Isocracy AGM, Duolingo Progress, Coursework

[tcpip]

Isocracy AGM was held today; a smaller-than-usual gathering, although we did have person dialing-in as well. Discussed Nicolò Bellanca's "Isocracy: The Institutions of Equality", and noted that in most cases the programme developed by the Isocracy Network had a greater level of exactness, detail, and coherence. But that is to be expected, we've been working on it for quite a while. There was widespread discussion about various suggestions in the book, especially matters of federalism, economies of scale, and so forth. The discussion continued on (and went on a wider range of subjects) when the official meeting ended and we continued at the local coffee shop. Next items on the agenda include submitting our paperwork to Consumer Affairs and writing a submission on homelessness to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry.

Finished the English to Russian tree on Duolingo earlier tonight. Still not feeling very confident of my abilities in said language at all and a lot more revision is required. I will also do the Russian to English tree as well, which seems to help reinforce some core concepts, and I suspect it is more developed that the other way around. In any case, it is my only "golden owl" of the year, bringing my total to 13. I remain amazed at users like ClaudioAg1! who have completed 43 trees. Worse still (for me) I have discovered that Duolingo now also has Latin. I'll finally make use of those old textbooks on the subject that I've barely looked at over the last 25 years or so, despite their old-world charm, and have a close look at Damian Conway's famous Lingua::Romana::Perligata Perl module, written due to Latin's strong lexical structure, although it seems to me that consistent positional languages have certain ease-of-learning and consistency advantages over the use of inflexions (English adjective order is quite a wonderful example).

Speaking of coursework, my Linux and HPC workshops took up most of the work time for the latter half of last week, with the Introduction to Linux and HPC class being full to the rafters, followed by Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting on the second day. Both of those had some excellent questions from some pretty switched on researchers. The third course, Regular Expressions using Linux had to be cancelled due to attendance numbers, which was a real shame given the amount of effort that's been put into it. The researchers who did attend pleaded for me to run the course again next year, which I certainly will. It is too important a subject, especially for various bioinformatics subjects.

Comments

[catsidhe]

The Latin Duolingo is still beta, so it's quite short. (I've managed to not just finish but get it entirely gold.)

Because of the flexible word order and the beta status, I've been getting quite a lot of my "My answer was correct" feedbacks accepted. Still: it is mainly working on noun and adjective declensions in the present tense. And like all the languages, it has its fixations: expect many psittaci ebrii and mustelae callidae.

Also, it is making an (inconsistent) distinction between "comrade" (comes) and "companion" (contubernalis) which I can't get my head around. I don't think the distinction is as clear in English as they seem to think it is.



I take it the Regular Expressions in Linux was giving an overview of the various flavours of Regex available, as well as how to use them?

RegEx

[tcpip]

Yeah, pretty much as you said.

Four-hour course, starts with regular languages, then general metacharacters, then grep, sed, and awk, all in the first hours.

Second hour explores the differences between BRE and ERE.

Third hour is Perl and PCRE.

Fourth hour is PCRE in PHP, Python, and Java. Conclusion is Simple Regex Language.

I think that's quite a lot for one day!

Re: RegEx

[catsidhe]

And a quick mention of SQL and filesystem globbing, and why they are to PCRE as My First Reader is to Finnegan's Wake?

Re: RegEx

[tcpip]

That's a good idea. I do talk about why HTML is often not very suitable for regular expressions.

(BTW, I see what you mean about the Latin tree. If I worked on it, I'd have it finished in a few hours..)

[warriorsavant]

May have to check out Duolingua. Been recommended to be before. However, how ever much I'd love to spend time doing nothing but learning languages, have too many other higher priorities.

[tcpip]

One of the nice things about it is the small incremental improvements that you can achieve (wrapped in gamification, of course). You can set yourself a very modest goal of just a single lesson a day, which one can complete in a few minutes.

Quite sensibly Duolingo recommends putting aside around fifteen minutes a day to learn a second language.

I'm rather a little too deep in the swamp and can easily spend up to two hours a day on the thing, although that is mostly whilst travelling.