Biomedical and Electrical Engineer with interests in information theory, evolution, genetics, abstract mathematics, microbiology, big history, IndieWeb, mnemonics, and the entertainment industry including: finance, distribution, representation
@Weegee They literally announced the heavily considered results in the last week! It was a pretty big kerfuffle at the time.
https:/
Perhaps that donation helped? (They'd probably have known about it for a bit...)
@Weegee And to think that just a year or two back they were considering shuttering Dick Macksey's #Humanities Center.
Richard Macksey's Humanities Center @JohnsHopkins celebrates 50 years as intellectual community http:/
Brief reply to: Is majoring in liberal arts a mistake for students? https:/
What magisterial sounding pontification! Sadly, it’s not much different than the early philosophies of Socrates and Plato or many of the other early progenitors of the humanities and liberal arts. I get the impression that the author hasn’t read much philosophy and has not much grounding in the liberal arts. While I agree with the spirit in which the piece is written, I find it deplorable that there aren’t what should be obligatory mentions of words like trivium, quadrivium, or philosophy, but rather the corpus of work in which the author seems steeped is that of only modern day authors of popular science (Pinker, Gladwell, Kahneman, et. al.) who have some interesting viewpoints, but ones which require at least a grounding in the liberal arts to pick apart. Several times Khosla demeans the liberal arts and uses the repeated example that a reader should be able to pick apart and think critically about articles in The Economist. To do this requires a knowledge of logic and rhetoric which are two of the pillars of what? — yes, the liberal arts!
He also seems unaware of big movements within the humanities and sciences like Bill Gates and David Christian’s Big History Project which are going a long way towards providing a more balanced education in history, economics, physics, chemistry, biology and evolution. I find here, no prima facie evidence of his knowledge of Thomas Kuhn or Karl Popper, which might help win me to his argument. In all, aside from the passing references to one or two recent works, this entire argument is not much different from many that could have been written at the beginning of the industrial revolution. How blind so many must be to seemingly think there’s something new here.
Most appalling to me here is that the author doesn’t seem to give even a passing nod or small wink to C.P. Snow or “The Two Cultures” [http:/
Yes, we certainly need more emphasis on the quadrivium portion of the liberal arts, and in particular mathematics and critical thinking which seem to have been left by the wayside. It is deplorable that the highest extent of mathematics that 99% of college students are exposed to terminates in the 17th century for the most part. Sadly, many college students are left without the ability to think critically and deeply, not to mention the hordes of students in America who barely make it through high school and don’t attend college. One also only needs to skim through recent issues of Nature [http:/
Yes, we need far, far more, but alas, this poor article only touches the tip of the issue and it sadly only does so with less than half of the picture.
The Future of the Humanities: Reading
As technology advances, doomsaying remains constant.
http:/
I've reuploaded the DCC Core Latin Vocabulary to Anki https:/
Introducing Open Library of the Humanities http:/
This is a brilliant exercise!
I have to imagine that once the conceptualization of language and some basic grammar existed word generation was a much more common thing than it is now. It's only been since the time of Noah Webster that humans have been actively standardizing things like spelling. If we can use Papua New Guinea as a model of pre-agrarian society and consider that almost 12% of extant languages on the Earth are spoken in an area about the size of Texas (and with about 1/5th the population of Texas too), then modern societies are actually severely limiting language (creation, growth, diversity, creativity, etc.) [cross reference: http:/
Consider that the current extinction of languages is about one every 14 weeks, which puts us on a course to loose about half of the 7,100 languages on the planet right now before the end of the century. Collective learning has potentially been growing at the expense of a shrinking body of diverse language.
To help put this exercise into perspective, we can look at the corpus of extant written Latin (a technically dead language): It is a truly impressive fact that, simply by knowing that if one can memorize and master about 250 words in Latin, it will allow them to read and understand 50% of most written Latin. Further, knowledge of 1,500 Latin words will put one at the 80% level of vocabulary mastery for most texts. Mastering even a very small list of vocabulary allows one to read a large variety of texts very comfortably. These numbers become even smaller when considering ancient Greek texts. [cross reference: http:/
Another interesting measurement is the vocabulary of a modern 2 year old who typically has a 50-75 word vocabulary while a 4 year old has 250-500 words, which is about the level of the exercise.
As a contrast, consider the message in this TED Youth Talk from last year by Erin McKean, which students should be able to relate to: https:/
#bighistory #collectivelearning
How to memorize Dowling's Wheel and become fluent in #Latin fast http:/
Another piece that may help to speed things up is memorizing the "right" words in a specific order. Researchers at Dickinson in concert with others have compiled and documented a list of the most common core vocabulary words in Latin (and in Greek) based on their frequency of appearance in extant works. This very specific data becomes a tremendously handy tool when attempting to learn and master a language. It is a truly impressive fact that, simply by knowing that if one can memorize and master the 250 most frequent words in Latin, it will allow them to read and understand 50% of most written Latin. Further, knowledge of 1,500 of the most frequent Latin words will put one at the 80% level of vocabulary mastery for most texts. Mastering even a very small list of vocabulary allows one to read a large variety of texts very comfortably. Continuing on to memorize more and more provides one with even more facility--though with obvious diminishing returns.
I've written a bit more on the topic here: http:/
Additionally, I've created an Anki deck of flash cards that is downloadable (https:/
#Latin #Memory #Mnemotechniques