not sad for any of the following reasons:

• Oh no, kids these days are receiving a poor science education!
• Oh no, the parents received a poor science education when they were young!

I was sad because of many of the parents’ reactions to their children’s questions:

…16% told their children to ask their partner and a fifth made up a response or pretended that no one knew the answer.

What are some better alternative responses?

Some months ago, when the legendary computer scientist John McCarthy died, I wrote a blog post in which I briefly reminisced about the way I hated computer programming before I came to love it. Today I am filling in some more details about how school (elementary school through college) made me fear, misunderstand, and hate computer science and programming. I am inspired to do this because

• Just a few weeks ago, I came across an old article from 1992 by someone who had a similar experience, and I wanted to complete my story. Although my story also goes back more than two decades, I feel that the same fundamental stumbling blocks exist to the universal computational competence that I now advocate.
• The topic of learning “coding” has exploded into the popular media, with hundreds of thousands of people having signed up for Code Year and even New York Mayor Bloomberg stating that he has signed up for the free Codecademy online tutorial courses.

My goals in telling my story:

• I want to raise awareness among those who might this year be jumping into “coding” that they might encounter the same kinds of stumbling blocks that discouraged me at first, so that they don’t prematurely jump to such conclusions as “programming is boring and confusing” or “programming requires special talent I don’t have”.
• I want for educators to take note of the barriers facing students who may not be “naturals” to understanding computation or writing computer programs in the context of currently common programming environments.

In a forthcoming article, I will engage in a severe critique of the Codeacademy lessons I have so far examined and gone through, while helping my wife learn programming from scratch.

Yesterday I wrote about my experience with completing, in fall 2011, the free online Stanford course Introduction to Databases. Today I am writing about my experience with completing Machine Learning.

This course was different in many important ways from the databases course.

In October 2011, Stanford University broke new ground by offering three free online computer science courses:

• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
• Introduction to Databases
• Machine Learning

Curious, I signed up for all three of the courses, since I had never taken a course in any of these three subjects.

Because I was not enjoying the AI course and did not expect to find it so useful, I dropped it after completing all the assignments in the first week or two.

Here I report on the databases course. I will follow up with a report on the machine learning course.

A while back I heard about a “100 Up” workout for runners to improve their form and performance but filed it away without checking it out. I assumed it was gimmicky. But I finally looked it up, and it is actually utterly simple, yet challenging.

Well, I’m going to take up the challenge of doing it for 30 days in a row. I’ll fire off a single tweet each day after I complete the “100 Up” for the day.

How about joining me?

I was in my basement looking for stuff and happened to find three of my childhood flute books:

• Belwin Band Builder part 1
• Rubank Intermediate Method: Flute or Piccolo
• Marcel Frank’s 95 Classical Tunes For The Flute

Here are my memories of my usage of these books and how I might use them now, three decades later.

For years now, I’ve noticed that when people find out that I do yoga, they often say something like

I tried yoga once and I got hurt. I thought it was supposed to be relaxing.

Today I read an article, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body”. I urge anyone who currently does yoga, or is thinking about starting it, to read this article. It discusses cases of quite serious injury in yoga practitioner, including instructors, and reveals a world of danger that many may not be aware of, given how popular and hip yoga has become in the past decade or two.

I’m not a yoga instructor, and I’m also not a fanatic yoga devotee, but since I once did yoga every other day for a couple of years, and found it extremely, astoundingly beneficial, I’d like to share some ideas on how I have managed to avoid being injured by yoga. I’ll also discuss related issues with Pilates and sitting meditation.