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What are you learning about these days?

The beliefs and cultures from all over the world; it helps to keep in perspective that the usa is a country, not the world; and many of us are too closed minded.

I'm back in school working on a degree on organic chemistry too;)

I never stop studying or practicing survival techniques either
 
I'm trying to learn about religious extremism and what motivates terrorists to attack innocent civilians.
 
Job:
effective teaching strategies, implementing multiple intelligence theory, behaviour management, how to make teens think learning is OK, etc (secondary school focus)

Personal:
Economics (frugal lifestyle, investing, property, etc)
Travel (mainly motorcycle travel)
Motorcycle repair (trying to fix compression issues in my Kawasaki)
History (kinda job related- atm focusing on the 'ancient world')

i like learning. My goal is to be able to convince young teens that learning is something they can like too. :)
 
For school: painting, art history, contemporary art, contemporary literature, writing poetry, writing creative nonfiction, studio professions, printmaking, drawing, gallery shows, and welding (that's technically done with now, but I'm glad I have the knowledge) . . .

Personal: parenting, asthma, literature, philosophy, marriage, friendship, 'gifted' children, and hopefully other languages soon. I learned some German in grade school and I'd love to revisit that langauge as well as the country.

I'm sure I've said it before, but I would love to be a career student (both in and out of organized school education). So many things to learn and only one life (?).:)
 
I must say
I learned today that Jamshyd changed his lovely (relief?) avatar.
 
Aww you're so sweet :). hehe. Don't worry, its back. The doom thing was temporary for the thread I started in S&G.

The avatar is indeed a relief. It is a detail from the Altar of Zeus at Pergamon...

FrisoaltarPergamo.jpg
 
I have a project to make a list of things I'm chronically unclear about. Then my goal is to get clear about them. The very beginnings of my list:


  • In medicine there is etiology and pathogenesis, there is a distinction, I get squared away on the distinction sometimes but it never sticks.
  • Similarly there is a real difference between hermeneutics and exegesis. I have looked up which is which a couple dozen times.
  • Hate to admit it, I don't know the difference between Shia and Sunni.
  • I really have no idea what producers do in movies a television.
  • Most modern operating systems use a macro-kernel, microsoft say that their kernel is a hybrid kernel (part micro part macro--I guess). Some people I've read say that hybrid kernel is a bullshit meaningless appellation, I'd like to know enough about kernels to be able to evaluate the hybrid claim on my own.
 
Sunni Muslims follow Mohammad (sp?) exclusively, whereas the Shiites took his son-in-law Ali (I think) and his descendants while the line lasted as spiritual leaders (called Imams). The Sunni are the overall majority, but the Shiites hold majorities in certain countries, particularly Iran.

I had a brief fascination with Islam in 2000, as it was the Abrahamic faith about which I knew the least.

Also, I think that producers are like executives in corporations. They have the assets, contacts, experience and wherewithal to get the films/shows made, but don't bother with the actual work itself. They coordinate, delegate, and pay other people to get the job done. And are usually paid quite handsomely for it.
 
For December I'm going for my Cisco Certified Network Associate cert. Besides that I've been following the theme of simulations and hyperreality going through Phillip K. Dick, JG Ballard, both writers of which Baudrillard has written extensively(I've OD'd on Baudrillard, he's brilliant), which leads me to Umberto Eco, postmodernist theory, Semiotics, Lyotard, Battallie and the origins of desire.

If my IT career didn't demand so much after-work study and certs I'd be studying French or Portuguese to add to my native Italian and German.
 
1) Metal casting - silver, gold, bronze pieces.
2) Applied genetics. I'm learning to build a transgenic animal for the lab I move to in a couple of months.
3) Computational Neuroscience (my main field of study)-- Modeling neural networks. This is to try to decode its neural firing to see if the new genes that I will have spliced into its genome have altered its neural circuitry (made it "smarter.")
 
Last edited:
Dave said:
Sunni Muslims follow Mohammad (sp?) exclusively, whereas the Shiites took his son-in-law Ali (I think) and his descendants while the line lasted as spiritual leaders (called Imams). The Sunni are the overall majority, but the Shiites hold majorities in certain countries, particularly Iran.
Click to expand...
That is indeed the gist of it. Of course, things get a bit more complicated as you get more detailed.

The division is primarily a political one. Muhammad did not leave an heir, and people argued over who will rule the umma (Islamic society). The majority favoured Abu Bakr, one of Muhammad's closest friends. This started the Caliphate which eventually expanded to become the Islamic empire.

However, the Shi'a (supporters) of Ali remained, and a schism formed. They had their following and their tradition continued to flourish and came to include its own distinct spirituality.

It seems to have thrived in certain areas of the Islamic empires more than others: Egypt, India, and Iran. Their powered waxed and waned as sunni leadership went and arrived at the scene. It seems that the Shiites of the Ismaili sect (particularly in India) were very open to Sufi and otherwise esoteric thought and developed their very own esoteric cultures.

I actually know very little on the subject and am trying to get to know more about the Shiia since I have always been taught about Islam from a Sunni point of view.
 
boo

Jamshyd said:
That is indeed the gist of it. Of course, things get a bit more complicated as you get more detailed.

The division is primarily a political one. Muhammad did not leave an heir, and people argued over who will rule the umma (Islamic society). The majority favoured Abu Bakr, one of Muhammad's closest friends. This started the Caliphate which eventually expanded to become the Islamic empire.

However, the Shi'a (supporters) of Ali remained, and a schism formed. They had their following and their tradition continued to flourish and came to include its own distinct spirituality.

It seems to have thrived in certain areas of the Islamic empires more than others: Egypt, India, and Iran. Their powered waxed and waned as sunni leadership went and arrived at the scene. It seems that the Shiites of the Ismaili sect (particularly in India) were very open to Sufi and otherwise esoteric thought and developed their very own esoteric cultures.

I actually know very little on the subject and am trying to get to know more about the Shiia since I have always been taught about Islam from a Sunni point of view.
Click to expand...

I'm sorry but I think it's all silly.

Don't get me wrong, I respect everybody's points of view, but when it gets down to situations such as this one . . . it kinda irks me.

All this division and bloodshed over what seems like semantics at the end of the day.

Perhaps my views are skewed due to ignorance; I'll admit I'm not very well-versed on the subject.

It seems that they've been arguing for so long that they've lost sight of what they started arguing about and somewhere along the line it became about pride since no one wanted to admit they are wrong.

One of the many reasons I despise organized religion. :\
 
Oh it is silly, I agree.

Though, I would not call it "semantics" - it is an argument about two real people, one of whom was chosen as a leader, and the other was not.
 
Semantics was the wrong word to use.

For me it just seems trivial who is delivering the message if the message remains the same.
 
Currently:

'The' relationship between democratization and religion, through various theoretical lenses, examining various social institutions, with a focus on Gulf-states....and very recently Turkey (this is what I'm teaching).

A revisitation of political sociology 'classics', with current attention on Marx, moving to Polanyi next.

Just how bad many undergrads are at writing (grading). ;)

ebola
 
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