Here are the courses I'm actually taking/seriously considering:
 |
| My current online courses - Coursera |
 |
| My upcoming online courses - Coursera |
 |
| My upcoming edX courses |
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query coursera. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query coursera. Sort by date Show all posts
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Coursera, edX, ...
You may have noticed my new obsession with free online courses, the so-called MOOCs.
Here are the courses I'm actually taking/seriously considering:
My experience so far is recounted here.
I have ambitious plans (too many courses) for January/February. Will probably drop something.
Happy holidays!
Here are the courses I'm actually taking/seriously considering:
Friday, July 11, 2014
Snippets - on music, my racism, learning quantum, and what I'm blogging next
1. I finally bought a harmonica last week. The first thing I played on it, beyond just blowing in and hearing what happened or trying to blow from left to right was 3-3-2-1 to try to sort of mimic the guitar opening in The Search, like one of the loveliest songs in my life right now. Cos the internet how-to guide said blowing is one skill, then said something about sucking too so I tried that and got my mi-re-do to work. Meanwhile, Jesse Jagz is in concert in a few weeks - August 2nd at the MUSON Center in Lagos. I hope the audio equipment isn't weird this time, cos there was some lack of definition/fidelity/power in the speakers at the Shrine concert last year. I know it will be an amazing evening for me :)
2. Listening to classical nowadays - just downloaded some of the top 50, top 100, classical music for beginners things you can find online. That's what happens when too much of the current music is not awesome enough lol. It occurred to me that I can tell my Mozart from my Bach. I know way too much about Western civilization. Found that I even know a little of the music from The Valkyrie and from Aida even though I've never watched them.
An aside on racism, judging the beauty of languages, and being labeled a 'machine':
Germany flogged Brazil at the World Cup semifinal match on Tuesday, bringing some of my anti-German sentiment to the surface. I listened to Jessye Norman (beautiful big black woman) singing Wagner thinking "so terrifying", such un-pretty and martial music, and anyway wouldn't Puccini, Verdi, and Italy have been a better match for this black girl; forgetting that my attempt at categorizing German as cold and terrible makes no sense, when even Beethoven was German. Anyhow you don't need to be German to do what the Nazi party did. And nobody perpetrates such without the support or assent of others, or at least I wish that with the UN nowadays that would be the case and the world would gang up against any such oppression.
Maybe I need to learn a little German. And Dutch. Somehow my familiarity with the Romance languages - Spanish, French - reinforces the warmth I feel towards the people and maybe if I stop avoiding the German language, I would become more able to appreciate the so-called German machine, the beautiful football that scored 5 goals in the first half against Brazil on Tuesday. I'm going to let myself learn a little German. I'll stop thinking that Persian/Farsi sounds like a slice of heaven even though it rooshes and shooshes too but somehow German just, the closest it comes to romance is like violent porn. Speaking of violence, I've read Jelinek too. But she's Austrian. Now it gets confusing because classics-wise Vienna/Austria is pretty (think Strauss, the waltz, ballgowns with fitted bodices and parties featuring violins and sheer delight! Away with the music of Broadway, be off with your Irving Berlin, ..., when I want a melody lilting through the house, then I want a melody by Strauss: it laughs, it sings, the world is in rhyme, swinging to three-quarter time - that's By Strauss, in Ella Fitzgerald's voice, another beautiful black Taurus woman). Language-wise, I hear Austria is German, and that WW2-wise, it was Nazi, and now there is the guilt and even the cold darkness, the unfriendliness and terror of which Jelinek wrote, and for which her work is so hated and so important and to me inspiring.
What do you think should be done about victor's guilt, post-violence? The former Nazi lands must keep acting contrite in part because the world is still afraid of them, post-trauma. Similarly in Japan which once became so capable that it terrorized China (Nanjing tales) and taunted America (Pearl Harbour), they do not have the same militarization rights as the average country. And to some extent for white South Africa, which succeeded in its apartheid policies for decades, there needs to be an active anti-apartheid raft of good deeds and of penance for a collective sin?
What should be done preemptively about the fear of getting too big, too good, the fear of making the weaker one cry? One school of thought is just be great; winning is good, it's the whole point. A more modern way is to embrace holism, be great for as large a set as possible, not just self, but self and neighbours, not just nation, but all nations, not just humanity, but all earth, not just this earth, but the future and space and outer space. This is one simple idea that I keep trying to articulate, the benefits and methods of holistic thinking.
If you hear the other thing I'm saying here, it's that I'm a little bit racist - at least in football, but it goes a little beyond football - and that as usual I'm going to combat my ignorance with a little learning.
3. I really want to know what quantum science is about. Maybe I already sort of do. One thing that helped: Week Five of Physical Chemistry on Coursera. I just finished weeks one, two, three, and five this week. Off to do weeks four and six. This is why I get Coursera fatigue. But it's so great to have such awesome education available for free, that I can't resist.
4. Yes, I'm definitely bingeing, overdoing it, because I'm also reading some good plays because somebody recommended Chekhov, and about to start two Coursera courses (hopefully one of them is unamazing enough that I'll drop it) on The French Revolution and on Managing Risk for Development. I bought the book of plays, and bought the harmonica, in Barcelona shops, on my first trip outside of Nigeria in many years. Thanks to my lovely sister for getting married in Spain, and thanks to the embassies for not rejecting our visa applications a third time. Is this racism too? From what I could see, not all the prostitutes in the tourist section of Barcelona were African :)
5. As usual I have thoughts on education - good thing I work in education - and now I'm thinking I'll write some of them here in a series called "homework for victims of the ASUU, SSANU, ASUP, NASU and other miscellaneous strikes in tertiary education." I do a lot of what the kids stuck at home should be doing with their time - study online, read what you like, do a lot of what you love even if it's watching Korean drama series or playing football or teaching something or selling something, maybe get a job or a traineeship, learn French, write about your life, ...
2. Listening to classical nowadays - just downloaded some of the top 50, top 100, classical music for beginners things you can find online. That's what happens when too much of the current music is not awesome enough lol. It occurred to me that I can tell my Mozart from my Bach. I know way too much about Western civilization. Found that I even know a little of the music from The Valkyrie and from Aida even though I've never watched them.
An aside on racism, judging the beauty of languages, and being labeled a 'machine':
Germany flogged Brazil at the World Cup semifinal match on Tuesday, bringing some of my anti-German sentiment to the surface. I listened to Jessye Norman (beautiful big black woman) singing Wagner thinking "so terrifying", such un-pretty and martial music, and anyway wouldn't Puccini, Verdi, and Italy have been a better match for this black girl; forgetting that my attempt at categorizing German as cold and terrible makes no sense, when even Beethoven was German. Anyhow you don't need to be German to do what the Nazi party did. And nobody perpetrates such without the support or assent of others, or at least I wish that with the UN nowadays that would be the case and the world would gang up against any such oppression.
Maybe I need to learn a little German. And Dutch. Somehow my familiarity with the Romance languages - Spanish, French - reinforces the warmth I feel towards the people and maybe if I stop avoiding the German language, I would become more able to appreciate the so-called German machine, the beautiful football that scored 5 goals in the first half against Brazil on Tuesday. I'm going to let myself learn a little German. I'll stop thinking that Persian/Farsi sounds like a slice of heaven even though it rooshes and shooshes too but somehow German just, the closest it comes to romance is like violent porn. Speaking of violence, I've read Jelinek too. But she's Austrian. Now it gets confusing because classics-wise Vienna/Austria is pretty (think Strauss, the waltz, ballgowns with fitted bodices and parties featuring violins and sheer delight! Away with the music of Broadway, be off with your Irving Berlin, ..., when I want a melody lilting through the house, then I want a melody by Strauss: it laughs, it sings, the world is in rhyme, swinging to three-quarter time - that's By Strauss, in Ella Fitzgerald's voice, another beautiful black Taurus woman). Language-wise, I hear Austria is German, and that WW2-wise, it was Nazi, and now there is the guilt and even the cold darkness, the unfriendliness and terror of which Jelinek wrote, and for which her work is so hated and so important and to me inspiring.
What do you think should be done about victor's guilt, post-violence? The former Nazi lands must keep acting contrite in part because the world is still afraid of them, post-trauma. Similarly in Japan which once became so capable that it terrorized China (Nanjing tales) and taunted America (Pearl Harbour), they do not have the same militarization rights as the average country. And to some extent for white South Africa, which succeeded in its apartheid policies for decades, there needs to be an active anti-apartheid raft of good deeds and of penance for a collective sin?
What should be done preemptively about the fear of getting too big, too good, the fear of making the weaker one cry? One school of thought is just be great; winning is good, it's the whole point. A more modern way is to embrace holism, be great for as large a set as possible, not just self, but self and neighbours, not just nation, but all nations, not just humanity, but all earth, not just this earth, but the future and space and outer space. This is one simple idea that I keep trying to articulate, the benefits and methods of holistic thinking.
If you hear the other thing I'm saying here, it's that I'm a little bit racist - at least in football, but it goes a little beyond football - and that as usual I'm going to combat my ignorance with a little learning.
3. I really want to know what quantum science is about. Maybe I already sort of do. One thing that helped: Week Five of Physical Chemistry on Coursera. I just finished weeks one, two, three, and five this week. Off to do weeks four and six. This is why I get Coursera fatigue. But it's so great to have such awesome education available for free, that I can't resist.
4. Yes, I'm definitely bingeing, overdoing it, because I'm also reading some good plays because somebody recommended Chekhov, and about to start two Coursera courses (hopefully one of them is unamazing enough that I'll drop it) on The French Revolution and on Managing Risk for Development. I bought the book of plays, and bought the harmonica, in Barcelona shops, on my first trip outside of Nigeria in many years. Thanks to my lovely sister for getting married in Spain, and thanks to the embassies for not rejecting our visa applications a third time. Is this racism too? From what I could see, not all the prostitutes in the tourist section of Barcelona were African :)
5. As usual I have thoughts on education - good thing I work in education - and now I'm thinking I'll write some of them here in a series called "homework for victims of the ASUU, SSANU, ASUP, NASU and other miscellaneous strikes in tertiary education." I do a lot of what the kids stuck at home should be doing with their time - study online, read what you like, do a lot of what you love even if it's watching Korean drama series or playing football or teaching something or selling something, maybe get a job or a traineeship, learn French, write about your life, ...
Monday, October 31, 2016
Moving on from Coursera, passing through The School Of Life
Late 2013 to Early 2016, I was a Courseran and Coursera-addict.
I'm now a follower / adherent of a video channel called The School Of Life.
Isn't it just excellent?
I now work in Yaba, Lagos, not far from my former workplace of Unilag and right in Sabo, the nascent tech startup hub.
I'm considering checking on options for learning more math and/or learning Chinese a bit, either at the university or someplace cleverer.
Advertisement: Read my books. ###Three Sisters, novel #1 here###
I'm now a follower / adherent of a video channel called The School Of Life.
Isn't it just excellent?
I now work in Yaba, Lagos, not far from my former workplace of Unilag and right in Sabo, the nascent tech startup hub.
I'm considering checking on options for learning more math and/or learning Chinese a bit, either at the university or someplace cleverer.
Advertisement: Read my books. ###Three Sisters, novel #1 here###
Monday, November 02, 2015
The freedom to thrive, not merely to be, AND a fun-tastic analysis of freedom in marriage
"Negative liberty is the freedom from interference by other people. FREEDOM FROM..."
"Positive liberty is the possession of the power and resources to fulfill one's own potential. FREEDOM TO..."
Wikipedia / Google
States do both of these things:
1. help secure my negative freedom, for example by deterring rapists, robbers, and assassins from attacking me
2. reduce my positive freedom, with laws, laws, laws. This is forbidden, that is required, and the other is punishable by imprisonment.
This bargain I accept to some extent, realizing that nothing good comes free.
Not only states, but other authorities have dual impacts on my freedom.
For example:
Positive liberty postponed: School would sometimes give you future power in the form of knowledge in exchange for current boredom - restricted movement, restricted course choices, restricted hobbies/activites.
Negative liberty sacrificed: As a public figure, like a politician or a celebrity, strange people lay selfish claims to your time and personal space. You have to care or pretend to care about trivial things, pick up the phone, sign an autograph, endure gossip and slander. In exchange, you gain power.
Positive freedom is the freedom to thrive, not merely to be! (Poetic, huh?)
............
(Because the instruction says feel free to be creative with this post,) here's one more example:
Marriage can increase freedom in many ways:
- by providing food, home, peace, caring, and money, one feels "settled down" and no longer buffeted by a harsh world. In fact, mapping out one's own home-territory is the ultimate in negative freedom
- by supporting each individual's activities towards achieving life's potential
- by creating opportunities for collaboration between the married people, including the making of children, but also other social, spiritual, economic, and creative collaboration.
But marriage can take back what it gives:
- it is a possessive relationship in which people lay claim to each other - MY husband, MY wife , for LIFE !
- it may feel like unpaid labour and slavery for one or more parties (excessive cooking and housework, excessive scolding and abuse, excessive financial or other demands),
- it may restrict activities that can be carried on while married (cultural need to spend inordinate amounts of time together, less interaction with other people, can't learn new things and can't change freely without considering the effect on spouse, can't move to a new country without carrying family along, in some cultures you can't marry other people, in some others you can't freely befriend or relate with other people)
- it may take away your food (half if you share one income and are poor, more when you have children), home (when you lose it in a divorce), peace (when you fight), health (the stress of living with someone you can't stand, the sharing of diseases ), caring (jealousy makes your closest partner your deadliest foe) and/or money (costly marriage ceremony, large expenses in marriage, costly divorce proceedings)
Conclusion: choose wisely, and good luck ;)
Note: I wrote this for a quick assignment in Alexander Guerrero's Coursera + U.Penn. Legal and Political Philosophy course. Coursera can be so much fun! (And loads of work.)
Advertisement: Read my books. ###Three Sisters, novel #1 here###
"Positive liberty is the possession of the power and resources to fulfill one's own potential. FREEDOM TO..."
Wikipedia / Google
States do both of these things:
1. help secure my negative freedom, for example by deterring rapists, robbers, and assassins from attacking me
2. reduce my positive freedom, with laws, laws, laws. This is forbidden, that is required, and the other is punishable by imprisonment.
This bargain I accept to some extent, realizing that nothing good comes free.
Not only states, but other authorities have dual impacts on my freedom.
For example:
Positive liberty postponed: School would sometimes give you future power in the form of knowledge in exchange for current boredom - restricted movement, restricted course choices, restricted hobbies/activites.
Negative liberty sacrificed: As a public figure, like a politician or a celebrity, strange people lay selfish claims to your time and personal space. You have to care or pretend to care about trivial things, pick up the phone, sign an autograph, endure gossip and slander. In exchange, you gain power.
Positive freedom is the freedom to thrive, not merely to be! (Poetic, huh?)
............
(Because the instruction says feel free to be creative with this post,) here's one more example:
Marriage can increase freedom in many ways:
- by providing food, home, peace, caring, and money, one feels "settled down" and no longer buffeted by a harsh world. In fact, mapping out one's own home-territory is the ultimate in negative freedom
- by supporting each individual's activities towards achieving life's potential
- by creating opportunities for collaboration between the married people, including the making of children, but also other social, spiritual, economic, and creative collaboration.
But marriage can take back what it gives:
- it is a possessive relationship in which people lay claim to each other - MY husband, MY wife , for LIFE !
- it may feel like unpaid labour and slavery for one or more parties (excessive cooking and housework, excessive scolding and abuse, excessive financial or other demands),
- it may restrict activities that can be carried on while married (cultural need to spend inordinate amounts of time together, less interaction with other people, can't learn new things and can't change freely without considering the effect on spouse, can't move to a new country without carrying family along, in some cultures you can't marry other people, in some others you can't freely befriend or relate with other people)
- it may take away your food (half if you share one income and are poor, more when you have children), home (when you lose it in a divorce), peace (when you fight), health (the stress of living with someone you can't stand, the sharing of diseases ), caring (jealousy makes your closest partner your deadliest foe) and/or money (costly marriage ceremony, large expenses in marriage, costly divorce proceedings)
Conclusion: choose wisely, and good luck ;)
Note: I wrote this for a quick assignment in Alexander Guerrero's Coursera + U.Penn. Legal and Political Philosophy course. Coursera can be so much fun! (And loads of work.)
Advertisement: Read my books. ###Three Sisters, novel #1 here###
Friday, March 06, 2015
I am rich!
New internet. Yah baby - unlimited nights. As my Naija people say, next levels.
It's been a fine four-year relationship with Visafone but Swift offered more for less. I tried to call VF yesterday to ask for a better deal but no answer. I know they'd probably have been puzzled, like 'take your business elsewhere if you like (or does this woman think she's in Yankee?)' but I still thought it'd be nice to talk before switching.
I feel bad for my 'phone credit' guy though, for a while now he could count on me buying 10 grand worth every 4weeks to feed my Coursera addiction. I feel like I have to do 'Happy Weekend' for him now :) I'm on my last GB with the current plan (shed a tear) , then omg omg I'm going to go wild. OK not really. I'll watch a few versions of Aida (detail research for novel #2.) I've blogged three days in a row now, so I'm clearly running away from writing, or something. This new Firefox Hello thing, I might try it. Revive Skype, which I've been off for years now. Watch Papa's interviews. Go hard on the online courses. I used to think those people were crazy, showing off their ten online courses. I've stopped counting mine - maybe ten, probably more.
You know what else I found at the store? A little plastic magnifying glass. Was inspired by my science MOOC to get a microscope or something like it. At some point maybe a telescope. Maybe I'll go someplace where I can see the stars. Maybe the North (Adamawa) when this Boko Haram rubbish ends.
They had acrylic and oil paints too at that shop, but I have enough toys already: piles of books to read, piles of movies to watch, crayons and wall, software and blogs, paper and postercolour, ... and now like double the internet!
It's been a fine four-year relationship with Visafone but Swift offered more for less. I tried to call VF yesterday to ask for a better deal but no answer. I know they'd probably have been puzzled, like 'take your business elsewhere if you like (or does this woman think she's in Yankee?)' but I still thought it'd be nice to talk before switching.
I feel bad for my 'phone credit' guy though, for a while now he could count on me buying 10 grand worth every 4weeks to feed my Coursera addiction. I feel like I have to do 'Happy Weekend' for him now :) I'm on my last GB with the current plan (shed a tear) , then omg omg I'm going to go wild. OK not really. I'll watch a few versions of Aida (detail research for novel #2.) I've blogged three days in a row now, so I'm clearly running away from writing, or something. This new Firefox Hello thing, I might try it. Revive Skype, which I've been off for years now. Watch Papa's interviews. Go hard on the online courses. I used to think those people were crazy, showing off their ten online courses. I've stopped counting mine - maybe ten, probably more.
You know what else I found at the store? A little plastic magnifying glass. Was inspired by my science MOOC to get a microscope or something like it. At some point maybe a telescope. Maybe I'll go someplace where I can see the stars. Maybe the North (Adamawa) when this Boko Haram rubbish ends.
They had acrylic and oil paints too at that shop, but I have enough toys already: piles of books to read, piles of movies to watch, crayons and wall, software and blogs, paper and postercolour, ... and now like double the internet!
Tuesday, August 05, 2014
Now I have to live without 43Things
I am sad to announce that this site, which has been my friend for a decade, is now to close down. On 43things.com , you could list and track up to 43 open goals of yours - sleep more, learn French, kiss in the rain, or whatever.
It allowed journal-style entries, with replies, pictures, comments, and a host of meta features - you could mark the goal as done, or postpone it, or even give up. Just for fun, you could give and get cheers on your goals and updates, browse for funny or popular goals, or create New Year resolutions.
I first discovered it while blog-surfing (cyberstalking really) a software-head friend's girlfriend, seated at my desk at my room in the Cats (Catalina apartments) in grad school. I really liked 43things. It was a fabulous Web2.0 social application.
The founders/creators of 43Things also created a lively site called 43places, and there was also 43people, allconsuming, then I stopped noticing their new sites.
I used 43places to organize my dreams of travel. You could write entries on places you'd been, but front-and-center was a list of where you'd like to visit. It featured flexible, intelligent programming using RubyonRails tech, such that you could list a country or continent, or a site or town; it didn't restrict you to one level, while it unobtrusively tracked the relationships between those places e.g. it was cool that I could indicate India, and separately the Taj Mahal, and do photos and 'social' relating to each in a way that felt natural.
43people was rather short-lived, and I mourned when they axed it. "Who do you want to meet?" it said, and I did indeed meet some of my 43people :)
I liked to keep my front-page list very short; my last 43things profile had only five items on it. Meanwhile, over the years, I learned from others how to simplify, unclutter, have fun, crush on my crushes, like my likes and choose my choices :) For most of my years with 43, I really meant to get the PhD, but that's not yet done, and who knows if ever. When I finally publish my first novel, I won't be able to share that milestone with my cyberfriend the robot and my anonymous 43things friends. Still, it's amazing how much one little site helped me along the way. Thanks, kids of the robot co-op. Thanks, 43 community. One love.
The good news is that Coursera is still alive. Plus, maybe there is a Web 3.0 around the corner. California (and Seattle, well, West-Coast) idealism rocks.
I first discovered it while blog-surfing (cyberstalking really) a software-head friend's girlfriend, seated at my desk at my room in the Cats (Catalina apartments) in grad school. I really liked 43things. It was a fabulous Web2.0 social application.
The founders/creators of 43Things also created a lively site called 43places, and there was also 43people, allconsuming, then I stopped noticing their new sites.
I used 43places to organize my dreams of travel. You could write entries on places you'd been, but front-and-center was a list of where you'd like to visit. It featured flexible, intelligent programming using RubyonRails tech, such that you could list a country or continent, or a site or town; it didn't restrict you to one level, while it unobtrusively tracked the relationships between those places e.g. it was cool that I could indicate India, and separately the Taj Mahal, and do photos and 'social' relating to each in a way that felt natural.
I liked to keep my front-page list very short; my last 43things profile had only five items on it. Meanwhile, over the years, I learned from others how to simplify, unclutter, have fun, crush on my crushes, like my likes and choose my choices :) For most of my years with 43, I really meant to get the PhD, but that's not yet done, and who knows if ever. When I finally publish my first novel, I won't be able to share that milestone with my cyberfriend the robot and my anonymous 43things friends. Still, it's amazing how much one little site helped me along the way. Thanks, kids of the robot co-op. Thanks, 43 community. One love.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Understanding women
Last week in Nigeria gossip blogging was dominated by some circus about... - it's already this week so who even cares?
The same week, I finally watched the first Sex and the City movie and also encountered some circus elsewhere that got me thinking about women and their peculiar madness.
I want answers.
Here are some answers.
First let me get this off my chest: if you want to be beautiful in my book, starrrr, show me some inner beauty. All that drag-queen bizness may get you tagged as 'stunning', yeah, like he's stunning too.
To the point. Ahem. Here are some answers.
A chic who wants to understand men can do worse than learn to code. Honest. If you're already clever or mathy, jump right in with Coursera/RiceUniversity 's Python course. If not, here's a baby version. (But women are already right, so they don't need to learn no crude, male behaviour.)
A dude who wants to understand women?
At first I thought there is no formula, but the three women I studied helped me see one thing: CHIC EGO HUGE, BUT their flavour of selfishness is all about how they appear, not the food-clothing-sex-shelter-money they tangibly get. Understand "face" and you understand women. What is face? Watch Asian movies, get a Japanese roommate, or read chic lit. 100 hours to change your life.
You're welcome.
What else do you need to know to live a long and happy life? I'll let grandpa tell you -
Advertisement: Read my books. ###Three Sisters, novel #1 here###
The same week, I finally watched the first Sex and the City movie and also encountered some circus elsewhere that got me thinking about women and their peculiar madness.
I want answers.
Here are some answers.
First let me get this off my chest: if you want to be beautiful in my book, starrrr, show me some inner beauty. All that drag-queen bizness may get you tagged as 'stunning', yeah, like he's stunning too.
To the point. Ahem. Here are some answers.
A chic who wants to understand men can do worse than learn to code. Honest. If you're already clever or mathy, jump right in with Coursera/RiceUniversity 's Python course. If not, here's a baby version. (But women are already right, so they don't need to learn no crude, male behaviour.)
A dude who wants to understand women?
At first I thought there is no formula, but the three women I studied helped me see one thing: CHIC EGO HUGE, BUT their flavour of selfishness is all about how they appear, not the food-clothing-sex-shelter-money they tangibly get. Understand "face" and you understand women. What is face? Watch Asian movies, get a Japanese roommate, or read chic lit. 100 hours to change your life.
You're welcome.
What else do you need to know to live a long and happy life? I'll let grandpa tell you -
Advertisement: Read my books. ###Three Sisters, novel #1 here###
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Back to back...HITS
I just watched Ordet (The Word) a 1955 Danish film by Carl Th. Dreyer.
And
1. I can't keep it to myself.
2. My life just changed: "if you had prayed to God, He would have answered your prayers." Ah, true. Ask, for a change, stoic one. The answer is yes, really, only maybe sometimes the answer is not yes. (a paragraph of personal stuff I just deleted.)
Now I really wish to see Rams.
And be a judge at Cannes or the Oscars or any large international film festival / awards programme.
Yesterday, I watched the zen film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, ...and Spring.
Please, treat yourself to this film.
Raise The Red Lantern, from the day before that, was also a complete masterpiece.
In very related news, I decided on the title for Novel #2 - it has changed a few times, but maybe this is the final one, the best one - cutting it down from a bevy of twelve main characters to just four. That way less rambling, more story. It will be short and verrry good. And I'll do a rework of Three Sisters (Novel #1) too.
It's been many many years of thinking about these people, and I've not been writing, but hey, the book is practically reality.
I've been letting all these other works soak in and influence me and so it's really going to be something wonderful. Yeah, I'm going to shit a pearl.
There'll be many unused characters (and drafts) and they'll get recycled into short-stories and maybe one or two into novel #3. Then no more novels hehehehe. Just kidding, once you pop you can't stop.
Thank you for feedback on novel #1 so far, I need the feedback, I'll use it, so please send more. Thanks again.
I've been swimming in muse-ic. Jill Scott this morning. India.Arie yesterday. Madonna. Great. Great. Great. Lorde. I want my writing to feel like the Lorde album - heady, pure. Guess what the Lorde album is called? Pure Heroine. Did I just describe it as heady and pure!? Hey, Cannes? The ghost of Roger Ebert says...Tosin's really good at this.
Great films too: you want to see what I've been watching? HERE. It's hard to keep these things to myself. Boring books, I'm reading a Jane Austen-y novel titled The Third Sister, by Julia Barrett. It's clever, it's slim, it's not going very fast. If you want to see what else I've been reading - go here.
Also going slow slow slow - anything on Coursera, math-for-myself, Arabic and the languages I want to learn.
No job starting next week, maybe for a couple of months. Colleague says I'm actually going on maternity leave, pregnant with a book. Maybe I'll write one chapter of it, more likely I'll write close to ten chapters. Then start a job again somewhere gorgeous. Awh, I'm going to miss my kids.
Did you ever see Avenue Q? You absolutely have to listen to the audio. And you have to listen to the award-winning audio for Hamilton, the Broadway musical too. And tell me which other musical-theater audio I have to get, please, because three shows are better than two.
These things are amazing. They are simply at the pinnacle and that's the best water from which to drink.
And
1. I can't keep it to myself.
2. My life just changed: "if you had prayed to God, He would have answered your prayers." Ah, true. Ask, for a change, stoic one. The answer is yes, really, only maybe sometimes the answer is not yes. (
Now I really wish to see Rams.
And be a judge at Cannes or the Oscars or any large international film festival / awards programme.
Yesterday, I watched the zen film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, ...and Spring.
Please, treat yourself to this film.
Raise The Red Lantern, from the day before that, was also a complete masterpiece.
In very related news, I decided on the title for Novel #2 - it has changed a few times, but maybe this is the final one, the best one - cutting it down from a bevy of twelve main characters to just four. That way less rambling, more story. It will be short and verrry good. And I'll do a rework of Three Sisters (Novel #1) too.
It's been many many years of thinking about these people, and I've not been writing, but hey, the book is practically reality.
I've been letting all these other works soak in and influence me and so it's really going to be something wonderful. Yeah, I'm going to shit a pearl.
There'll be many unused characters (and drafts) and they'll get recycled into short-stories and maybe one or two into novel #3. Then no more novels hehehehe. Just kidding, once you pop you can't stop.
Thank you for feedback on novel #1 so far, I need the feedback, I'll use it, so please send more. Thanks again.
I've been swimming in muse-ic. Jill Scott this morning. India.Arie yesterday. Madonna. Great. Great. Great. Lorde. I want my writing to feel like the Lorde album - heady, pure. Guess what the Lorde album is called? Pure Heroine. Did I just describe it as heady and pure!? Hey, Cannes? The ghost of Roger Ebert says...Tosin's really good at this.
Great films too: you want to see what I've been watching? HERE. It's hard to keep these things to myself. Boring books, I'm reading a Jane Austen-y novel titled The Third Sister, by Julia Barrett. It's clever, it's slim, it's not going very fast. If you want to see what else I've been reading - go here.
Also going slow slow slow - anything on Coursera, math-for-myself, Arabic and the languages I want to learn.
No job starting next week, maybe for a couple of months. Colleague says I'm actually going on maternity leave, pregnant with a book. Maybe I'll write one chapter of it, more likely I'll write close to ten chapters. Then start a job again somewhere gorgeous. Awh, I'm going to miss my kids.
Did you ever see Avenue Q? You absolutely have to listen to the audio. And you have to listen to the award-winning audio for Hamilton, the Broadway musical too. And tell me which other musical-theater audio I have to get, please, because three shows are better than two.
These things are amazing. They are simply at the pinnacle and that's the best water from which to drink.
Advertisement: Read my books.
###Three Sisters, novel #1 here###
Bonus films:
Sometimes the reviewers don't know what they're talking about: these products were really great experiences for me - Home (2015 animated film and soundtrack album with Rihanna) and We Are Your Friends (2015 DJ-music-culture film), ignore the poor reviews.
Sometimes the reviewers don't know what they're talking about: these products were really great experiences for me - Home (2015 animated film and soundtrack album with Rihanna) and We Are Your Friends (2015 DJ-music-culture film), ignore the poor reviews.
Friday, May 20, 2016
Ma chérie, mon cher
Advertisement: Read my books.
###Three Sisters, novel #1 here###
What am I supposed to do -
sit around and wait for you?
Well, I can't do that...
- Cher, in Believe
If I had far more than the one or two dozen gigabytes per month to play/live on the internet, I would watch most of these little tennis videos a few times. I just watched #32 and it's a match I remember well. I call it Black-On-Black-Violence. Both Roger Federer and Andy Roddick showed up in black. Dressed as The Undertaker, I said, as in, somebody is going to leave in a coffin today. Andy himself was a perennial top 4 player and a one-time world number 1. He had Jimmy Connors coaching him and had gone through hell to put himself in a position to challenge Roger, who had become a mountain-sized problem to him and everybody.
Oh Lord, the bullets came pow. Pow. Andy with the fastest serve in men's tennis. Power. Heart. Fire. Everything. Read about it read about it, let me know if you watched it.
Roger won.
I don't know if I cried but I felt Andy's heart. That was when he became my guy, because before that...ehn, he's American, so, too...uncomplicated.
Omg another match I just remembered: Andy Roddick winning at Queens - pure, unadulterated beauty. First of all the courts at Queens make you - I mean if you're the kind that gets visceral reactions to beautiful things - you'll lose your breath for a bit. It's so dirty-yellow green and red. And Andy respecting the space because it's England, yet being such a giant, so fit, hard, and American. And then doing his job, whacking the ball, and winning and being happy.
I usually cheat by using my internet overnight (12-6 is free in the contract), but the internet company cheats by charging for the first and the final 45minutes or so, that is you're only safe from 1-5am. Then I usually call monthly when I run out of 'data' to complain about all the lost gigabytes and they usually apologize and tack them back on, but I'm sorta getting tired of the dance. And maybe having too many all-nighters watching gossip videos and music videos while downloading edu/Coursera recordings and all the films and music albums I want, and getting really tired from the jetlag :) is not always the way to live.
Federer: amazing!
Rafa Nadal: mi amor. I fell in love at first sight.
I wonder if when I'm 99 and dying my only regret will be all these years I'm spending NOT watching tennis.
Because think about my life without the 2008 Wimbledon final - the excitement leading up to it, the experience of seeing it, alone, undisturbed... The thing is I wouldn't even know what I didn't know, that I had missed out on the whole joy of life.
Or my life without the drama of Ana Ivanovic - the beauty, the hustle, the rise, the fall, - or Anna Chakvetadze (A-Chak, the psychologist and book-lover, just kept placing the ball and placing the ball and many times, that was enough to win) in those days.
Or life without taking a snapshot of a body like Martina Hingis' and wondering what it means. For many years I've struggled to describe it without thinking of horses horses. I think it's how pronounced the balls of the shoulders are, like mine. And since anatomically hips and shoulders are close kin, she's a bit more a collage of different structures fit together and less one compact aerodynamic mass.
(Yes I just figured it out. It has these exaggerated balls (1) and it reminds me of me (2). So I was utterly captivated, and now it turns out I'm just crazy about myself? How narcissistic. How pathetic. )
I thought to use the word gangly for Ms Hingis. I know gangly is usually a Venus Williams tall-with-limbs-flying-here-and-there - you should watch Venus play, she is a tall, beautiful child - not a not-so-tall, non-flailing, sexy mama; but what I was thinking was actually GANGLIA, GANGLION, gangly in that sense, and after some work I've found there is support for relating ganglia-ness / gangliness to the knobs of her shoulders, the knobs/orbs at the hips etc. Ganglia Origins: From Latin - swelling; From Greek - cystic tumour.
She walks like a bow-legged horse. :) Or maybe it's my imagination.
I don't think to use gangly for myself. For myself, I think Bantu, rather short/squat and explosive at least in the lower-body, contrasted with the slender-tall Sudanic type. (Map) No I'm not actually short. But I look like someone who really should be stronger. Except that I don't like to move. I'm basically like Martina. She's a professional athlete, so I must be wrong about her not liking to move so much? I think she's a bitch, definitely. I don't think she's a person who gives too much of a _ ; I definitely from-a-distance like her. Very much.
Hey.
If she was gay
and I was gay
I'd stay away
Cos it won't be ok
You know she'd wipe
the floor with my aaaassss
And she would break my heart
Yes she would break my heart
Stomp on the littler part
Save the rest for breakfast
fried eggs and rare girl-heart
line of coke for dessert
That bi* would fu* me up
That shi* would be so crae
No shrink could fix all that
So better not to start
...
But I'm not gay
Nor is she gay.
Crae.
For the melody, you know If You Were Gay from Avenue Q, right?
I haven't really watched tennis since 2008. Maybe I watch three matches a year nowadays. And not even full-attention. Then again, Novak Djokovic has been number one for a few years. I was happy for him to be a top three player behind Roger and Rafa, but not happy when he started beating Rafa. I don't want anybody beating my Rafa, don't you hear me?
I never thought Novak would become so powerful, and while I'm sure he's a great guy and great player and all, I don't really want to watch him. And that's not fair at all.
I have to mention Andy Murray. Or it won't be fair. I like Andy.
So maybe it's ok to not watch tennis to spite Novak? My friend Bala has been a Djokovic fan since whenever. He's not getting any from me with that kind of attitude :P Haha just kidding, that's just one of ten good reasons.
Always thought that if I was 99 and dying, one of my regrets would NOT be that I didn't have a kid or two, so why bother? Especially when I know how much I hate my life when it's filled with chores. It's like dying, dude, when you have to constantly do silly things that you would rather not do and can't find the importance of doing. I remember having my Chemistry book in front of me, while this little baby wanted to play. Yeah it's fun to play with you for a few minutes but then I have to get back to regular eleven-year-old life. I remember poo-poo. (OK, diapers nowadays, thank God.) There's laundry and connecting (because if you're going to parent you'd better do it well by paying attention and connecting with them) and the other day somebody reminded me about school, yeah, kids go to school, and I remembered: shit there's also the morning routine wake up brush teeth get to school on time nonsense to deal with? I hated being woken up rudely to start the day with a bath, like what's so wrong with waking up when you feel like waking up, naturally? And now I'm supposed to wake up somebody else?
School itself was great. It's efficient. You're with people your age so learning and play come naturally. The adults have enough to do to keep them happily engaged. They cook for a lot of people at a time and get it over with. I can't even feed myself, too lazy, and now I've got to feed somebody else on a schedule? Why mess things up in my life? Why now when everything is so perfect?
If only I could be a dad.
Because I love you, future kids, I just don't want all this mommy shit.
And if you knew how stupid life was, you might consider staying unborn too. There's nothing here.
So yesterday I learned one new way to be a dad: I was at my amala woman's place buying some food to eat there and some to take home, and found out her kids are in boarding school. The younger is eight years old. Really? You don't have to wait till secondary school to cart them off? Awesome. And she's a super-intelligent woman in my opinion, a Christianly-doctrinely businesswoman; she says she visits them often, maybe twice a week, husband too. She says they live in a nice private hostel just outside town. They eat well. I'm thinking wow they don't have to deal with traffic; they can step right from schooltime into lunch, siesta/nap, sports/play, prep time, sleep. This is magic. I was in boarding school from age 9 too and always wondered about the hellish traffic and crappy lifestyle of day (commuting) students. Unnecessary stress going back and forth.
You never know though, what you think is best may not be what your kid prefers, but my preference has always been for kids to have lots of room to grow, lots of interactions with various interesting people, lots of space to play.
Those conditions were there in most of my own life and I see them as very positive. I would hate to crowd my kid or be crowded in by them.
But it's probably not my calling to create all these healthy kiddie-developing conditions in this current concrete jungle with new modern cloistered life (can't talk to neighbours), small nuclear families (I think of those as hell, children need space), money-centered lifestyle (and getting very little value in exchange for the money.) It is not my calling; I like twenty-year olds, I like to talk to people like adults, I like to teach in a respectful laissez-faire manner, I like to interact and go, I don't like the full-time-hands-on thing with a tiny little baby ... and so having kids has seemed to me like a passport to hell, at least if not well managed. Maybe when I was 18 and busy it would have fit in as a nice side-gig. Now I'm, oh Lord, I'm a grown-ass woman, and it just seems like it would be such a change from a grown-up life, if that makes sense. Can't do it. Definitely outsourcing. Give me your college kids, I'll give you my toddler.
What shifts the balance?
Boarding school - Oh Yes. Especially since it's not even these big-money arrangements where I dunno, you're paying for the kids to basically network with rich kids and sleep under duvets with constant air-conditioning. They're in Africa, what's all the rubbish about pretending it's Scotland?
The alternatives I've considered before -
Very flexible work (beyond what you think of as flexible. No, I will not be one of those harried adults. Nope. Not happening. Unless there's a war or something.) That's part of my life now.
Rural living or a semblance of it, like a job back in the 'country', or living on a nice university campus with everything. I know people who had that - academic parents, staff school - and hated it, they claim they grew up poor. Oh well.
Communal living, like multiple little families, like Rafa's extended-family house, so someone can baby-talk and pull my baby's cheeks and teach them drawing or stories and it doesn't fall to just two unfortunate souls to do everything. I mean who came up with this whole isolated couples idea - it's so inhumane.
I really had everything as a kid:
We were for a time too poor to be isolated and Lagos was 20 times less crowded. Kind neighbours, low stress levels. I was always talking.
Lived on a gorgeous island for a few years, even. Maybe 200 people in 64 little houses on well over 10 hectares (so maybe 10,000sq.ft. per person) with no fences. Amazing.
Then not sure what happened, stress level rising, maybe because of the extra kids - twins, maybe it's just hard after a few years of marriage to pretend life isn't frustrating, maybe it's just luck - sometimes a life is easy sometimes it's fraught with ... the mind/soul is not happy, but thankfully school was there for me. So many people at school from whom to learn so many things. I couldn't sleep my first night even long after lights-out, it was so exciting. The biggest problem was holidays from boarding school. Most people don't feel the same way, I'm sure.
So kids, I know you want to be born and everything. Help me figure out the logistics of it, get yourself a daddy or two - maybe he's always wanted to be a mommy or maybe he has a nice extended family to feed us, because you know I love food, and I will take time out of my not-so-busy schedule to get knocked up and you know, do the whole nine months in the oven and two years carrying you on my back like a smiling peasant before you move on to General Relativity / Quantum Mechanics.
If I was 35 and dying, how much would I regret not having done novel #2? Not very much. Now I thought of a new way to constrain the work - make it about children, the four main characters' ages are pushed down under 16, maybe even around 10, throughout. To make that work well, I really should hang out with young people, and there are many schools about, and I have no job keeping me from doing it, so why not do it? If I was 35 and dying though, I'd remember that it was supposed to be just one novel and I've done that. These extra writings are beyond what's required, so hey, good job. Do whatever you want. Hang out with kids and write something amazing, or don't hang out with kids and write an irritating writerly piece. Your business.
I'm tired. I hate writing. Yeah, right. Time to shower. 11:11am, it's nice and warm.
What am I supposed to do -
sit around and wait for you?
Well, I can't do that...
- Cher, in Believe
If I had far more than the one or two dozen gigabytes per month to play/live on the internet, I would watch most of these little tennis videos a few times. I just watched #32 and it's a match I remember well. I call it Black-On-Black-Violence. Both Roger Federer and Andy Roddick showed up in black. Dressed as The Undertaker, I said, as in, somebody is going to leave in a coffin today. Andy himself was a perennial top 4 player and a one-time world number 1. He had Jimmy Connors coaching him and had gone through hell to put himself in a position to challenge Roger, who had become a mountain-sized problem to him and everybody.
Oh Lord, the bullets came pow. Pow. Andy with the fastest serve in men's tennis. Power. Heart. Fire. Everything. Read about it read about it, let me know if you watched it.
Roger won.
I don't know if I cried but I felt Andy's heart. That was when he became my guy, because before that...ehn, he's American, so, too...uncomplicated.
Omg another match I just remembered: Andy Roddick winning at Queens - pure, unadulterated beauty. First of all the courts at Queens make you - I mean if you're the kind that gets visceral reactions to beautiful things - you'll lose your breath for a bit. It's so dirty-yellow green and red. And Andy respecting the space because it's England, yet being such a giant, so fit, hard, and American. And then doing his job, whacking the ball, and winning and being happy.
I usually cheat by using my internet overnight (12-6 is free in the contract), but the internet company cheats by charging for the first and the final 45minutes or so, that is you're only safe from 1-5am. Then I usually call monthly when I run out of 'data' to complain about all the lost gigabytes and they usually apologize and tack them back on, but I'm sorta getting tired of the dance. And maybe having too many all-nighters watching gossip videos and music videos while downloading edu/Coursera recordings and all the films and music albums I want, and getting really tired from the jetlag :) is not always the way to live.
Federer: amazing!
Rafa Nadal: mi amor. I fell in love at first sight.
I wonder if when I'm 99 and dying my only regret will be all these years I'm spending NOT watching tennis.
Because think about my life without the 2008 Wimbledon final - the excitement leading up to it, the experience of seeing it, alone, undisturbed... The thing is I wouldn't even know what I didn't know, that I had missed out on the whole joy of life.
Or my life without the drama of Ana Ivanovic - the beauty, the hustle, the rise, the fall, - or Anna Chakvetadze (A-Chak, the psychologist and book-lover, just kept placing the ball and placing the ball and many times, that was enough to win) in those days.
Or life without taking a snapshot of a body like Martina Hingis' and wondering what it means. For many years I've struggled to describe it without thinking of horses horses. I think it's how pronounced the balls of the shoulders are, like mine. And since anatomically hips and shoulders are close kin, she's a bit more a collage of different structures fit together and less one compact aerodynamic mass.
(Yes I just figured it out. It has these exaggerated balls (1) and it reminds me of me (2). So I was utterly captivated, and now it turns out I'm just crazy about myself? How narcissistic. How pathetic. )
I thought to use the word gangly for Ms Hingis. I know gangly is usually a Venus Williams tall-with-limbs-flying-here-and-there - you should watch Venus play, she is a tall, beautiful child - not a not-so-tall, non-flailing, sexy mama; but what I was thinking was actually GANGLIA, GANGLION, gangly in that sense, and after some work I've found there is support for relating ganglia-ness / gangliness to the knobs of her shoulders, the knobs/orbs at the hips etc. Ganglia Origins: From Latin - swelling; From Greek - cystic tumour.
She walks like a bow-legged horse. :) Or maybe it's my imagination.
 |
| I looked up 'gangly' and found this person so named... |
Hey.
If she was gay
and I was gay
I'd stay away
Cos it won't be ok
You know she'd wipe
the floor with my aaaassss
And she would break my heart
Yes she would break my heart
Stomp on the littler part
Save the rest for breakfast
fried eggs and rare girl-heart
line of coke for dessert
That bi* would fu* me up
That shi* would be so crae
No shrink could fix all that
So better not to start
...
But I'm not gay
Nor is she gay.
Crae.
For the melody, you know If You Were Gay from Avenue Q, right?
I haven't really watched tennis since 2008. Maybe I watch three matches a year nowadays. And not even full-attention. Then again, Novak Djokovic has been number one for a few years. I was happy for him to be a top three player behind Roger and Rafa, but not happy when he started beating Rafa. I don't want anybody beating my Rafa, don't you hear me?
I never thought Novak would become so powerful, and while I'm sure he's a great guy and great player and all, I don't really want to watch him. And that's not fair at all.
I have to mention Andy Murray. Or it won't be fair. I like Andy.
So maybe it's ok to not watch tennis to spite Novak? My friend Bala has been a Djokovic fan since whenever. He's not getting any from me with that kind of attitude :P Haha just kidding, that's just one of ten good reasons.
Always thought that if I was 99 and dying, one of my regrets would NOT be that I didn't have a kid or two, so why bother? Especially when I know how much I hate my life when it's filled with chores. It's like dying, dude, when you have to constantly do silly things that you would rather not do and can't find the importance of doing. I remember having my Chemistry book in front of me, while this little baby wanted to play. Yeah it's fun to play with you for a few minutes but then I have to get back to regular eleven-year-old life. I remember poo-poo. (OK, diapers nowadays, thank God.) There's laundry and connecting (because if you're going to parent you'd better do it well by paying attention and connecting with them) and the other day somebody reminded me about school, yeah, kids go to school, and I remembered: shit there's also the morning routine wake up brush teeth get to school on time nonsense to deal with? I hated being woken up rudely to start the day with a bath, like what's so wrong with waking up when you feel like waking up, naturally? And now I'm supposed to wake up somebody else?
School itself was great. It's efficient. You're with people your age so learning and play come naturally. The adults have enough to do to keep them happily engaged. They cook for a lot of people at a time and get it over with. I can't even feed myself, too lazy, and now I've got to feed somebody else on a schedule? Why mess things up in my life? Why now when everything is so perfect?
If only I could be a dad.
Because I love you, future kids, I just don't want all this mommy shit.
And if you knew how stupid life was, you might consider staying unborn too. There's nothing here.
So yesterday I learned one new way to be a dad: I was at my amala woman's place buying some food to eat there and some to take home, and found out her kids are in boarding school. The younger is eight years old. Really? You don't have to wait till secondary school to cart them off? Awesome. And she's a super-intelligent woman in my opinion, a Christianly-doctrinely businesswoman; she says she visits them often, maybe twice a week, husband too. She says they live in a nice private hostel just outside town. They eat well. I'm thinking wow they don't have to deal with traffic; they can step right from schooltime into lunch, siesta/nap, sports/play, prep time, sleep. This is magic. I was in boarding school from age 9 too and always wondered about the hellish traffic and crappy lifestyle of day (commuting) students. Unnecessary stress going back and forth.
You never know though, what you think is best may not be what your kid prefers, but my preference has always been for kids to have lots of room to grow, lots of interactions with various interesting people, lots of space to play.
Those conditions were there in most of my own life and I see them as very positive. I would hate to crowd my kid or be crowded in by them.
But it's probably not my calling to create all these healthy kiddie-developing conditions in this current concrete jungle with new modern cloistered life (can't talk to neighbours), small nuclear families (I think of those as hell, children need space), money-centered lifestyle (and getting very little value in exchange for the money.) It is not my calling; I like twenty-year olds, I like to talk to people like adults, I like to teach in a respectful laissez-faire manner, I like to interact and go, I don't like the full-time-hands-on thing with a tiny little baby ... and so having kids has seemed to me like a passport to hell, at least if not well managed. Maybe when I was 18 and busy it would have fit in as a nice side-gig. Now I'm, oh Lord, I'm a grown-ass woman, and it just seems like it would be such a change from a grown-up life, if that makes sense. Can't do it. Definitely outsourcing. Give me your college kids, I'll give you my toddler.
What shifts the balance?
Boarding school - Oh Yes. Especially since it's not even these big-money arrangements where I dunno, you're paying for the kids to basically network with rich kids and sleep under duvets with constant air-conditioning. They're in Africa, what's all the rubbish about pretending it's Scotland?
The alternatives I've considered before -
Very flexible work (beyond what you think of as flexible. No, I will not be one of those harried adults. Nope. Not happening. Unless there's a war or something.) That's part of my life now.
Rural living or a semblance of it, like a job back in the 'country', or living on a nice university campus with everything. I know people who had that - academic parents, staff school - and hated it, they claim they grew up poor. Oh well.
Communal living, like multiple little families, like Rafa's extended-family house, so someone can baby-talk and pull my baby's cheeks and teach them drawing or stories and it doesn't fall to just two unfortunate souls to do everything. I mean who came up with this whole isolated couples idea - it's so inhumane.
I really had everything as a kid:
We were for a time too poor to be isolated and Lagos was 20 times less crowded. Kind neighbours, low stress levels. I was always talking.
Lived on a gorgeous island for a few years, even. Maybe 200 people in 64 little houses on well over 10 hectares (so maybe 10,000sq.ft. per person) with no fences. Amazing.
Then not sure what happened, stress level rising, maybe because of the extra kids - twins, maybe it's just hard after a few years of marriage to pretend life isn't frustrating, maybe it's just luck - sometimes a life is easy sometimes it's fraught with ... the mind/soul is not happy, but thankfully school was there for me. So many people at school from whom to learn so many things. I couldn't sleep my first night even long after lights-out, it was so exciting. The biggest problem was holidays from boarding school. Most people don't feel the same way, I'm sure.
So kids, I know you want to be born and everything. Help me figure out the logistics of it, get yourself a daddy or two - maybe he's always wanted to be a mommy or maybe he has a nice extended family to feed us, because you know I love food, and I will take time out of my not-so-busy schedule to get knocked up and you know, do the whole nine months in the oven and two years carrying you on my back like a smiling peasant before you move on to General Relativity / Quantum Mechanics.
 |
| I'll get a unique 'oja' for your royal ass, not this towel. |
I'm tired. I hate writing. Yeah, right. Time to shower. 11:11am, it's nice and warm.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Is this the future of the internet?
According to the material in this course, it has been about twenty years
since the internet was founded. The internet and world wide web seem
to have changed EVERYTHING since then. We buy and sell online. We meet
friends and get news online. We work in many cases by getting on the
internet. Then we play on the internet too. Could this technology get
any more pervasive? Will the internet of 2033 be much different from
the web today?
Yes, obviously.
The interfaces will be different, I think. Today, many internet users don't connect through clunky teletype machines, large computers, or even small laptops, but through little, brittle smartphones. I remember just five years ago working with a colleague who was developing a touchscreen and about ten years ago the research news pieces on haptic - touch-based - interfaces. In the next five, ten, years, users will communicate their intent to the computer world without needing to use a keyboard. They will wear their interfaces - in their gloves, for instance, or implanted in their heads to sense neural signals. They will wear their interfaces as glasses, as in Google Glass and all the knock-offs and pirated versions that will develop.
The availability will be different too. Today, a lot of the world is not online but is rapidly getting on. For instance, I live in Africa where it is very palpable how the available bandwidth is small but increasing from month to month. In my newspaper today was a pullout advertising "swift networks" with a new unlimited speed plan - they don't really mean that, but at least they mean it will be fast - for only 50% more than the plans advertised at 1Mbps which actually deliver about 100kilobits per second. A couple of companies invested in submarine cables to the coast of Lagos and in the past three years the news has covered the so-called last-mile challenge - that is, the difficulty in getting all that available bandwidth to the end user. Hundreds of kilometers inland, in my land-locked home state, the government wants to lay fiber at least in a small part of the state capital. My point is that there will be internet everywhere in twenty years, not just in the US and the wealthiest countries. To not have reliable internet will be a mark of poverty, as it is a mark of poverty now to not have electricity (for the record, where I live we barely have electricity, we get maybe 10 hours a day on-and-off unpredictably every day), or to not have pipe-borne water (ditto, we have our own private water system - bore-hole, pumping machine, overhead storage.)
The uses will be different, more democratized. The elite first users came up with elite uses for the internet: research, geeky games, stock-market trading, bookselling. The masses will come up with different uses. I can imagine hysteria about the illuminati and the end of the world. Incomprehensible doodling all day - already the users of the internet have degenerated from theses and paragraphs and correct spelling to " sup, aw u 2day gr8 tym i no der is." Ah well, now they'll just scribble a line straight from their brains onto the doodoo wall. On the other hand, the potential for craftspeople in the middle-of-nowhere to reach their markets in New York, or for a design from a teenager in Hawaii to be adopted by a multibillion yen company in Tokyo will remain, and will grow dramatically.
Because location will become less important, the world will seem even more to be one uniform place. Today we have multinational brands in Dubai, Paris, Johannesburg, Mumbai - the same hotel names, the same clothing lines, same sandwich shops. By 2033, it will be sickening just how the same every city is. It will take effort to find a place with character. Maybe by this time, people will have so much material things that they'll finally stop chasing after material things. Local, and by this I mean national governments will work hard to get their people some time off the internet to create local relationships, national cohesion and culture outside the global internet. Please marry, they will say. Please exercise. In a few years, the most modern governments will finally cut down the workweek to four, then three days to encourage such perceived greater goods as the workplace efficiency being too high will produce more unemployment, more unhappiness, and - unless someone can come up with a large project to mop up human effort - more utterly useless goods.
What sort of project might that be, the modern day great pyramids, like industrial automation in the 20th century or business-process automation in the last twenty years? Would it be a space-travel, space-energy and stardrives program or a down-to-earth training/indoctrination/acculturation program utilizing software to help us learn everything from programming and kung-fu to languages and pottery? Would it be a program to end death as we know it or a program of mass aggression? Ha, I can't tell you that. I don't exactly have a crystal ball.
References:
The reference thing is irrelevant to this essay because I read a lot a lot a lot, so how can I say the ideas came from these two to five places?
1. Coursera (Inside the Internet - this course)
2. Google Glass (a proposed product)
3. The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded (movies)
4. Technology news sources
Note: I wrote the above essay in November 2013
for a massive open online course on
Write an essay that imagines how the Internet will be different 20 years from now. Justify your answer by connecting your ideas to the history of the Internet that we have learned in this class and through outside materials. Your answer can focus on how technology will change or how people will change or how governments and policy will change or even how society might change.
--- For references:
Please enter your references here. Only use this space for references (i.e. don't continue your essay in this space). There is no specific citation format. While there is no minimum nor maximum required references, most essays will have somewhere between two and five references. If your references are web sites use the URL. If the references are papers include enough information to identify the source using APA http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ format. Graders will not take points off for syntax errors in references, but they are welcome to suggest how the syntax of references can be improved.
Yes, obviously.
The interfaces will be different, I think. Today, many internet users don't connect through clunky teletype machines, large computers, or even small laptops, but through little, brittle smartphones. I remember just five years ago working with a colleague who was developing a touchscreen and about ten years ago the research news pieces on haptic - touch-based - interfaces. In the next five, ten, years, users will communicate their intent to the computer world without needing to use a keyboard. They will wear their interfaces - in their gloves, for instance, or implanted in their heads to sense neural signals. They will wear their interfaces as glasses, as in Google Glass and all the knock-offs and pirated versions that will develop.
The availability will be different too. Today, a lot of the world is not online but is rapidly getting on. For instance, I live in Africa where it is very palpable how the available bandwidth is small but increasing from month to month. In my newspaper today was a pullout advertising "swift networks" with a new unlimited speed plan - they don't really mean that, but at least they mean it will be fast - for only 50% more than the plans advertised at 1Mbps which actually deliver about 100kilobits per second. A couple of companies invested in submarine cables to the coast of Lagos and in the past three years the news has covered the so-called last-mile challenge - that is, the difficulty in getting all that available bandwidth to the end user. Hundreds of kilometers inland, in my land-locked home state, the government wants to lay fiber at least in a small part of the state capital. My point is that there will be internet everywhere in twenty years, not just in the US and the wealthiest countries. To not have reliable internet will be a mark of poverty, as it is a mark of poverty now to not have electricity (for the record, where I live we barely have electricity, we get maybe 10 hours a day on-and-off unpredictably every day), or to not have pipe-borne water (ditto, we have our own private water system - bore-hole, pumping machine, overhead storage.)
The uses will be different, more democratized. The elite first users came up with elite uses for the internet: research, geeky games, stock-market trading, bookselling. The masses will come up with different uses. I can imagine hysteria about the illuminati and the end of the world. Incomprehensible doodling all day - already the users of the internet have degenerated from theses and paragraphs and correct spelling to " sup, aw u 2day gr8 tym i no der is." Ah well, now they'll just scribble a line straight from their brains onto the doodoo wall. On the other hand, the potential for craftspeople in the middle-of-nowhere to reach their markets in New York, or for a design from a teenager in Hawaii to be adopted by a multibillion yen company in Tokyo will remain, and will grow dramatically.
Because location will become less important, the world will seem even more to be one uniform place. Today we have multinational brands in Dubai, Paris, Johannesburg, Mumbai - the same hotel names, the same clothing lines, same sandwich shops. By 2033, it will be sickening just how the same every city is. It will take effort to find a place with character. Maybe by this time, people will have so much material things that they'll finally stop chasing after material things. Local, and by this I mean national governments will work hard to get their people some time off the internet to create local relationships, national cohesion and culture outside the global internet. Please marry, they will say. Please exercise. In a few years, the most modern governments will finally cut down the workweek to four, then three days to encourage such perceived greater goods as the workplace efficiency being too high will produce more unemployment, more unhappiness, and - unless someone can come up with a large project to mop up human effort - more utterly useless goods.
What sort of project might that be, the modern day great pyramids, like industrial automation in the 20th century or business-process automation in the last twenty years? Would it be a space-travel, space-energy and stardrives program or a down-to-earth training/indoctrination/acculturation program utilizing software to help us learn everything from programming and kung-fu to languages and pottery? Would it be a program to end death as we know it or a program of mass aggression? Ha, I can't tell you that. I don't exactly have a crystal ball.
References:
The reference thing is irrelevant to this essay because I read a lot a lot a lot, so how can I say the ideas came from these two to five places?
1. Coursera (Inside the Internet - this course)
2. Google Glass (a proposed product)
3. The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded (movies)
4. Technology news sources
Note: I wrote the above essay in November 2013
for a massive open online course on
Internet History, Technology, and Security.
This was the writing prompt:Write an essay that imagines how the Internet will be different 20 years from now. Justify your answer by connecting your ideas to the history of the Internet that we have learned in this class and through outside materials. Your answer can focus on how technology will change or how people will change or how governments and policy will change or even how society might change.
--- For references:
Please enter your references here. Only use this space for references (i.e. don't continue your essay in this space). There is no specific citation format. While there is no minimum nor maximum required references, most essays will have somewhere between two and five references. If your references are web sites use the URL. If the references are papers include enough information to identify the source using APA http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ format. Graders will not take points off for syntax errors in references, but they are welcome to suggest how the syntax of references can be improved.
 |
| Like my hard-working students, I earned this |
On constitutional struggle and the challenge of modernity, with Iran as an example
Iran is a nation-state that is descended from the Persian empire of Biblical times.
In those days, more than 2000 years ago, kings like Nebuchadnezzar and Darius conquered lands as far as the Levant, in the historic home of the Jews. Wikipedia has that "Iran reached the pinnacle of its power during the Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BCE, which at its greatest extent comprised major portions of the ancient world, stretching from the Indus Valley in the east, to ... the northeastern border of Greece, making it the largest empire the world had yet seen."
To cut a long history short, over the centuries, this civilization has seen ignoble defeats in war and also the self-inflicted malaise of incompetent civil administration. In fact, in this course, we learn that a state's achievement in war and in administration are closely linked in a mutually reinforcing, or mutually eroding, cycle.
So for Iran, times have changed. Their landmass is greatly diminished. They boast impressive ruins, ancient architecture and ancient feats in technology and the arts, but are not today first or best in anything. How does a people so aware of their majestic history handle such a discrepancy between their great expectations of themselves and their mediocre reality? If they could do it before, why are they not doing it again?
In the 19th century, Iran was under the rule of the Qajar dynasty, and by the early 20th century, this largely incompetent rulership had for "neighbours" the clever Russian and British empires. Iran was losing badly - not just land, but even the labour of the people, the wealth of the remaining territory, was committed to servitude and debt payments.
The British, and later, American meddlers were of course not their traditional rivals - say Ottoman, Arab, or their conquered minority tribes. Modernity in the 19th and early 20th century meant that a country that lay oceans away could 1. have commercial or martial interests in your own country and 2. actually cross barriers in communication and transport to realize its aims. That is, to say, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the challenge of modernity came to many of our territories in the form of European colonialism.
Modernity does not have an easy definition. Wikipedia employs these subheadings in the attempt to define it: politically, sociologically, culturally and philosophically, secularization, scientifically, artistically! The explanations then focus on the use of reason and loss of "God" concept, and the incidence of a prescribed set of institutions in government and economics.
Basically this verbosity exposes the term as a weak one. Being centered on the experience of those who use it, its meaning may change from one place to another and from one decade to the next. In fact, the discussion forum for this course has featured some debate or complaint over the use of the word "modern, not modern, or modernity."
Still, it is a reasonably useful term because I know what it means, you likely do too: it relates to things of the new age that are not things of the times past. It relates to things from the bringers of new things (USA, say) and not things we have known for generations (the customs of my people, say.) I think it is easy to get annoyed with the term if one does not identify with the European dominant culture that defines it. This may be the case for Iran, as it is often the case for Africans, Muslims, Texans, and others who are beset and besieged by this new dominant power.
In this course, we learned that there are four idealized responses to modernity that have been adopted in the Muslim world, and that they are Secularism and emulation, religious Reformism, traditionalism, and fundamentalism.
Turkey has tried to jettison its own culture to chase after the West. It changed its writing and dress, abandoned its religion, adopted new laws, bureaucracies, and secular rationalism. Today, it has a strong economy alongside a nagging feeling among citizens that it should "be itself" sometimes. Who knows if the Europeans will ever admit Turkey into their club - the EU - or if Turkey will stop caring?
Iran had its phase of emulation, when the royals enjoyed foreign travel and racked up debts to finance it. Perversely, they even "emulated" the tactics of their tormentors in 1951 by nationalizing (claiming their rights to) their own oil.
Egypt, like Turkey and Iran, has a grand ancient history. It has had a Western-backed secular leadership over a largely religious population, with a constitution that was nominally Islamic but allowed reform and interpretation to suit the modern elite. Today it's in the midst of a bloody struggle and for six months has been ruled by the military.
The people of the Gulf, in Saudi, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and so on, may not have had great civilizations, but they are proud of their fiercely independent history in the desert. So far, they trade with the West - oil for modern goods - but have not adopted its laws. Will they need to change from their traditionalism to Western laws and bureaucracy to manage modernity, defined here as close contact with the rest of the world and its objects and ideas? I believe that process has already begun, as they purchase state-of-the-art education and financial centers.
Iran too is no slouch technologically (two words: nuclear weapons) but how quaintly Islamic its constitution is! It permits a bureaucracy to function, but at all times inferior to and checked by the ayatollah. I can't imagine how, except through fear and force, the Iranians have maintained this government for more than 30 years. The Iranians I've met are barely Islamic in lifestyle, so why do they accept the authority of a purported voice (sign) of God?
References:
1. Wikipedia: Iran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran
2. E. Afsah's video lectures: https://class.coursera.org/muslimworld-001/lecture/index
3. Course discussion forums
4. Wikipedia: modernity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity
5. My experience in Western, Muslim, and other countries.
6. Aljazeera.com and Al-Jazeera TV.
Note: I wrote this essay this week as part of an excellent online course on
Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World
Here was the writing prompt:
This course has presented four distinct response patterns to the challenge of modernity. These four Models of Adaptation are, to recapitulate:
YOUR TASK:
Write a well-argued, clearly structured, exposition that addresses at least three key questions:
REQUIREMENTS FOR YOUR SUBMISSION:
This is a short writing task of maximum 1000 words (less is acceptable, INCLUDING references)
...
In those days, more than 2000 years ago, kings like Nebuchadnezzar and Darius conquered lands as far as the Levant, in the historic home of the Jews. Wikipedia has that "Iran reached the pinnacle of its power during the Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BCE, which at its greatest extent comprised major portions of the ancient world, stretching from the Indus Valley in the east, to ... the northeastern border of Greece, making it the largest empire the world had yet seen."
To cut a long history short, over the centuries, this civilization has seen ignoble defeats in war and also the self-inflicted malaise of incompetent civil administration. In fact, in this course, we learn that a state's achievement in war and in administration are closely linked in a mutually reinforcing, or mutually eroding, cycle.
So for Iran, times have changed. Their landmass is greatly diminished. They boast impressive ruins, ancient architecture and ancient feats in technology and the arts, but are not today first or best in anything. How does a people so aware of their majestic history handle such a discrepancy between their great expectations of themselves and their mediocre reality? If they could do it before, why are they not doing it again?
In the 19th century, Iran was under the rule of the Qajar dynasty, and by the early 20th century, this largely incompetent rulership had for "neighbours" the clever Russian and British empires. Iran was losing badly - not just land, but even the labour of the people, the wealth of the remaining territory, was committed to servitude and debt payments.
The British, and later, American meddlers were of course not their traditional rivals - say Ottoman, Arab, or their conquered minority tribes. Modernity in the 19th and early 20th century meant that a country that lay oceans away could 1. have commercial or martial interests in your own country and 2. actually cross barriers in communication and transport to realize its aims. That is, to say, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the challenge of modernity came to many of our territories in the form of European colonialism.
Modernity does not have an easy definition. Wikipedia employs these subheadings in the attempt to define it: politically, sociologically, culturally and philosophically, secularization, scientifically, artistically! The explanations then focus on the use of reason and loss of "God" concept, and the incidence of a prescribed set of institutions in government and economics.
Basically this verbosity exposes the term as a weak one. Being centered on the experience of those who use it, its meaning may change from one place to another and from one decade to the next. In fact, the discussion forum for this course has featured some debate or complaint over the use of the word "modern, not modern, or modernity."
Still, it is a reasonably useful term because I know what it means, you likely do too: it relates to things of the new age that are not things of the times past. It relates to things from the bringers of new things (USA, say) and not things we have known for generations (the customs of my people, say.) I think it is easy to get annoyed with the term if one does not identify with the European dominant culture that defines it. This may be the case for Iran, as it is often the case for Africans, Muslims, Texans, and others who are beset and besieged by this new dominant power.
In this course, we learned that there are four idealized responses to modernity that have been adopted in the Muslim world, and that they are Secularism and emulation, religious Reformism, traditionalism, and fundamentalism.
Turkey has tried to jettison its own culture to chase after the West. It changed its writing and dress, abandoned its religion, adopted new laws, bureaucracies, and secular rationalism. Today, it has a strong economy alongside a nagging feeling among citizens that it should "be itself" sometimes. Who knows if the Europeans will ever admit Turkey into their club - the EU - or if Turkey will stop caring?
Iran had its phase of emulation, when the royals enjoyed foreign travel and racked up debts to finance it. Perversely, they even "emulated" the tactics of their tormentors in 1951 by nationalizing (claiming their rights to) their own oil.
Egypt, like Turkey and Iran, has a grand ancient history. It has had a Western-backed secular leadership over a largely religious population, with a constitution that was nominally Islamic but allowed reform and interpretation to suit the modern elite. Today it's in the midst of a bloody struggle and for six months has been ruled by the military.
The people of the Gulf, in Saudi, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and so on, may not have had great civilizations, but they are proud of their fiercely independent history in the desert. So far, they trade with the West - oil for modern goods - but have not adopted its laws. Will they need to change from their traditionalism to Western laws and bureaucracy to manage modernity, defined here as close contact with the rest of the world and its objects and ideas? I believe that process has already begun, as they purchase state-of-the-art education and financial centers.
Iran too is no slouch technologically (two words: nuclear weapons) but how quaintly Islamic its constitution is! It permits a bureaucracy to function, but at all times inferior to and checked by the ayatollah. I can't imagine how, except through fear and force, the Iranians have maintained this government for more than 30 years. The Iranians I've met are barely Islamic in lifestyle, so why do they accept the authority of a purported voice (sign) of God?
References:
1. Wikipedia: Iran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran
2. E. Afsah's video lectures: https://class.coursera.org/muslimworld-001/lecture/index
3. Course discussion forums
4. Wikipedia: modernity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity
5. My experience in Western, Muslim, and other countries.
6. Aljazeera.com and Al-Jazeera TV.
Note: I wrote this essay this week as part of an excellent online course on
Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World
Here was the writing prompt:
This course has presented four distinct response patterns to the challenge of modernity. These four Models of Adaptation are, to recapitulate:
- Emulation/Secularism
- Religious Reform
- Traditionalism
- Fundamentalism
YOUR TASK:
Write a well-argued, clearly structured, exposition that addresses at least three key questions:
- What is special about modernity and which challenges does it generally pose to traditional societies?
- Which challenges did Iran face from the 19th century onwards and what had these to do with modernity?
- Which elements of the first three response patterns can you make out in modern Iranian history, and what accounts, in your view, for the ultimate success of the fourth in the shape of the victorious Islamic Revolution?
REQUIREMENTS FOR YOUR SUBMISSION:
...
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