a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
TechOwl's comments
activity:
TechOwl  ·  3166 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: [OC] Tending Your Mind's Garden

I honestly do think that keeping a well-tended garden is a high-effort task. Of course, it depends on what you consider to be a weed, and what you consider 'healthy' and 'beautiful' to mean. But my take is that e.g. believing that homosexuality is inherently bad would be an example of a weed, and depending on a person's upbringing, that can be a very easy belief to hold. Weeds of that sort can be difficult for people to come to terms with and pluck, especially if they've been strongly indoctrinated into a particular system of beliefs.

I think I agree with your other points.

TechOwl  ·  3166 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: [OC] Tending Your Mind's Garden

That's a good point -- you'd definitely want to evaluate what other gardeners tell you, as some of them will be outright wrong. I'm glad it's potentially helpful!

TechOwl  ·  3188 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How do you commute - I just started commuting with a mini skateboard at age 30.

My own commute is a combination of taking a train and walking, but I see a lot of people (in San Francisco) using the other methods you've listed -- Razor scooters, Airwheel-style standing unicycles, folding bikes, and skateboards (both standard and electric). You definitely don't need to feel awkward about skateboarding at age thirty -- I've seen folks in their fifties wearing suits and carrying a skateboard with them, and indeed, that's nothing to judge someone for.

TechOwl  ·  3189 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why We Should Switch To A Base-12 Counting System

I'm unconvinced that a base-12 numbering system is particularly better than base-10, but I can explain what the author was trying to say about fractions and decimals. In base-12, one half would be represented as 0.6, one third as 0.4, and one quarter as 0.3. In base-10, the number immediately following the decimal mark is the tenths place, so one half is 0.5, or five tenths; in base-12, that first digit after the decimal mark would be the twelfths place, so one half would be 0.6, for six twelfths.

TechOwl  ·  3189 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Kerntype, an html5 kerning game

This was fun, thanks for sharing! I'm not a professional designer, but I did get 91/100 :D

TechOwl  ·  3189 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How did you learn programming?

Hi -- I'm a professional software engineer, and I first began coding about three years ago, after finishing college (where I studied biology). Here are my suggestions.

As a beginner, you'd do best to learn a simple and modern language like Python or Ruby. Python is my top recommendation. I would avoid languages like C and JavaScript initially -- though both are widely used, C is too syntactically clumsy for an absolute beginner to learn quickly, while JavaScript is just a bit on the strange side. You could certainly learn JavaScript as a first language, but I think it'd be a much more natural choice for your second language.

I learned Python using a free "MOOC" (Massively Open Online Course) at https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-mitx-6-00-1x-0 -- that's essentially an online version of MIT's Computer Science 101 course. If you'd like something a bit shorter, I've heard great things about another free course, https://www.coursera.org/course/interactivepython1. Indeed, that Coursera course begins in just a week, on July 11.

You could also poke around on codecademy, as others have recommended, but you won't learn in much depth there. I'd suggest starting with an open online course or by self-studying from a textbook ("Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python" is one that I haven't read, but that comes highly recommended, and is available for free online at https://inventwithpython.com/).

Feel free to ping me with any questions.