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!
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I attended a much-anticipated talk at CMU by Dr. Vonda Wright of UPMC in McConomy Auditorium, given to the CMU community as a keynote lecture for the CMU Fitness Challenge I participate in.
“Dr. Wright is an orthopedic surgeon at UPMC and an author and researcher. She focuses on the master athlete and living a healthy lifestyle, having conducted extensive research on the benefits of remaining active throughout one’s lifetime.”
It was a fascinating and inspiring talk! Dr. Wright was a high-energy speaker, very passionate and direct. She spoke on many topics, actually, not just about physical exercise. And she spoke frankly about personal experiences in her life.
Read On →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:
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?
Read On →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
My goals in telling my story:
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.
Read On →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.
Read On →In October 2011, Stanford University broke new ground by offering three free online computer science courses:
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.
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I was in my basement looking for stuff and happened to find three of my childhood flute books:
Here are my memories of my usage of these books and how I might use them now, three decades later.
Read On →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 practitioners, 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.
Read On →Today I decided to do some treadmill running, since I was going to the gym to do some strength training anyway, so I did just two miles of running as a “warmup” there, using my Bikila LS shoes.
I don’t much like treadmills, so why did I deliberately plan to run on one?
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