subjects you would like to learn more about, but aren't sure where to start (and an open invitation for ilxor help)

1. higher mathematics (esp. calculus)
2. the baha'i faith
3. computer programming languages
4. quantum theory (kinda goes w/ no. 1)
5. 16th/17th century transcendental english poetry

all but #2 seem at least somewhat dependent on prerequisite knowledge.

you're going to have to learn a lot more than calculus to understand quantum theory

that's what i'm asking!

well, do you know algebra?

i have a decent grasp of it, yes. it's been a while since i've flexed those muscles, though.

1. choreography and contemporary dance
2. fingerstyle guitar

personally if you're interested in getting into math imo the most fun path (assuming you are doing this as a hobby or for kicks) will not be the one that leads you quickest to understanding quantum theory. abstract algebra would be my suggestion for a good fun thing to study casually that has little to no prerequisite knowledge necessary & a lot of very mind-blowing results throughout & from early on

agreed, abstract algebra is dope

1. higher mathematics (esp. calculus)
3. computer programming languages

― crisp apple morning (clouds), Friday, October 12, 2012 12:55 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus: If you add up all the tiny changes in a function over an interval, you get the function back. The rest is commentary.

By 3 do you mean you want to learn how to program? There's approximately a billionty ways of going about this.

The first step in learning to program though is to be able to touch-type quickly. Can you type at least 60wpm? That's probably a minimum.

2. the baha'i faith

I believe that ILX's own thelategreat knows about this. At least I think he does.

You both think and believe it!

Sorry I just love language sometimes.

Oh you know what I meant!

I know, isn't it great?

I bethink myself

The first step in learning to program though is to be able to touch-type quickly. Can you type at least 60wpm? That's probably a minimum.

― www.toilet-guru.com (silby), Friday, October 12, 2012 5:24 PM (52 minutes ago)

yes

this is what wikipedia is for

wikipedia is shit

no it isn't

you're going to have to learn a lot more than calculus to understand quantum theory

Rubbish, my maths is basically high school level but I managed to write a philosophy dissertation on quantum shit. You can understand a good deal without any maths at all - start with the double slit experiment.

Wikipedia is often shit for layperson explanation of technical topics.

to take one example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_Faith

this is a featured article on wikipedia, i.e. one of the best articles the project has produced. if you want to know about the baha'i faith there is no better place to start.

wikipedia is very good for math fwiw, maybe moreso if you are even the slightest bit immersed, but it is really good & jumping from topic to linked related topic is an instructive & really fun way to learn much moreso than a more linear, textbook-based approach. i waste a lot of time that i should be spending doing math assignments going on endless wikipedia tangents

OK so you can type fast enough for programming not to be intensely frustrating.

It's hard to get comfortable with programming if you're not at least a little bit comfortable with the command line. So in addition to picking a text editor (something like Notepad++ on Windows or TextWrangler on a Mac or Gedit on Linux or nano or vim or emacs on anything) you should know how to move around in the filesystem in the command line for your OS. (Dos prompt, Terminal on a mac, etc.)

There's lots of ways to learn to program. Here's a slightly old but from what I can recall from working through it still reasonable one:

http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/?Chapter=00

Here's a famous one that MIT used to use but I've never worked through:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

Here's one for a different language:

http://getpython3.com/diveintopython3/

It can take years of dicking around for programming to feel natural. Once you are capable of writing code in your head, you're pretty good at programming.

^^ leaving so much out

xp ledge- yeah i guess i fall into the category of people who are suspicious of philosophers writing about quantum shit without any knowledge of math, but tbh that's just a bias i learned from my roommate who is a physicist who probably picked it up from feynman or someone. anyways, i don't know much about quantum & there are obv interesting philosophical implications of a probalistic model of the universe & stuff

Yeah the animus between physicists and philosophers is famous :) but without even getting into the philosophical side you can learn plenty about the basic principles and implications with v little maths. Feynman said the double slit experiment contains the *only* mystery of quantum mechanics and you can get the idea of that with no equations at all.

i second 'choreography/contemporary dance'

http://www.codecademy.com/
this site might be useful for beginning programming. really tho where you want to start with programming depends on what you ultimately want to do with it. i guess on that site it would be best to start with javascript, which is fairly easy, formally similar to a lot of other languages, and will give you fun/interesting results pretty quickly.

I have mixed feelings about KA but I liked these videos:

http://www.khanacademy.org/cs

i would also like very much to learn more about choreography and dance. i used to know a bunch of performance artists doing work that was informed by the experimental dance tradition but the extent of my knowledge is basically the fact that yvonne rainer exists. and that her autobiography has a great title (“feelings are facts”) and i want to read it.

The best way to learn about programming languages is to do some programming in a particular language. Like any language, you would need to start at zero and build from there, with the equivalent of C-A-T means "cat" (or C-H-A-T means "chat" or K-A-T-Z-E-N means "katzen", etc). In programming, this is traditionally done by writing a program that prints "Hello world." on the computer screen.

In choosing which programming language to begin with, you should evaluate how available it is to you (free is nice) and whether it was designed as a language for novices. For a very long time, BASIC was the obvious choice, because Microsoft included a free BASIC interpreter with their OS. Lately, perl has made big strides as a place where people start out.

Next you need a compiler or interepreter to work with. Each program you write is only a text file when you write it. An interpreter is a program that reads your text file and directly controls the computer to perform the commands you have written. A compiler is a program that reads your text file and recreates it as an executable file; when the executable file is run, it directly controls the computer to perform the commands you wrote. When people think of "computer programs", they normally think of executable files.

Once you've chosen your language and found an interpreter or compiler for it, go find a forum like ILE where programmers talk about programming. Also, read the manual; it probably will have a tutorial. If you chose a language often used by beginners, the tutorial will probably be aimed at your level of ignorance.

There. That'll occupy you for a few days at least.

yo plax by fingerstyle do you mean picking or what even tho i can't tell you anything about it even tho i can do a lil bit if asked so idk hi tho

what's that site that gives you little programming tasks?

here's a popular one!

http://projecteuler.net/problems

ya thats the one, so cool

i feel like the late great could basically answer all of the OP's questions

thanks, some v useful answers here.

Mine ATM:

1) Math of the kind used in finance (I guess this would be calculus and the like) and also statistics
2) General handyman stuff around the house / the basics of home construction (the kind of shit the Ubell bros talk about on Leonard Lopate)
3) The inner-workings of automobiles
4) non-beginner NFL stuff, like actual plays

I guess I'm on some kind of MAN kick

yo plax by fingerstyle do you mean picking or what even tho i can't tell you anything about it even tho i can do a lil bit if asked so idk hi tho

― Randy Carol (darraghmac), Friday, 12 October 2012 19:49 (1 hour ago)

it means i want to play like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43-UUeCa6Jw

hi yrself

lol i realise this is somewhat ambitous

-how to make chewy crepes. (every recipe on the net is how to make french-style crepes)
-how to make bouncy ball over song lyrics in videos
-how to sync videos in multi-cut audio collages without doing each one individually

(i suppose all those things are a subset higher math)

For chewy crepes maybe try Swedish Pancake recipe?

The one i just looked up described Swedish Pancake as light and fluffy. I wonder if it's some tapioca powder or something that makes chewy crepes chewy.

Plax, what is your current level on guitar (e.g. what repertoire can you play)?

Can you play e.g. "Blackbird" or "Dust in the Wind"?

did that ilx university thing ever get off the ground? i spend a lot of free time watching open courses videos from fancy universities, just finished one about financial markets. it's really amazing that they give away all this content.

i've played guitar badly for about ten years. i can play most of hearts and bones by paul simon which is probably the most difficult thing i can do but its not all there and i've been cracking at it for like two years. the last thing i learnt was if i needed you by townes van zandt.

i got a math degree and was totally lost in abstract algebra. i don't know how anyone could do it casually. calculus is really fun and you could probably teach yourself after you brush up on algebra and trigonometry. get a used college calc book cheap and look at chapter 1. you're gonna need to start from the beginning with physics if you want to do quantum physics ever, i don't really care about that stuff irl but i liked modern physics class.

i want to know more languages

currently working on learning both japanese and esperanto. recommend getting a good instructive book (the teach yourself and "colloquial [language]" publishers are usually good. also supplementing with pimsleur's comprehensive japanese audio lessons (90 lessons) and a dictionary to learn the basic 2,000 kanji. with esperanto i'm just using teach yourself esperanto and an esperanto dictionary.

after that i would probably get some simple stories or even a reader that progresses in difficulty. there are a few for esperanto but i haven't found one easy enough for someone at my level of proficiency in japanese.

after that i guess the next step is conversation with native speakers?

Two YouTube channels I highly recommend:

Minute Physics: http://www.youtube.com/user/minutephysics - short stick-figure animations about common physics questions.
VI Hart: http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart - blipvert-speed shorts about fractally weird math.

One technique that helped a lot w.r.t. languages was to re-watch movies I was familiar with but with a different language track. I think I learned more from watching The Thing in French a couple times than from a couple weeks worth of podcasts.

I want a good intermediate-and-up level course in electronics. I have the beginner-level stuff down: circuits, Ohm's Law, etc. but want to get to the point where I could build some effect pedals and all that Make Magazine stuff that uses Arduinos, etc.

I tried at the ILX U stuff but it turns out people who know stuff don't nec know how to teach stuff and that listening to someone talk for 45 mins about something you could have learned in 10 has not gotten more palatable since I was actually in college.

I loved loved all 26 episodes of paul fry's introduction to theory of literature (open yale courses). would like to find more stuff like this.

That's something I should maybe actually try. It's possible financial markets was just not my bag.

i asked this once on ILB (i think), but does anyone know a good overview of the history of labor unions? i'm not looking to be professor labor history or anything, but i was hoping someone could recommend a single book, or maybe a pair of texts that complement each other well.

"want to get to the point where I could build some effect pedals and all that Make Magazine stuff that uses Arduinos, etc."
i don't know even the basic stuff, but this sort of thing is doable without even knowing that.

there doesn't seem to be a way to "dabble" in architecture without turning into some kind of wreck-your-house home improvement guy, does there?

pad and pen

i don't know what city you're in e. telecom, but here in dc there was a great (free!) 4-day workshop on arduino at an art museum this past spring. it might be worth looking into something like that. nothing better than getting hands on.

its only in the last ten years that zaha hadid has actually been getting buildings built. i think only one before the maggie centre in 2001 but she had a retrospective in 1983 at the AA.

i feel like there's some foundational knowledge like knowing how water/electrical hookups work before you can even try doing crazy stuff with fancy materials -- is that stuff actually passed off to contractors instead of architects? am I misunderstanding what architects actually do?

4) non-beginner NFL stuff, like actual plays

Here is a decent list of terminology to help understand the nuts and bolts of plays:

http://blogs.nfl.com/2011/12/28/playbook-mailbag-terminology-101/

"want to get to the point where I could build some effect pedals and all that Make Magazine stuff that uses Arduinos, etc."

i don't know even the basic stuff, but this sort of thing is doable without even knowing that.

That's the thing... There's all kinds of kits that get into building things, but I want the elementary theory behind step 1, step 2, etc.

i don't know what city you're in e. telecom, but here in dc there was a great (free!) 4-day workshop on arduino at an art museum this past spring. it might be worth looking into something like that. nothing better than getting hands on.

There are a couple of hacker spaces here in Los Angeles that offer classes, but most of them are intro/beginner level... I want more of a near-electrical engineer content level.

this might interest you but won't have quite the same angle as you're after http://www.nand2tetris.org

i dunno man, the electrical engineers i know have no idea how to build effects pedals. i think maybe the trick is to work backwards? (figure out the specific application and search for increasingly general principles from there.)

plax you ever tried travis picking? that's... ok that's not what's going on in the elizabeth cotten vid since she's playing a right-handed guitar left handed, but it's a similar effect, pretty easy to learn imo and a good base for other fingerstyle stuff. this is a pretty good intro:

http://www.guitarland.com/Travis.html

Effects pedals: grab a breadboard and a pile of components and start trying stuff out. There are loads of circuits online, but a particularly good set are here http://beavisaudio.com/bboard/projects/. The guy who runs the site was selling a breadboard/components pack for a while and after it was discontinued he put all the documentation online.

i dunno man, the electrical engineers i know have no idea how to build effects pedals. i think maybe the trick is to work backwards? (figure out the specific application and search for increasingly general principles from there.)

― Philip Nunez, Saturday, October 13, 2012 2:47 AM (8 hours ago)

^^^ this is pretty much true when it comes to analogue effects - as long as you're not frying components or doing anything dangerous, just about anything goes. It's really much more about how good the effect sounds, whereas electrical engineers are more concerned with 'predictable operation within certain parameters' and measuring circuit characteristics. OTOH it can sometimes be useful to use more EE tools to visualise wth is going on, like the Tone Stack Calculator (http://www.duncanamps.com/tsc/).

Ha, Travis picking was exactly what I was going to suggest too. I'll listen to the songs plax mentioned today and see if I have more to add. The intro to "Dust in the Wind" is the 'first day of fingerpicking' song of choice for most guitar teachers, it seems. I was going to try to find something closer to the songs you mentioned (and will look for one) but since it comes up in ledge's link, you could give it a try too:

http://youtu.be/eN6VLI1Dml4
http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/k/kansas/dust_in_the_wind_tab.htm

At first, just practise the right-hand picking pattern on open strings or just with a C chord. Practise slowly at first, making sure your rhythm is really steady. Once you feel like you can do that in your sleep, practise changing the chords. Just stick with the intro at first. You could maybe just practise the pattern going back and forth between C and Am chords before you add all the variations with the left hand.

i asked this once on ILB (i think), but does anyone know a good overview of the history of labor unions? i'm not looking to be professor labor history or anything, but i was hoping someone could recommend a single book, or maybe a pair of texts that complement each other well.

― Thanks WEBSITE!! (Z S), Saturday, October 13, 2012 1:49 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm guessing you're not after a history of the British labour movement here, right?

OK, after quickly scanning the Townes Van Zandt and Paul Simon tracks, you're probably looking for something a bit more advanced than just an intro to fingerpicking/Travis picking, sry. (I knew I should have waited to listen before posting that.) Will get back to you this weekend.

Carl could probably recommend you something.

Xpost yo c

Yo Sund4r I'd be interested in recs for beyond fingerpicking 101. I've got Travis picking and blackbird solid, and two or three other tabs I've picked up here and there - here comes the sun, these days... just looking to broaden my repertoire or get new skills. I got a fingerpicking the Beatles book but mos of the arrangements are really simple and boring.

I'm guessing you're not after a history of the British labour movement here, right?

well, it depends - do you mean labour movement as in organization of workers, or as a political movement? i'm looking for something that would cover the former.

The organisation of workers *is* political. But I do mean that, rather than the Labour Party. Though actually on scanning my bookshelves I can't see anything that really fits the bill; thought I had a couple of things that would work for a general British view, but they all seem to be over-specific in their own little revolutionary niches.

You could try google scholar but I agree it's better to have recommendations from people you (theoretically) trust.

Tbh, beyond the basics, my own background with fingerstyle guitar is almost entirely classical and my guitar (as opposed to theory) students are generally at a basic level. I wasn't sure if plax was looking for something more basic at first. Still, I might very well be able to come up with something this weekend.

no that travis picking link is great! i often have to simplify the finger picking and it sounds really flat and monotonous, this really breaks down how to introduce a bit of syncopation bit by bit. i tried adding it to "freight train" and while i'm still way off cotten-picking it does sound a lot jazzier and more sophisticated. i like it!

the cultural significanceof the merkin. What morés dictated its usage etc.

& other aspects of cultural significance leading to invention of esoteric items.

I always thought the merkin was historically worn by ladies of the night after they'd shaved their real ones off to get rid of crabs, no?

Was coming on here to recommend codeacademy, and also point out that 60wpm is in no way a requirement to be good at this :)

60wpm is in no way a requirement

if you type code faster than you can fully think it through, you'll write masses of poorly structured, buggy code

re: guitar fingerstyle, this site has a wealth of detailed video lessons, skip down to the FO section for the folk/fingerstyle stuff:
http://www.justinguitar.com/en/AA-000-LessonIndex.php#FO

boiling potatoes

and you'll appreciate i dont admit it lightly

why not steam them

boil them - roiling boil - for 3 mins in saltwater, then give them a shake in flour + roast them in oil damnit.

some are better with skins on, some with skins off. some boil in 5 minutes, some take 20, you have to get a knife in there to check every few minutes if you aren't sure.

we now have an air fryer, the roasties it makes aren't my best but they are easy and quick

lads any fool can roast spuds, little respect pls

steaming takes year and never cooks the middle

knife check spuds fall apart

knife check spuds only fall apart if already overdone

boil fist sized whole potatoes in their skin for half hour, then peal and chop into small cubes for frying with herbs, garlic spices etc.. will that do?

maybe 25 mins actually.

Making capuccinos. I wanna do latte art. We have a coffee machine at work, so want to serve clients a little art filled cup. Lol