The continuous learning process...

So, you’ve finished school, you’re working, you probably have been doing so for a few (or too many) years. Then one day you stumble on a math equation you saw at High School (Tertiary School if you are British) and you can’t remember where to start solving it. Then someone mentions something about Genghis Khan and you barely remember he was a Mongol that took over many lands.

It’s only natural, you know, to forget things over a period of time. Specially when we don’t use and practice them constantly. How can you avoid losing all that information your teachers took so much pride and effort in stuffing into your brain in the first place?

I came up with an interesting game I am going to start. Every Saturday (or so) I will pick a topic on random, it might be about the British Empire, or about the Chin, or about finding the area under a curve, or parsing XML through the Python programming language, or how to hack the firmware for my digital camera, or maybe how to bake French bread. Then I am going to blog about my findings.

Why? Well… maybe many of you already know some of these things. Then again, maybe many of you don’t. Information is vital in our society: He who knows is he who perseveres. The point of me posting random topics to my Blog is not to brag about how much I know, or what I learned throughout the day, but to share my opinion on a topic I randomly thought about which may be of interest to you.

In the end, it may be a handy read, or it may be irrelevant information, but the point is doing what you feel is right in the end… I feel we all must keep our memories and knowledge alive, and this is might be a good practice to start with.

What do you think? Do you consider you have a better way of keeping knowledge alive in your memory?

Unproductive? Stressed out? This might help...

How can you be more productive at home and at work, while ridding yourself of unnecessary stress? These are a few tips I have found along the way:

Pending matters (personal or work) tend to stick to your brain through the day, even though you are not focusing on them. They are like a cancer that cuts off productivity, just like a person who is going through divorce or difficult times will have trouble coping with work and friends, this holds with any kind of personal activities that have been left pending.

• If you take email seriously, divide it into “personal” and “work” folders. Attend to personal mail before leaving to work each morning, or at night before going to bed.
• Write down task lists (Use Google Calendar, Outlook, Google Tasks or even pen and paper) and divide them into days. You can’t do everything in a day, so be realistic. Try to do everything that is personal at home, and everything that is work related at the office.
• When you don’t accomplish a pending task, don’t leave it “hanging”. Set it for a later time (after work maybe?) and remove it from the “overdue” list. If it was something urgent you couldn’t accomplish and it involves someone else, let that person know (email? phone?) immediately that it will take you another day to finish it.
• While at work, be sure to have your pending activities listed appropiately and go through them in order, remember you can’t do everything at once and it will only stress you out thinking about how much you have to do, specially when you have a deadline.
• If you read personal email at work, try to archive (or store) personal emails that arrive, and mark in your calendar that you must attend to those emails when you get home. If it is something urgent, reply at once that you will attend to the issue at a later time.

By following these steps, hopefully you will be able to clear your mind at work and start to focus on what you have to do, not what you had to do and didn’t do, nor what you have pending and might have to do later. Everything at its time.

Now get to work!

Someone named David

I went for a stroll through the graveyard the other day. It was a random event, however, enjoyable to a certain extent. I didn’t intend to make a photoshoot out of it, however, I found some interesting scenes and moments along the way.

I was thinking about the people who had gone through life and were now buried in the cemetery. What might their lives have been like? How must they have looked? Could there be a trace of history they have left behind? What will their descendants think or know about them? Did they even have offspring at all?

It’s interesting when all these questions come to mind as you start formulating all these stories about lives you know nothing certain about, except for their last words. I sometimes wonder about what will my last words be, I would at least hope for them to be somewhat meaningful. Or maybe something completely random would do just as well.

Boston Dynamics PETMAN humanoid robot

“Boston Dynamics, makers of BigDog, i.e., the coolest robot ever made, are in the process of building a dynamically balanced humanoid. PETMAN is their new 2-legged robot sponsored by the US Army for the purpose of testing chemical protection clothing for the soldiers.

Boston Dynamics has not released much information about PETMAN other than that the project has 2 phases : phase 1 has a 13-month duration focused on design and phase 2 has a 17-month duration for building, validating and installing the robot. The company expects to deliver the robot in 2011.”

via Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.

An Ode to the Inverted Question Mark

Yesterday was National Punctuation Day in the U.S.A. and although I do not live in the US, I wrote this short ode to the Inverted Question Mark:

I am in love with the inverted question mark “¿”. It hangs like a light bulb, with such charisma and curves. It is but a mere symbol, however, a symbol so special to me. I am in love with this question mark, as it states the unraveling awkwardness of the world, a strange world in which I grew up in. ¿Is it true, my love, that a question should start with you? You represent a world with many languages, many signs, and many symbols. My inverted question mark, you represent change, beauty and awkwardness. My inverted question mark, you will always be my true undaunted love.