First stitches: on learning to knit

A colleague at work asked me for some tips on learning German and her situation and goals were fairly common so I thought I'd write up some notes here. For the specific scenario under consideration, and to ground what follows: my colleague's mother tongue is not English, but she wants to learn German since she now lives there. She's interested in...

My niece reached out to me a few days back asking about tips for studying at school. She was specifically interested in any ideas I had about how to excel in her maths studies. I wrote up my thoughts for her and it occurred to me yesterday that there might be some benefit from putting these notes online as well. Without further ado, therefore…...

I love blogging and I've benefitted a lot from what it's done for me ever since I started my first Geocities page in the mid 1990s. I maintain a technical blog at mlops.systems and a somewhat less technical blog at alexstrick.com/blog, though hope at some point to merge these together. In the past I would have been content with ensuring that my...

Not by Vermeer. This generated by my friend Stable Diffusion. I visited the bumper Vermeer exhibition today in Amsterdam. I had previously seen many of the works separately in different galleries in the USA and here in the Netherlands, but there's certainly a raw power to bringing them all...

I read 75 books this year (over 22,000 pages), and a few days still remain. Looking back over the full list, I'm both surprised at how many were only of middling reward. I think the key is to take one's sweet time on the true gems and speed through the should-have-been-a-blog-post dross. Out of the gems, the following stand out: Sabine...