Language Learning Crash Course: from slightly more than zero to slightly less than advanced

I previously learned how to crochet. I never made anything too fancy or intricate but it was an easy way to make beautiful presents for special occasions or individuals. This past christmas we decided that presents could only be exchanged if they were handmade. Cue: hours of double crochet to make a jumper, a snood and some embroidery of Ramallah...

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...