Lone Gunman

Tom Stafford—co-author of Mind Hacks—has writ­ten a series of posts on what psy­chol­o­gists know about learn­ing. For any­one inter­ested in edu­ca­tion and per­sonal devel­op­ment, these pro­vide an inter­est­ing intro­duc­tion to a few top­ics of note.

Learn­ing Makes Itself Invisible

Once you have learnt some­thing you see the world dif­fer­ently. Not only can you appre­ci­ate or do some­thing that you couldn’t appre­ci­ate or do before, but the way you saw the world before is now lost to you. This works for the small things as well as the big pic­ture. If you learn the mean­ing of a new word, you won’t be able to ignore it like you did pre­vi­ously. If you learn how to make a cup of out of clay you won’t ever be able to see cups like you used to before.

The premise of the arti­cle (and espe­cially the exam­ple given) puts me in mind of the pre­vi­ously men­tioned phe­nom­e­non of sine wave speech.

Learn­ing Should Be Fun

Rather than fun being a relief from learn­ing, or a dis­trac­tion from it, for most of our his­tory, before school, learn­ing had to be its own moti­va­tion. Brains that learnt well had more off­spring, and so learn­ing evolved to be rewarding.

In lots of teach­ing sit­u­a­tions we focus on the right and wrong answers to things, which is a ven­er­a­ble par­a­digm for learn­ing, but not the only one. There is a less struc­tured, curiosity-driven, par­a­digm which focusses not on what is absolutely right or wrong, but instead on what is sur­pris­ing. A prob­lem with rights and wrongs is that, for some peo­ple, the pres­sure of being cor­rect gets in the way of expe­ri­enc­ing what actu­ally is.

The Straight Dope on Learn­ing Styles

This is where we hit prob­lems. Are learn­ers either pri­mar­ily visual, audi­tory, kines­thetic (as claimed in NLP)? Or are they pri­mar­ily ana­lytic, cre­ative or prag­matic (as pro­posed by Robert Stern­berg). Is the world made of Con­verg­ers, Diverg­ers, Assim­i­la­tors and Acco­moda­tors? Maybe instead we should use the Myers-Briggs cat­e­gories of Sensers, Intu­itors, Thinkers and Feelers?

Faced with these pos­si­bil­i­ties an aca­d­e­mic psy­chol­o­gist has a stan­dard set of ques­tions they would like answered: can you really divide peo­ple up into a par­tic­u­lar set of categories?

Only hav­ing seen one gecko in my life I’ve given them lit­tle thought. One thing I am sure of, how­ever, is that I didn’t expect the answer to how geckos man­age to nav­i­gate walls and ceil­ings so dex­trously to be as awe­some as it is.

The bot­toms of a gecko’s feet are […] cov­ered with mil­lions of tiny foot-hairs on each toe, called setae, each about as long as the width of two human hairs (about 100 mil­lionths of a meter). Each seta, in turn, is divided at the end into approx­i­mately a thou­sand tiny spat­u­lae […] which are about 200 bil­l­lionths of a meter wide, which is smaller than the wave­length of vis­i­ble light.

It seems the geckos’ toes cre­ate so much sur­face area in this way, with such tiny end­ings, that they are able to make use of Van der Waal’s force — a weak attrac­tive force which is present between mol­e­cules — to stick them­selves to the ceiling.

via Seed

I per­son­ally find the exam­ples given in this arti­cle quite unin­spir­ing (even quaint), but the fol­low­ing quote from Clive Thompson’s look at the anthro­pol­ogy of YouTube is rather piquant:

What’s hap­pen­ing to video is like what hap­pened to word pro­cess­ing. Back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, pub­lish­ing was a rar­efied, expert job. Then Apple’s WYSIWYG inter­face made it drop-dead easy, enabling an explo­sion of weird new forms of microp­ub­lish­ing and zines. Lap­top audio edit­ing did the same thing, giv­ing birth to the mashup and cut-and-paste sub­gen­res of music. Then there’s photo manip­u­la­tion, once a rar­efied pro­pa­ganda tech­nique. Pho­to­shop made it a folk art.

In a sense, you could argue that even after 100 years of mov­ing pic­tures, we still don’t know what video is for. The sheer cost of cre­at­ing it meant we used it for a sti­flingly nar­row set of pur­poses: news, doc­u­men­taries, instruc­tional presentations.

Now the lid is blow­ing off.

via Mind Hacks

Mol­e­c­u­lar gas­tron­omy is defined as the “sci­en­tific dis­ci­pline involv­ing the study of phys­i­cal and chem­i­cal processes that occur in cooking”.

Fol­low­ing on from a con­ver­sa­tion I had with Andrew this past weekend—and after read­ing this great arti­cle from The New York Times—I decided to com­pile a short­list of the best books on mol­e­c­u­lar gas­tron­omy (accord­ing to me):

• Harold McGee — On Food and Cooking
• Peter Barham — The Sci­ence of Cooking
• Hervé This — Mol­e­c­u­lar Gastronomy
• Shirley Cor­ri­her — Cookwise
• Gar­diner and Wil­son — The Inquis­i­tive Cook

Update: There are so many books on mol­e­c­u­lar gas­tron­omy that it can be hard to keep up with what’s avail­able and to dis­cover the best of the bunch and the must-haves. To help I’ve started Mol­e­c­u­lar Gas­tron­omy Books: a site ded­i­cated to review­ing and cat­e­goris­ing the best books on mol­e­c­u­lar gas­tron­omy.

Paul Buchheit—original devel­oper of Gmail and Google AdSense, founder of Friend­Feed—dis­cusses how projects can obtain ‘overnight suc­cess’.

This notion of overnight suc­cess is very mis­lead­ing, and rather harm­ful. If you’re start­ing some­thing new, expect a long jour­ney. That’s no excuse to move slow though. To the con­trary, you must move very fast, oth­er­wise you will never arrive, because it’s a long jour­ney! This is also why it’s impor­tant to be fru­gal — you don’t want to starve to death half the way up the mountain.

He has also writ­ten another excel­lent post on a num­ber of impor­tant devel­op­ment aspects he learnt while writ­ing Gmail.

via Cod­ing Hor­ror (itself, an excel­lent post)