Category: learndorphins

Part 1: here. Part 2: here. Suburban practice: 30-45mph streets Goals: Be able to drive to (and park at) Trader Joe’s then Metropolitan Market and get back home. Continue building good habits, two-way communication with parental unit in right seat Scanning and naming things to keep an eye on (e.g., pedestrians looking like they may cross, lights about to change, […]

Learn to Drive Syllabus: Neighborhood

learndorphins

2022-06-212022-07-11 wt8p

(A belated followup to Part 1. Part 3 is here.) Neighborhood Practice: 25mph streets Goals: Back out of and pull into our driveway. Complete point-to-point drives in a gentle environment, build good habits – speed control, scanning, and learning to recognize potential issues. Two-way communication with parental unit in right seat. For example, when I say stop, you need to […]

Screws

learndorphins

2021-08-262021-08-27 wt8p

[From mid-2008] My dishwasher’s been making a bad grinding noise that, I think, is the remnant of a broken coffee cup sloshing around in the sprayer assembly. I noticed the screws holding this on are the TORX shape. This got me wondering about the type of screws available and what their trade-offs were. Enjoy! The flathead (or “slotted”) screw is […]

Learning to Drive Syllabus, Parking Lot

learndorphins

2021-01-152022-07-11 wt8p

I will be teaching my adult children how to drive and found it helpful to cobble together a syllabus of activities. This will be in multiple phases, starting with … a parking lot. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Parking Lot: Goals: Use and feel of steering inputs, mirrors and other controls. Car gauges and lights. Learn how […]

Nutrition Course External References

learndorphins

2013-03-16 wt8p 2 comments

… speaking of great Coursera offerings, I just finished Katie Ferraro’s excellent Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention course. Its focus on evidence-based medicine was refreshing and helped clear up a lot of confusion I’ve had from contradictory sources over the years. Since Coursera content is prone to being archived, I wanted to preserve the extensive set of external references provided so […]

Reflections on Coursera

learndorphins

2013-03-03 wt8p 2 comments

Charles “Dr Chuck” Severance put together an interesting video on his reflections on Coursera from his “Internet History, Technology, and Security” class. Some areas in the video that I’d call out: 01:42 – 02:45 — Chuck shows us how cozy his instructor’s room is. He expands upon the technology setup here, but it’s basically a couple of HD cameras, a monitor, […]

Online classes

learndorphins

2011-11-23 wt8p 6 comments

This fall, Stanford has been offering free online classes this fall in three subject areas of computing: Artificial Intelligence, Databases, and Machine Learning. It’s different from MIT’s excellent OpenCourseWare series in that Stanford is offering a course you can play along with while MIT is providing the materials for self-study. For two of the courses, two tracks were offered: “basic,” in […]

Dolphin Kick

2011-02-07 wt8p

When I first heard someone mention the term dolphin kick, I thought it was a reference to the 1980s Patrick Duffy show, Man from Atlantis. The BBC says the dolphin kick “replaces a standard underwater leg kick with a whipping motion that minimizes water resistance.”[1] It’s a little easier to make sense of this if you watch the video. Suffice […]