Education
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Inspiring Educators
→: Inspiring EducatorsI’ve had a post in mind for a while now, about how I accidentally mis-branded myself as an educator, why that was a problem, and how I managed to turn it into a selling point. And then I watched the video embedded below. And it made me re-evaluate the value that I place on being…
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What Makes a Programmer Great?
→: What Makes a Programmer Great?This is a post I co-wrote with Douglas Gresham. Douglas is a software engineer at Google, who blogs at www.douglasgresham.co.uk (less often than he should, go bug him for updates). I’m a graduate student, though I firmly believe that great programmers are not the result of university courses in programming. But university courses take us…
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Can You Flow Your Way to Great?
→: Can You Flow Your Way to Great?If you know me at all (or have just been reading my blog for a while) you’ll know I’m really interested in how to be more productive, more effective, and generally achieving more. And of course I read Zen Habits and all these other blogs that talk about flow. Flow is about being completely absorbed…
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Not a Scientist, Nor an Engineer
→: Not a Scientist, Nor an EngineerWhen I was doing my undergrad, I knew a lot of geography students. One of them told me that geographers spent a lot of time debating what geography was. I found this completely ridiculous, of course, imagining the only thing to be more pointless than studying geography was angsting about nature of geography. (Of course,…
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Progress
→: ProgressHow do you define progress? As a grad student, the weeks I spend reading papers and thinking don’t feel like progress – it’s the week, or day, or hour, when things start to come together that does. In going back to training, it’s not the gradual improvements in fitness and energy. It’s when I can…
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Rediscovering Balance
→: Rediscovering BalanceMy life has been out of balance for as long as I can clearly remember. And I know, the most successful women embrace that imbalance but my feeling is that mine has been too far out of balance, or perhaps just too imbalanced in the wrong way. Last semester, I was in so much pain…
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Science Teacher Talk: Information -> Meaning
→: Science Teacher Talk: Information -> MeaningInitial draft of a talk I’m supposed to be giving in February. Information -> Meaning Before the printing press, literacy rates were really low, and the average book was the bible. This was all people had by way of information. The printing press caused a revolution. 100 years later, humans had more information than they…
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First Day as a Ski Instructor
→: First Day as a Ski InstructorAlthough I’ve given a lot of free ski lessons since I qualified, to people displaying various degrees of talent and attention to instruction… yesterday was the first time people paid for my advice. I’m still kind of shocked that it’s worth anything, given that I couldn’t ski until I was 21. But, now I have…