What's something you learned recently?

[petra]

Reminding ourselves that we don't have to leave the house to learn new things, because we have the internet at our fingertips. Caveat: not about COVID-19, please.

Comments

[petra]

Rosario Dawson will apparently be playing Ahsoka Tano on The Mandalorian when television comes back to the land. SQUEE!

Also, watching a percussionist play West Side Story is impressive and mesmerizing. I knew that percussionists were inherently multi-instrumentalists but I didn't quite know how quickly they had to change from one to the other.

[minoanmiss]

I've been watching videos by a dude who has devoted himself to exploring all the fruit in the world, and I've learned so much about fruit, including that the seeds of one of my childhood favorites (guinep) could have been roasted and eaten as well!

[teaotter]

A friend linked me to this article about making a needle-felted steek. I'm still nervous about cutting my knitting, but I think this could make it a lot easier.

[j00j]

I learned we briefly considered hippo ranching in the US as a way to get rid of invasive plants and address a meat shortage (content note: article discusses farming of animals pretty extensively for obvious reasons; also themes of colonialism etc). I learned via the Stuff You Missed in History podcast (which have released some of their lighter episodes for our entertainment in these times) but here's an article. https://www.wired.com/2013/12/hippopotamus-ranching/

[petra]

Those sound like excellent videos to watch when it's hard to get interesting fruit for the current complex of reasons. Learning new things about foods you thought you knew is always a joy.

[petra]

That does sound like it would help with cutting knitting. I can't work in wool for allergy reasons, so I'll be over here with my non-animal fibers looking jealous of your ability to felt.

[petra]

Oo, that's fascinating! I would love to see What If Hippo Ranching incorporated into speculative fiction.

[ex_flameandsong751]

Oh my goodness, I once told a friend of mine I thought Rosario Dawson would be perfect as Ahsoka. *screaming*

[ex_flameandsong751]

Here's an interesting article on nine colors that were named for people.

[petra]

I think happy screaming is totally appropriate in this situation. I look forward to the gravitas Dawson will bring to the role, and I do so at the top of my lungs and at a pitch only dogs can hear.

[petra]

Delicious etymology. Thank you!

[althea_valara]

I'm learning to program in Python and Ruby on Rails. I had borrowed a kid's book on Python from the library in January, called "Code This Game!" By Meg Ray with art by Keith Zoo. It greatly surprised me how easy it is to make games in Python. I haven't touched the games I was building in a couple of weeks, but when I was working on them I found the Pygame documentation invaluable.

For Rails, there's a guide here: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

I really should get back to my studies, but i 'be been distracted and keep putting it off.

[petra]

That's definitely a good use of your time. I hope you're less distracted and more able to focus on what you want to focus on soon.

[minoanmiss]

ahaaha I told you about him twice. Here's the other boy I've been watching on Youtube: this one does chemistry.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFhXFikryT4aFcLkLw2LBLA

[petra]

You told me once and linked me once, which is fair. Thank you for sharing!