Things I like

Sunday 24 April 2016

Review: The BFG

The BFG by Roald Dahl
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I like this book, it's a very heart warming, sweet, pleasant book.

It's written for kids, but I loved it as an adult. Dahl thinks of himself as the BFG, opening up little Sophie's mind to great new ideas, criticizing humans for being the only species to kill their own, challenging humans' self centered world-view "You humans think you're so clever, only believing in what you see. Till yesterday you didn't even believe Giants existed."

I highly recommend this book to kids. If you wanna teach your read vocabulary and ideas, give them all sorts of books to read. But if you wanna teach them _how to learn_ vocabulary and ideas, give them this book!

View all my reviews

Thursday 14 April 2016

Courage Quotes

Courage doesn't mean you don't get afraid.

Courage means you continue despite the fear.

Friday 8 April 2016

Ah!

Saturday 9 January 2016

Learning Python The Hard Way

A quote from the first page:

As you study this book, and continue with programming, remember that anything worth doing is difficult at first. Maybe you are the kind of person who is afraid of failure so you give up at the first sign of difficulty. Maybe you never learned self-discipline so you can't do anything that's "boring." Maybe you were told that you are "gifted" so you never attempt anything that might make you seem stupid or not a prodigy. Maybe you are competitive and unfairly compare yourself to someone like me who's been programming for more than 20 years.

Whatever your reason for wanting to quit, keep at it. Force yourself. If you run into a Study Drill you can't do, or a lesson you just do not understand, then skip it and come back to it later. Just keep going because with programming there's this very odd thing that happens. At first, you will not understand anything. It'll be weird, just like with learning any human language. You will struggle with words, and not know what symbols are what, and it'll all be very confusing. Then one day BANG your brain will snap and you will suddenly "get it." If you keep doing the exercises and keep trying to understand them, you will get it. You might not be a master coder, but you will at least understand how programming works.

If you give up, you won't ever reach this point. You will hit the first confusing thing (which is everything at first) and then stop. If you keep trying, keep typing it in, trying to understand it and reading about it, you will eventually get it. If you go through this whole book, and you still do not understand how to code, at least you gave it a shot. You can say you tried your best and a little more and it didn't work out, but at least you tried. You can be proud of that.

Thursday 26 November 2015

Reading List - 10

Ancient Greeks

The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
Tragedies of Aeschylus
Tragedies of Sophocles
Tragedies of Euripides
Histories by Herodotus
History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
Dialogues by Plato
Works by Aristotle
Letter to Herodotus and Letter to Menoecus by Epicurus
Ancient Romans

Treatises of Cicero

On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
Aeneid by Virgil
Works of Horace
History of Rome by Livy
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Parallel Lives and Moralia by Plutarch
Germania and Dialogue on Oratory by Tacitus
Enchiridion and Discourses by Epictetus
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Letters From a Stoic by Seneca

If you’re looking for a big picture tour of classical culture, I highly recommend two lecture series from my favorite college professor, Dr. J. Rufus Fears: Famous Greeks and Famous Romans.