Post date: Oct 21, 2020 3:24:7 AM
a quote for the day:
"There are some disciplines that lean heavily on reasoning and have relatively little context: math, computer science, chess. Learn some basic principles, apply your reasoning, and you can build up towering edif[i]ces of work and expertise.
Other disciplines – law, medicine, history – simply require so much knowledge as well as reason that just packing in the reading takes years and years, no matter how good you are at reasoning. That's why there are child chess prodigies but not child history prodigies.
Fiction is part of that context-acquisition process.
The realization that adults don't have a monopoly on reason has a corollary: kids don't have a monopoly on failures of reason."
~ Cory Doctorow, as written [here].
...
yes, it's been a while;
yes, it's been busy ..
.. and as for my usual follow-up: i don't know anyone who isn't busy, especially during this COVID-19 time. [0]
but seriously, i haven't been posting because contradictorally [1] nothing immediate comes to mind to write about, yet so much has happened that i don't know what to write about first.
so in lieu of telling you about the last six months, i'll spare you the details and just say hello.
so: hello again!
...
[0] recently at the start of a video-chat meeting, a colleague remarked that i looked tired. when i said that, in this day and age, we're probably all tired, i heard a collective murmur of melancholy consent. (also, that colleague was not satisfied with my answer.)
[1] my spell-check is telling me that this is misspelled, which means that this might not be a word. on the other hand, it seems to be the natural adverbial version of "contradictory."