Learning second, foreign, or other language as adult is not uncomplicated. First, we need to review what we actually know about learning languages, and learning them as an adult (as there is a significant difference between how children and adults learn languages). What we don't know about l;earning a language First off, we need to ... Read more
When one wants to understand what the most sigificant digits are regarding courses of action, it is vital to have the appropriate time-scale. What can be done in 1 day is a much more constrained problem than one can be done in 1 year, 10 years, 1,000 years, etc. Ten million years is sufficiently large ... Read more
Our three-year-old wasn't pooping regularly, which caused a lot of concern. Eventually we were going to go to the hospital for a thorough set of tests and what not, after about 4 months of once-per-week pooping. There are many potential causes and this behavior is not uncommon in 2-6 year olds. Possible things to try: ... Read more
The original formulation of Zipf's law was based on naturally occurring word frequencies and their rank order in a given English language corpus. For one example, merely 135 words accounted for 50% of the total word frequencies. This could be extended to phrases as well. For foreign language learners, this means that there is some ... Read more
The thing about history is that there is a lot of it. And prehistory, well, so much more. The highlights: carbon/methane sequestration 50mya seas and temperatures Return of the wooly mammoth Arctic resources Emigration for the next 1,000 years O Canada Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) > At least since 1997, the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum has ... Read more
Shichida, Heguru and other so-called "right-brain" learning methods, to put it plainly, have no evidence for their efficacy, and in large part the theoretical statements they make about how the brain and learning works are largely discredited by current learning and brain development research. These kinds of so-called "schools" should be considered scams for the ... Read more
Update added the Time Horizon timeline which includes events at various time bands. Regular readers of this blog know that I intermittently opine on what are appropriate time horizons. This it seems is an underlying feature of many failures and successes in many areas of human behavior. Allow me to present some recent thoughts and ... Read more