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bathyspheric

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I have found my cursive hand getting much better after spending some time with Gregg shorthand.

The emphasis on curve and proportion in Gregg has made my cursive hand much more regular, flowing and pleasing to the eye. I’m sure similar benefits would accrue to learning and practising Orthic where specific curves, angles and joins have meaning.

MakeCode allows you to begin with block code and slide into Python or Javascript. It has many resources available or you can make more sprites or tunes for your game. Even better, you can get a GameBoy-esque hardware to transfer your game too. I make a Sharks-With-Lasers game with my Year 7 students (11-12 yrs) and most find some aspect to enjoy. Larger frameworks can make it tough to get all the way to a game yiu can play yourself. Go for early success, then build on larger frameworks.

https://arcade.makecode.com/

https://core-electronics.com.au/gamego-handheld-console-code...

After a career in a science, engineering and IT, I am now teaching computer science and maths in high school and loving it. In Australia, any previous degrees would have a big impact on what additional training you would need before teaching. But to answer your direct question, any and all of your industry experience will be valuable in a high-school context, whatever its ‘pedigree’ or quality.

To teach, however, you are likely to need an education qualification. In Oz, this could be a 2 year Masters of Teaching provided you already have a degree of some sort to act as a content base (3 yr Bachelors is fine). There are accelerated 18 month courses available, mostly online but with significant periods of in-school practical experience (2-3 slots of 4-8 weeks).

Both the education and the pracs are very valuable to your teaching roles. The reduced contact over working days, and weeks of holiday are great, but you will still need plenty of energy for the kids, and there is plenty of outside-hours of work too, but you choose when and how you do it.

My teens was my first jobs; pizza places and pamphlets. My twenties was travelling, hospitality and finance. My thirties was university, science and programming jobs. My forties has been a masters and now teaching, I wonder what my fifties will bring. Each change has let me take skills and experience from one sphere and apply it differently.

10k hours is not a guaranteed unless it’s directed practice. 2k and some flexible thinking can get you a long way towards interesting and new experiences.

Far from heavyweight, I was building innovative solutions for a small consultancy that became more successful and more practised at the same old solutions. Cue same boring problems. I took two years part-time to retrain with an education degree and now teach bright young minds 9-3 each day for 40 weeks a year. Pay cut worth it. All I was asking for at the end, was interesting problems to solve, but now I know that young people are more interesting and more worthwhile than any neural net or optimization problem. My 2c.

Yeah sure, there is too much momentum in current climate changes for Australian policy to turn it around. But the argument that Australian emissions are tiny in comparison to US, India or China so we don't need to be a part of the global solution falls flat for me. If we can punch above our weight in trade or diplomatic spheres, surely we can do the same in climate-mitigation areas.

Where do you see resistance to these mitigation attempts like cloud brightening?

I would say that there is a lot of interest in some quarters for this sort of solution, as it might mean that we could save the GBR without curtailing the energy industry. I think resistance to these ideas might be related to dealing with the symptoms; high ocean temperatures, rather than the causes; human-induced climate change. I support science-based evaluation of all these ideas, but without ignoring or addressing potential causes.

Can I ask if I understand your use of `tail` in tail variance? Do you mean tail as in extremes of a distribution, or tails, as in losses. I'm very interested in using MC techniques to model extremes of a distribution, like 1-in-1000 year events from a Weibull distribution, but my (naive) algorithms spend a lot of time in the fat belly of the curve rather than out in the tails, but perhaps (probably) I'm holding it wrong. Is there a way to constrain the MC sampling to the tails of a distribution?

Merging Maps 9 years ago

It thought ChainMap might be useful (Python) but found out I need to be a lot more careful using it.

    from collections import ChainMap

    a, b, c = {'a': 1}, {'b': 12, 'c': 13}, {'c': 23}
    d = ChainMap(a, b, c) # ChainMap({'a': 1}, {'b': 12, 'c': 13}, {'c': 23})
    e = ChainMap(c, b, a) # ChainMap({'c': 23}, {'b': 12, 'c': 13}, {'a': 1})

    # Lookups cascade
    d['c']  # -> 13
    e['c']  # -> 23

    # Updates mutate first dict
    d['c'] = 1003 # ChainMap({'a': 1, 'c': 1003}, {'b': 12, 'c': 13}, {'c': 23})
 
    d['c'] # 1003
    e['c'] # 23
    a   # {'a': 1, 'c': 1003}
Python 3.3+ https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.html#collectio...
The Mac Pro Lives 9 years ago

My only vim customization is `:imap kj <Esc>`.

Takes 10s to write into a .vimrc on any new computer.

Edge was disqualified because it seemed to bypass the hosts file and wouldn’t load pages from unique domains. I can do measurements so I might revisit this, but it wouldn’t have been a fair comparison as-is.

Is it surprising that Edge might bypass the hosts file?

It surprises me, as I thought all outgoing requests were routed through `/etc/hosts` or equiv, but I don't spend too much time in Windows these days.

I don't think the bar would need to be stainless.

The reinforcement cage in concrete weight coating used on subsea pipelines is relatively ordinary steel. The steel is protected from corrosion by the concrete itself and a system of sacrificial anodes that are easy to survey and replace. (I help design pipelines)

How to Be a Stoic 9 years ago

At times, I have found some comfort in thinking about my personal travails from universal perspective. Can my upset really have any gravity, any impact upon a drifting continent, on a spinning globe, travelling round a spiral arm of a galaxy in an expanding universe?

Take a breath, breathe out and move along.

Might all be a hologram anyway...