How to eat betterThis is a digest (if you'll pardon the pun) of information on the gap between the typical modern Western diet and what our bodies are adapted for. There's certainly a big gap between what I eat and Ran Prieur's recommendations, but there's a lot of food for thought here.
A simple Gmail hackI mentioned this in the office the other day and was surprised that no one else knew, so they told me to post it in my Scrapbook!
If you're signing up for mailing lists/etc with your Gmail account, try adding a tag your email address, like this:
johnsmith+lists@gmail.com (instead of johnsmith@gmail.com)
This will work like your normal email address, but if you also create a label in your email account called "lists", all mail with this tag will automatically be added to it. You can also create a filter for all email with "+lists" in the address, so that it doesn't display in your inbox.
There are some other uses for this. For example, if you're testing a site, you can just add different tags to your address and you have an endless supply of different addresses to test it with.
Also, if you teach two completely different things, and want to have two different teaching profiles on School of Everything, you could use the same email address with different tags to create multiple accounts.
Hope that isn't too confusing - I've found this trick useful, so it seemed worth passing on.
How to, erm, make like a bear...From an article about three guys who are walking round Britain, living without money:
most of the British population... don't know how to defecate outdoors.
"We're constantly coming across what we call the Ring of Hasty Poos," Will explains. " People need a crap and they're miles from a toilet, so they panic, go into the woods and fling bits of paper everywhere. These shameful poos are a real problem."
"It's a simple art that we have lost," adds Ginger. "You dig a nice big hole with a stick, get some water, wash your bum, and use moss or leaves to wipe it clean and dry. Once you get used to it any leaf will do, although moss is best."
"Or sphagnum," says Ed, a little misty-eyed at the memory. "Ooh, that's a treat..."
The Folksy rulerOne of the things I really like about Folksy.com (the UK-based crafts marketplace) is the cool stuff they make to promote the site. Looking through their Flickr stream, there are plenty of other examples of them getting involved with the community of people who make and sell stuff through the site.
There's lots of inspiration there for us at School of Everything - and for any other startup that's trying to find playful ways to spread the word about a useful service.
How to write Consistently Boring Scientific LiteratureA not at all boring article that's full of genuinely good advice on what not to do if you find yourself writing a scientific paper.
Home brewing the easy wayI haven't tried following his method yet, so I can't vouch for the quality of the beer you get! But the video seems to explain things clearly.
Try your hand at transcribing 17th century documentsTry transcribing a document and get it marked.
How to get lost - and what to do nextI'm going away by car this weekend and I've just been planning my routes, which reminded me of something about learning to drive. When I first passed my test and found myself out on the road on my own, the thing I was least prepared for was not having someone constantly directing me! No one had taught me how to get lost, or what to do next.
Unlike a lot of my friends, I didn't learn to drive when I turned seventeen, and by the time I took my test, I was already in a job where they needed me to do a lot of driving. I had a great driving instructor - he was an ex-professional footballer who still did a lot of football coaching, and I'm sure that experience was part of what made him good at teaching driving skills. But like most people, my lessons consisted largely of practising for the driving test, in which you're given instructions on exactly what to do at all times.
As soon as I qualified, I found myself being sent out in a radio car all over South Yorkshire with an address and an A to Z, with the news editor wanting me to call in before the next bulletin. I'd never really practised studying a map, before you set off, so that you remember how to get somewhere - and I hadn't learned how to drive safely while keeping an eye out for a street name, or just knowing when to pull up and look at the map again.
Luckily I got through without doing any harm to myself or anyone else, but I wonder if anyone actually does teach new drivers these skills? I notice a lot of the driving instructors on School of Everything offer Pass Plus training:
http://schoolofeverything.com/subject/pass-plus/all/teacher_profile
I'd be interested to know if those courses cover the kind of road skills and navigation skills I found I was lacking as a new driver? (Come to think of it, maybe having a SatNav is like always having a driving instructor telling you what to do next? It's not something I've tried, yet.)
Doing my homeworkI noticed recently how much new stuff I'm learning these days. In fact, it feels like I give myself more homework now than I ever used to do when I was at school or university. For example, in the past week I've been:
- teaching myself to transcribe 17th century manuscripts
- helping a friend rewrite a research report on Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (which meant getting my head round enough of the science not to mess up the meaning of what I was editing)
- editing a magazine about "commons" and "common sense"
- taking part in an extended email discussion about copyright and ethics
Even when I go to the pub with friends, there's a serious risk that one of us goes home with a reading list...
Whereas, when I was at school, I was one of those kids who is bright enough to get away with being slack. In sixth form, a teacher accused me of relying on my "native wit", which wasn't far from the truth - and at university, one of my tutors commented that I'd been "bone idle" for the whole of my second year.
Yet it wasn't always like that. When I was five or six, I was as full of curiosity as I am now, only with even more energy! So how come I lost that for a while? (For about twenty years, in fact.)
I think a lot of it has to do with the meaninglessness of the work at school. I hate doing stuff because I'm told to - and even more so, if it's obvious that the result of that work means little or nothing to anyone. In school, the best teachers find ways of making learning meaningful, but that takes quite an exceptional person - because they're working against the structure of schooling itself.
For me, the first step towards recovering my sense of curiosity was in my mid-twenties, when I quit a sensible job at the BBC and started reading with a vengeance. I discovered I could use the skills I'd learned at university to follow my own interests and lines of enquiry, which ran cross country over academic fields, rather than sticking to the path. I was broke and with no career direction and happier than I had been in years.
Even then, however, another point at which I used to get stuck was in the desire to know about Everything - meaning that I never knew where to start. [Ah... that explains how I ended up starting this site!] What I've figured out more recently, though, is that I can get round this by looking for opportunities to learn stuff through contributing to something meaningful. (For example, learning to transcribe 17th century manuscripts so that I can help with research for the Blackden Trust.)
I'm willing to believe that I was more allergic to school than average, but I can't help thinking that a lot of people go through a loss of curiosity as a result of the way our education system works, and not all of them are lucky enough to find it again. So I'm really curious about how we could help people get from where I was aged 5 to where I was aged 25, without the detour.
Archaeology and what it means to be "human"One of my favourite excuses for escaping from London is to go and help out with courses at the Blackden Trust. The Trust gives school students the opportunity to come and learn about archaeology, history and geography, working with leading academics in these fields and hopefully contributing to the ongoing process of research on this part of Cheshire:
http://theblackdentrust.org.uk/
This Saturday, I'll be there for a course on 'Geology and the landscape archaeology at Blackden', led by Mark Roberts, who has spent nearly a quarter of a century leading excavations at Boxgrove in Surrey, one of the earliest sites of human occupation in Britain.
I thought I'd try to find out a bit more about Mark's work, and that led me to this article, reposted on an anthropology forum, which gives a taste of what's been learned from the work at Boxgrove. I find these glimpses of life half a million years ago tantalising, not least for the questions they raise about what it means to be "human":
"Hunting and butchering large mammals in open environments would have, in hominids, required a level of planning and co-operation that could only be serviced by speech... Conversely, they are not yet fully 'modern' humans. This is the puzzling conundrum - because contrary to established views they were organised, they could plan and were adaptable. However, unless we are missing a great deal from the non-surviving organic record, they don't appear to have been particularly innovative, probably as a result of a lack of competition...
"It is also difficult to imagine speech without any manifestation of art or ceremony but at present none has been found. It appears that like the Neanderthals, into which species the Boxgrove hominids evolved, these hominids combined physical prowess with a 'partly modern' behavioural pattern in order to survive successfully in Europe for over 400,000 years. Whether they were actually human or not depends on our definition of the term; but it is certainly time to study them as a species in their own right, rather than to position them either as tool-assisted apes or as a failed model of ourselves."
http://forums.skadi.net/archive/index.php/t-17898.html
The sound of a black holeA few months ago, a friend played me some remarkable recordings made by scientists at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, who had captured and made audible the "sound" of stars. I just discovered that these are available, with lots more information about how the recordings were made, on a recent edition of the observatory's JodCast:
http://www.jodcast.net/archive/200808Extra/
Particularly mesmerising is the sound of material falling into a black hole (just after 23 minutes in on the podcast), which someone described as "God playing the bongos"!
For anyone interested in learning about astronomy, the visitors centre at Jodrell Bank and their online materials are an amazing resource.
