For three years I have been considering joining the crowd that participates in Conversion Diary's "7 Quick Takes Friday." It's a handy way to gather together random ideas that are cluttering up the backblog and/or are too short to make into posts of their own, and because it links back to the other participants, I get involved in a larger community. Which is probably why it took an introvert like me three years to take the plunge.
We've been watching How to Look at and Understand Great Art from The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company). I'll review it after we have completed the course, but already we are thrilled. I don't know how anyone can graduate from high school without this kind of knowledge, but I did—and I was valedictorian.
Do you know how Google Translate works? It's very clever. I would never have guessed, but thanks to the folks at Little Pim, I know there's magic involved—well, Harry Potter, anyway.
Rather than try and do any actual translating itself, Google Translate figures that someone else has probably already done the hard work for you. Google uses its incredible computing power to trawl through the vast swathes of human translation work, and pairs your English sentence with a human-translated equivalent. ... Whenever you ask Google to translate a sentence, it draws on vast archives of translated text, including everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages. ... This is why books like Harry Potter are so useful. With translations in 67 languages, Harry Potter provides an excellent frame of reference for Google Translate to draw upon. While there may be no recorded history of direct translation between Hebrew and Welsh, by running both translations through the hub of the original English text, Google can attempt a direct translation.
I took the Front Porch Republic out of my feedreader's A-list because I simply couldn't keep up. Fortunately, they send me occasional e-mails with their top posts, so I didn't miss Allan Carlson's The Family Centered Economy.
American writer and social critic Wendell Berry was born just three years before Russian agricultural economist Alexander Chayanov died in the Soviet Gulag; Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin was born at the same time as Chayanov but outlived him by 30 years. The insights of these three men lead Allan Carlson to suggest seven social changes that are sure to inspire and infuriate. Who (besides me) would have thought that the secret to a healthy economy would involve homemaking, homeschooling, micro-business, small-scale farming, breastfeeding, and large families?
My family is tired of hearing me preach about the wonders a nightly xylitol rinse has done for my teeth and gums. I find the dental profession in general remarkably incurious about this inexpensive and pleasant dental health aid, but here is some encouraging news, in both the linked article and other articles under "Related Stories." The stories are depressingly old (2007/2008), but this paper says that the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry has supported "the use of xylitol as part of a preventive strategy aimed specifically at long term caries pathogen suppression and caries ... reduction in higher risk populations" since 2010. Ask your dentist.
Last Saturday we enjoyed the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra's season-opening concert, Puccini é Verdi, a presentation of excerpts from the two composers' great works. Music Director Christopher Wilkins certainly knows how to draw a sell-out crowd to begin the season with great enthusiasm: feature the University of Central Florida Chorus and the Florida Opera Theatre Chorus and you're bound to draw many of their friends as well.
What impressed me the most about the production was how well it was staged. The stage was structured so that the soloists, rather than waiting their turns stiffly on front-and-center chairs, made their entrances through the orchestra as they were singing. It wasn't a complicated setup, and added much to the effect.
Crime is down, way down. Everyone from Free-Range Kids to the New York Times to our local police department is telling us so. Why, then, is fear up? Here's my take on the subject:
Certainly the relentless, sensationalist, sponsor-driven news coverage of any tragedy, no matter how remote, is to blame. Even worse, however, are regular television shows. (Books, too, but TV is more graphic.) Face it: a kid walking safely to school does not make for an exciting story. So what do we see? Lots and lots of crime. Kidnappings, murders, rapes, dismemberments, terrorism, torture, lots of car chases and bullets spraying. Twisted neighbors, abusive family members, corrupt cops.
We know it’s fiction, but the sounds, sights, and terror have an impact on our brains we cannot control. Bare statistics about crime are no match for the horrors that our gut knows surround us—because we have seen them.
What do you think?
For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!
my dad was telling me about a course he's been watching from the Great Courses. i love pouring through their catalog. fortunately, i think the Carnegie has some of their series. i just might have to take the plunge. is it possible to do a homeschoo high school curriculum on just Great Courses videos?
Liz -- Not on the videos alone, I'm sure, nor would you want to. (I've seen enough of your approach to know that.) But they'd be a great supplement. They have some high school courses, and most if not all of their other courses would be suitable for high school students, I think. Janet highly recommends their How to Listen to and Understand Great Music for music history. (I do, also, but her degree from Eastman lends a bit more authority to the recommendation.) We've found everything Bob Greenberg has taught to be great. My only caveat is that the courses are designed to keep high school and college students interested, and we know what keeps teenage boys glued to the lecture ... frankly I got tired of hearing about the composers' sex lives.
I thought of recommending The Everyday Guide to Wine to you after reading one of your recent posts. We loved it.
Get on their mailing list, and you'll be flooded with hard-to-resist catalogs. You do know never to buy a course that's not on sale, right? All their courses go on sale at least once a year. The regular prices will make your eyes roll back into your head, but the sale prices are reasonable.
thanks for the tip - and the recommendation! i will also look into the great music course. so many to choose from! so little time!
I just noticed yesterday that my library is offering another freebie. I knew they offered Ancestry (drawback is that I have to go to the library for that). They also offer Mango and Little Pim which would allow me to learn a foreign language from home.
Now I notice that they offer something called Universal Class. I really don't know much about it, but it looks like you can take on on-line classes in pretty much any subject for free. I think they have a demo class that you can try out. Note that it is free for me because my library is paying for a library subscription. Otherwise I think you have to pay for the classes. It's worth checking out your library to see what kind of services they offer!
We have a bunch of Great Courses that I picked up cheap at library book sales. So far we have watched....zero. I think they are probably a bit dry for the boys at this point. Maybe some of the art ones would be more interesting.
The Teaching Company Great Music course is only great for those with excellent hearing. It's the only Teaching company course I ever gave up on partway through - out of frustration at listening to the same bit of tape over and over again to try to hear what he said I was supposed to hear and never managing to hear it at all.
Did the OPO give in to popular demand and perform the lovely Nabucco slave chorus or did they avoid the crowd-pleasers for more artsy fare?
Yep, we did get to hear that one, and they did a fine job. Also from Verdi: La forza del destino: overture, Il Trovtore: Vedi! le fosche notturne spoglie (Anvil Chorus), Rigoletto: Questa o quella, Falstaff: E sogno? O realta?, Don Carlo: Spuntato ecce il di d'esultanza and Dio, che nell'alma infondere, and La Traviata: Si ridesta in ciel l'aurora, Ah fors'e lui... Sempre libera, and Libamo ne' lieti calici.
Puccini: Edgar, Prelude to Act 1, and Questo amor, vergogna mia, Madama Butterfly: Humming Chorus, Gianni Schicchi: O mio babbino caro, Tosca: E lucevan le stelle, Vissi d'arte, and Va, Tosca! (Te Deum), Manon Lescaut: Intermezzo, and Turandot: Nessun dorma.
(That should give you an idea. There may be mistakes in my hasty transcription of the program -- spell check is no help searching for typos here!
Not being much of an opera buff, many of these were new to me, but I can't say they weren't crowd pleasers. The OPO does a pretty good job of pleasing the audience with old favorite and pleasing the orchestra with music they haven't played a million times.
