couple of TED talks on drawing

Speaker: Graham Shaw

You, too, can draw cartoons! Audience (including you, the viewer) asked to draw along with him. It works.

Drawing helps us remember more. Some study showed subjects remembering twice as many words when they drew vs. writing them down. (Exact number not given.) Once again, audience-friendly demo. As he put it, paraphrased, "you can all draw. Or at least, draw well enough to be useful."

productive day

Today feel long and full. Possibly partly because I woke up at 6, sadly. But I cleaned up, moved stuff to my new place (10 minute walk from the old one), went back, studied Spanish waiting for someone to show, bailed, moved in fully, walked out for shopping, watched videos of how to draw (previous post), watched more Coursera videos on Mars, started a Coursera on machine learning, got in a bit of Japanese.

I'd say a killer feature of Coursera is being able to speed up video playback, but I think I've seen that on other video players. Still, it's nice, I can take in what they say faster than they speak naturally.

I'm way ahead of my Duolingo friends for the week! Probably because they were at some burn thing in the woods and couldn't get online, mind you. But ahead! Briefly!

I'd also removed the freeciv and freecol packages. I can feel the withdrawal from freecol, my fingers twitching toward the easy game, engaging enough to feel like the brain is working but not challenging enough to be tiring. But the package stayed removed, and I did Spanish and planetary science instead, so that's a win.

Malden has a bunch of nice small parks and lot of not-nice big intersections.