In terms of a documentation artifact, I love what `cargo doc` generates, but when I'm inside a source file, any plaintext solution seems so limiting.
I actually miss what I had when I was playing around in TempleOS. All text in the OS is rich (you can toggle between the markup and the standard WYSIWYG view), so comments could have formatting, colours, images (bitmap or vector, great for diagrams), hell, even (aggressively spinning) 3D models.
The thing I used most was the collapsible sections, think and in HTML. Although I appreciate plain text and would hate WYSIWYG rich text in my serious source code (not to mention binary data appended to the end of the source file for images and models), I can't help but pine for those features. Being able to just draw a real diagram and being able to edit it later in seconds as opposed to making some horrid ASCII art was awesome.
I'm not deep into geometry, but one of my favourite web apps / UI designs is the Polyhedra Viewer by Nat Alison [1][2], which shows relations, properties, and transformations in a very natural way.
Tom7's video on polyhedra properties [3] is also great, and taught me about the best Unicode characters (sic) [4]:
︘ U+FE18 Presentation Form For Vertical Right White Lenticular Brakcet
Beautiful. I've always loved the aesthetic of Windows Solitaire [a] but felt strangely alone when playing it (figures). I'm reminded of a non-solitary solitaire, Nerts Online:
NERTS is fun, we play it with a group of our friends (fiends?) semi-regularly. But part of its charm is the inherent physical and verbal chaos... you can never reach all the piles, people's hands/arms collide with each other, drinks get spilled, names get called, alliances forged and quickly betrayed. It's a hoot.
I tried the online one but I'm not too experienced with cards so I just got destroyed. Another fun, chaotic one that I used to play in person a lot is Egyptian Ratscrew, a game where you have to slap the pile first if certain criteria are met. I don't think I've won a single match of that, I'm usually still processing what card was put down long after someone already slapped the pile. I had fun regardless. Make sure everyone removes their rings!
I didn't know about "an historic" until I heard it from American journalists. They did pronounce the 'h' and it did indeed sound very wrong. I believe I first heard it from Rachel Maddow. I can't find any clips, but there are a bunch of transcripts from her show if you search up:
It's one of those things American pseudo intellectuals do because they think it's more correct and want to sound superior. Maybe they heard a professor say it that way or read it in a book. Anything but actually process why the a/an distinction exists.
Starting earlier today, I've been using Firefox's local translation feature to auto-translate every page to Italian (to learn). I just had to remove English from my language list and check an option to translate English to Italian.
Firefox's local translation is pretty decent but not amazing. It did render this article's title as "Italiano: A vs. An", which I found pretty funny.
I recently wanted to try one of Kató Lomb's [1][2] preferred language-learning methods: getting a book in a foreign language and reading it (and re-reading it), figuring out words and phrases as if it's a big puzzle and writing them in the margins. From her book "How I Learn Languages" (1970):
> I recommend buying your own books for language learning. They can be spiced with underlines, question marks, and exclamation
points; they can be thumbed and dog-eared, plucked to
their essential core, and annotated so that they become a
mirror of yourself.
> What shall you write in the margins? Only the forms
and phrases you have understood and figured out from the
context.
> Ignore what you can’t immediately understand. If a
word is important, it will occur several times and explain
itself anyway. Base your progress on the known, not the un-
known. The more you read, the more phrases you will write
in the margins. The relationship that develops between you
and the knowledge you obtain will be much deeper than if
you had consulted the dictionary automatically. The sense
of achievement provides you with an emotional-affective
charge: You have sprung open a lock; you have solved a little
puzzle.
I can't really bring myself to write in the books themselves though, so I've been using separate paper. It feels wrong, even in a cheap book, like I'm defiling it.
I'm no polyglot, but talking and reading are very different skills.
My personal working theory:
Native speakers learn to speak first, then they learn to read and write.
From talking with high-level ESOL speakers, those that learned from written material have some very strange patterns of mistakes you can hear in their English - where they've programmed their pronunciation incorrectly very early on with basic mistakes.
Although English is an outlier here. Because English native speakers learn lots of different ways to manage how speaking and spelling are different. Plus because making speaking mistakes after learning words in books is such a social status mistake.
Personally I think if you want to learn a language, the ideal is with someone who corrects all mistakes, as though one is a baby. Although it is difficult to find this even when one can spend months in a foreign country. Not everyone feels comfortable correcting an adult.
The people that have learned English that I have spoken with that are the best all have a common trait: they've lived in a country and they MIMIC. The most amazing was a hippy Japanese guy: I remember one sentence where he shifted in the middle from broad East London to a strong Aussie accent due to where he learned the words.
I learnt conversational Spanish when I was 30. Next attempt will be 2-3 months immersed Korean as a middle aged guy so I'm looking forward to trying out my opinions!
I learned French mostly through conversation and immersion. This next language is pretty simple phonologically, and I'm not concerned about having a good accent in it, so the reading-puzzle route is something interesting to try.
Yeah, why you want to know the language strongly matters.
My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words. Learning by talking and mimicking is not my strength at all.
I suspect that is why I've noticed the pattern that natural mimickers are the ideal language learners (who I would like to emulate).
Although my beliefs are incoherent... I want software that starts with substituted latin letters into a Korean layout that slowly morphs into Korean (maybe choosing words carefully that have been taken from English).
> My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words.
I wonder what mine is. I feel like I don't take to reading in a foreign language too easily (though I have trouble focusing on reading generally), but I definitely struggle mimicking as well. Some times I really wonder how I learned French at all, I got to my current level of ability quite quickly, though I'm sorely lacking a lot of fundamentals both in writing and in speech.
I agree though, you can see a big difference in language learners on Youtube between those who practice speech vs those who mostly read. For example, Alexander Argüelles [1] is a famous polyglot who's written quite a few foreign-language grammar books, but the few videos of him speaking show his heavy accent.
For Korean, I wouldn't bother with Latin letters. Hangul is simple:
> A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.
– King Sejong on (what would become known as) Hangul
Reading in Korean would have been quite difficult historically, when it was mixed with Chinese characters à la Japanese [2], eg.
> 悠久한 歷史와 傳統에 빛나는 우리 大韓國民은 3⸱1 運動으로 建立된 大韓民國臨時政府의 法統과 不義에 抗拒한 4⸱19 民主理念을 繼承하고, 祖國의 民主改革과 平和的統一의 使命에 立脚하여 正義⸱人道와 同胞愛로써 民族의 團結을 鞏固히 하고, 모든 社會的弊習과 不義를 打破하며, 自律과 調和를 바탕으로 自由民主的基本秩序를 더욱 確固히 하여 政治⸱經濟⸱社會
Tribal warfare is often ritualized [1]. I remember reading that the tribes on what is now Canada's West Coast practiced real, brutal warfare compared to their eastern counterparts, due to the scarce resources.
In Burden of Dreams [2], the documentary about the making-of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, some of the tribal extras would occasionally go off in their motor boats for raids on neighbouring tribes. It's so interesting to me, tribal life would be fascinating to experience.
I didn't say "a grand time". It would also be fascinating to live through the Fall of Rome, the Pazzi conspiracy, the Black Death, or any number of other unpleasant things. I'm pretty on-edge about the interesting times I'm living in right now, but they are certainly interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC9RI8_QYmw
reply