Skip to main content

A Comment on The NY Time's A Surge in Learning the Language of the Internet

My father worked with computers in the military during the Korean War in the 50's and with corporations in the 60's. He died prematurely, but his brother saw the industry growth and got involved, programming for major corporations through the 70's and 80's. For much of my young adult life I heard "go into computers, it's the wave of the future." I find it amusing, in that it still is. The 'nerds' are a bit less nerdy, but still considered odd and of lower status than other professions.

As for myself, I avoided the 'wave of the future' for quite some time, but with half a CS degree, finishing a BA in Psych and half an MBA, I work as a software developer. Other than the basics I learned in 80's college, i.e., BASIC, PL/I, COBOL, loops, etc., most of my knowledge is self-taught, with books covering algorithms, patterns, data, databases, and software architecture.

Original article:

A Surge in Learning Language on the Internet

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars I finished reading this crying. It is a work of neurobiology, social science, anthropology, and history, but ultimately it is a work of great humanity, suggesting ways that humans, our groups, our systems, and our societies can be made better. View all my reviews

Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Third Edition

Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Third Edition by Geert Hofstede My rating: 4 of 5 stars A detailed and fascinating review of Hofstede's dimensions, by the researcher himself, showing broad high-level insights into history and culture, although a bit tedious, as it often describes in detail relationships many of us implicitly understand. View all my reviews

The Right to Write - NYTimes.com

In an article,  The Right to Write - NYTimes.com , I commented on the right to write, since writers are sometimes questioned on the validity of their writing, e.g., Harriet Beecher Stowe with Uncle Tom's Cabin: One, people always have the right to write, but readers concurrently have the right to reject said writing. Much personal criticism of depictions from writers is whether the depiction seems valid or plausible, but even that is an exercise in empathy, since it requires one to experience that depiction ideationally.  Two, there is a streak in Americans, and maybe anyone, that states that you cannot understand 'my pain', usually the death of a child or some horrific personal lose. Over a longer term I have sensed that people most easily accept empathy if it is expressed by someone with similar experiences, an aspect I believe is part of human nature. I find both irksome, since they deny empathy.