Category Archives: Learning

Filthy Predicates

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A tale of woe, a tale of SQL woe. This is what the past two days have been all about. At work, we have our master database which contains all the demographic and biographic information that allows us to do our jobs. It tracks donors, constituents, alumni, individuals, technically everyone.

We have arranged with an external vendor for extended services, the vendor is called iModules and part of my job is to help ‘bridge the gap’ between these two systems, at least data-wise. So, the primary question is, how do we update data on iModules from Millennium, Millennium being our CRM database. With SQL of course! Silly! That was the albatross I spoke of on Twitter yesterday. Mostly the construction of update scripts isn’t terribly difficult only time consuming and involves a lot of typing and checking up column names, our addrline1 is their Address_1, that sort of thing.

Before I can send updates there are two attributes that need to be added to various records to mark them as “ripe to be sent to iModules” and that’s what has had me stuck for the past two days. Our system has two distinct and not clearly compatible ways of extracting data. There is Millennium Internet Reporter, called MIR, that the report writing people use to extract data from the database and then there is little old me with Aqua Data Studio. My report-writer coworker, Lisa, handed me a copy of the criteria that MIR uses to extract which people get these attributes added to their records. It’s a pretty straightforward presentation, this from that, never in that, with these values, so on and so forth. Almost always these queries start with a very simple SELECT block and then start growing from there. Almost always I end up using JOIN or LEFT OUTER JOIN in order to collect the right data. Turns out in this case, JOIN was exactly NOT what I needed to use. Lisa gave me a number, a magic goal number for the number of records that my query, if it’s correct, should pull. This number is 687. When I started I got 287433. Then I adjusted the query and went to 133496. Over time I bounded all over, from 115 million all the way down to 20. Never really hitting that magic number. There are a lot of little gotchas that you have to be aware of and code properly. The sense that the query depends on is that we want to select certain people with certain values OR people without any values at all, but not a specific kind of value after that. I was wandering around trying various methods of attack, pulling the criteria out into temporary tables was one, switching all my joins to left outer joins (that lead to 115 million, oops) and then I thought I had it and was really clever when I enriched my joins with subqueries that used the IN predicate. Even then, I couldn’t get below 22500 records pulled. Remember the goal number is 687. There were some more little gotchas, for example, I forgot to remove the dead from the list, so that got me down to about 2700. Then I started to read about some of these predicates and I had a passing familiarity with SQL’s three-value logic property. In SQL there is true, there is false, and there is UNKNOWN. 1=1 is true, 1=0 is false, 1=null is unknown and null=null is unknown. Turns out my problem was all wadded up with the IN predicate that I had used. IN was inappropriate for this use, as it utterly ignored all the ‘null’ cases, the ones I wanted to be selected. Turns out there is a predicate I have never used, called EXISTS. This predicate changes the sense of what is selected and when I reorganized my query to use EXISTS I went from 2700 to 1686. But still, 1686 is greater than my magic goal of 687, so there was something else I wasn’t seeing. I had removed the dead, the logic looked spot on – as I read from the criteria page that Lisa had given me it read spot-for-spot “bang on” correct. Every time I ran the query it dutifully spit out 1686 records. So, what the hell was I missing?

Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, nothing more and nothing less, unless you find a bug. There aren’t any bugs in my way so it was a failure with my query, somewhere. I listed out all the selected records and started to look at them in the database, seeing if I could spot something in the selected group that shouldn’t be there and that I missed in my query logic. The first record I brought up was utterly incorrect, as the “title bar” had the word “Duplicate” in it, and my query clearly states “NOT LIKE %dup%” so why the hell was it still selecting records with Duplicate in the title bar? Yeah, case. That’s what screwed me. Case. SQL Server is very dutiful and stripped out all the places where the LIKE clause found the text fragment of dup. But not Dup, or dUp, or duP. Or agonizingly, Duplicate. Because a scan for ‘dup’ will never be true when given ‘Duplicate’ to look at d <> D. So once I wrapped the title bar column name in the lower() function, and re-ran the data query, SQL dutifully spit out 687 records. My magic number.

So I won, god damned it. It took switching from IN to EXISTS, pitching JOIN overboard, taking out the dead people and forcing lower-case reckoning. So now the damned thing is done and I can move on with my life!

Horizon Met

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My horoscope suggested that I try to include a regular new thing in my life, and that now is the perfect opportunity to not only begin, but to make it a habit. So I immediately thought about the things that I always wanted to try to include as a regular practice in my life but never really got it to stick.

That thing is meditation. I’ve read a lot of articles on it, it comes up over and over in Buddhist and Zen texts, and I’ve even gone so far as to get applications that help support it. The articles read a lot like the Chinese websites do about their tea, all about the benefits and nothing to point at any detractors. Much like tea, there is little that exists that could harm me. In fact, meditation contains nothing at all that could harm me beyond perhaps being eaten by some sort of apex predator while I’m meditating. The only downside that I can see to drinking tea is frequent bathroom visits. A lot of the sites I’ve seen and articles I’ve read approach meditation from various angles. Some approach it from a spiritual side, here you have the line that I think I remember Deepak Chopra saying about it, that what lies between thoughts is the thinker and if you stop thinking you can exist all by yourself. There are other articles that I’ve read, books too, that go on at length regarding the neurochemistry of meditation. That neurons that fire together wire together, and that meditation can actually increase the speed of cognition. For that I have no proof and it smells like a placebo, however it’s tea all over again. Even if the claims are bunkum, it’s not like I’m going to harm myself at all so if there is nothing to lose, perhaps anything gained is what I was always after from the beginning. I also remember reading a LifeHacker article regarding daydreaming and how if you just stop trying to drive your mind to unravel a question that sometimes the answer comes ready-packaged and drops into your lap if you back off the whip and let the mind work on it’s own. Do I believe any of this? I am skeptical however over my life and over the times I’ve tried to meditate I have to say that something is indeed there.

So earlier today I took a break from work. I plugged in my iPhone earbuds, set the volume low and ran one of the apps that I recently acquired, it’s called Naturespace. It had 109 reviews in the Apple App Store and the overall rating was almost five out of five stars. Since the app was free I tried it, loaded up one of the sample tracks and sat back in my chair. At work there is a problem, if you sit with your eyes closed, even if you are not pursuing a nap it looks nearly indistinguishable from actually sleeping on the job. I found meditating with my eyes open to be very difficult, but not impossible. The natural sounds helped mask the office noises that surround me in my workaday world and I had a bit of time to myself and thankfully nobody walked in on me and felt at-odds about seeing me sitting attentively in my chair with my eyes closed. One thing I did do was join my hands near my face and steeple my index fingers and rest them lightly against my philtrum, which I’ve heard referred to as a fairy-saddle. The book I read about the neurochemistry of Buddhism went on at length about the existence of an accupressure point right in this spot that supposedly activates the parasympathetic wing of the central nervous system. The parasympathetic slows and relaxes everything and it seemed to be a great way to help push myself along the path to entering a meditative state of consciousness.

My skills for this are picked up like trivia from lots of different places, when I’m bored I tend to graze on information on the Internet and I find myself reading lots of different things so the way I begin is to sit comfortably, make sure I don’t sense any ‘biological imperatives’ coming from my body and then I really should close my eyes to quiet the visual field. The natural sounds help bring on relaxation which I always think of as the foyer or antechamber to a true meditative state. The constant light touch against the philtrum may or may not be anything useful but earlier this morning I found that if I concentrate on my breathing and make it very natural and regular that I can figuratively imagine my mind as a surface of water. As I come down from the natural jitter and jump of being “online at work” I imagine the surface of water that is my mind getting more and more calm as time goes on. There is definitely some kickback as random things pop up out of nowhere and break the surface of the water image in my imagination. As I sat there I actually slipped into a meditative state and it felt ineffably wonderful. Thankfully I had a timer set on my iPhone that would send an alarm after 15 minutes so when I heard it I had to stop what I was doing and get back to work.

Now the only question is, where do I fit this into my life? Do I only spend about seven minutes in this state twice a day or do I devote an hour a day to it and give up something else? I have to admit that the experience was something incredibly positive and rewarding and was so inherently wonderful that I find myself craving to get back to that state. Then I start to wonder if it’s better to fix such a thing at a specific time or is it better to simply assert that I will intend to devote an hour to it and then find the time each day to fit it in. There may be a higher chance of me actually integrating the practice into my life if I give myself a small bit of flexibility without letting myself be totally floppy with timing. If I have no discipline for it I’ll never do it. Like a lot of things in my life, only time will tell. I’ll blog as I progress, which might inspire others to try what I am attempting.

Childhood's End

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I saw this opinion article on the New York Times: Children’s Books… and I have the exact opposite opinion as the author that the New York Times published. He states that adults should not read kids books. That they are beneath adults and that there are better things that adults should read.

I don’t want to know anyone who has this opinion. Wadding up your childhood and locking it in the basement of your soul is the quickest way to become an autumn person. Courting the death of joy should be anathema to any vibrant living human being. There is more than enough room, and respect, for anyone wanting to read “The Lorax” at the tender age of 36! The ability to embrace childish things means you have not let your soul ossify with the banality of our cold and horrible world.

People who judge and then sniff imperiously when they see an adult reading “The Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter”, or even “Horton Hears A Who” are in my opinion spiritually bankrupt and repellent. They exude the ardent seriousness of stupid adults. Life is best led reading whatever it is that you want to read. Judging puts you in hell, with the pedants, grammar, and spelling nazis. This cold and desolate region is filled with angry bitter shades who refuse to axe anyone a question. They refuse to deal with anyone who ain’t like them. And they burn with rage when you express alot of affection for anyone who doesn’t toe the strict line that English doesn’t have.

Your childhood is a diamond. It has to be loved. It’s as much a part of every passionate living adult as rationality. It’s your inner child that powers your curiosity. He or she is the gatekeeper to your imagination and your creativity. Denying him or her damns you to a life lived in shadows of gray. In that state you might as well be dead for all the good you are to anyone else.

Everyone needs to keep doing things that are good for your inner child. Don’t turn into an autumn person. They are animated corpses who don’t know they are dead.

Too Much

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Anytime I walk into a library, a bookstore, or any other place where a lot of media is all concentrated together either for lending or sale or just browsing the same thought occurs to me: How can anyone have any hope of seeing what is to be seen?

I’ve mused about this for a very long time. It strikes me that the entirety of the human oeuvre could be represented by Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. That thoughts and ideas occupy another sphere overlaid on the Earth, created by thinking creatures. This is very handy as it brings the idea of a sphere right in to the concept at the center of my writing. Is it possible anymore for any one of us to possibly see the entire sphere from one side to the other? I think there is a personal horizon that each of us is chained to, we can only see that part of the noosphere that we are either local to or interested in. Ultimately this question becomes a concern for answering the really big and important questions. The sense that we won’t cure cancer, we won’t stumble into room-temperature superconductivity, or practical fusion energy without some sort of broad synthesis across multiple disciplines. The way it feels to me, and I don’t have any proof of any of this, it’s all just intuition here, is that humanity has created a huge repository of ideas and that if the right person at the right time had access to the perfect constellation of ideas that some of the answers to the really big questions would pop out in a kind of ‘eureka’ rush of creativity and development.

I’ve spoken of these things with some friends especially when I’m in a pensive mood and the situation for such deep discussions are ripe. One thing that is a recent turn is the advent of social networking. We are relating more and more to each other, communicating more, writing more, talking more, sharing more. There are structures that have formed like Wikipedia which to me resembles a coral reef of information more than how it’s plainly stated, a free online encyclopedia that is crowdsourced. I suppose it’s the romantic in me that sees information not being added to Wikipedia as a matter of some dedicated purpose but rather that it’s information that washes up onto Wikipedia and builds over time. In Clive Barker’s Great and Secret Show the principal characters had something very much akin to how I consider Wikipedia (and other sites, really, that operate like it) in the dead-letter office. That little chunks of Art wash up over the years and collect like cruft in this office. That information created by all of us washes up on Wikipedia and collects like cruft on this site.

It is important to get back to the beginning again, that when I walk into my local Barnes & Nobles that I have the distinct feeling that I won’t be able to read and understand the contents of that building. That’s just the start. Then you expand it out to Waldo Library, and then the Kalamazoo Public Library, and it keeps on going all the way out to the Library of Congress and then kind of crashes upon the concept of the Internet as a whole. There is no time, there is not enough energy in my life to do any of that and that life demands so much else from you that even if you wanted to do anything of the sort there just isn’t any time, hope, or inclination for it. In a way, I posit that the content that humanity has created has defeated humanities hope to encompass it. So there may be the answers to life, the universe and everything out there, it’s just that none of us have hope to put the threads together and start drawing some of those big conclusions.

Perhaps however there is some hope in social networking and Wikipedia, structures where disparate information washes up and because it’s concentrated the threads are closer, easier to tie together and maybe we can move forward using those systems to help us. A lot of this is covered by Wolfram Alpha as well as some other artificial intelligence projects where information scientists have sensed this potential problem and maybe a machine could encompass human content and help us understand what it is that we’ve created.

This all may be the pressure behind the next stage of human evolution. First we took care of the needs of our genetics, making survival a triviality. Then we exploded with ideas, creating a noosphere too large for us to handle, and then the next pressure is based on encompassing and cultivating that noosphere. We need to get to the next stage of development which isn’t so much expanding as concentrating what we have already discovered about the world and about existence. In a way, perhaps the next stage of human evolution, the continued pursuit of ever more complicated cortexes in our brains will come in the generations to come. Children born with the tools needed to begin the pursuit of collection and concentration, eidetic memory, highly efficient relationship cognition. Children able to walk into a library and in an afternoon consume every ounce of information contained within the walls. It’s going to be those with those innate talents who may be able to bring what we imagine and what we dream about into reality.

How about the rest of us? In that perhaps technology will provide us a shortcut, perhaps a preview of what is to come for us all. That we can get peeks into what may be to come through things like Wolfram Alpha, through the AI projects, hell, even through something as quaint as Wikipedia. If nothing else, it is interesting to think about and engaging to talk about.

LJ – Bottoms Up!

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From 6/20/2003

I got this message forwarded on to me from the head MD at our local health clinic:

Dear employee:

Alcohol use among college students is a serious and growing public
health problem, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services. Their comprehensive report, entitled “Healthy People
2010,” demands a reduction in the prevalence of binge drinking on
campuses. Forty percent of college students have engaged in binge
drinking – defined as consuming five or more drinks in a row for men
and four or more drinks in a row for women – in the past two weeks.

I distinctly remember my freedom to drink myself silly back when I was in College to be one of the best fundamental lessons of my entire life. The freedom that came with College life, and the ability to intoxicate yourself willfully, even dangerously, was the perfect teacher of “Actions have Consequences”. I found the pleasure and pain of that entire part of my life helped me understand many things, including personal limits, unintentional weight gain, and a new appreciation of ultra-intense headache pain. A dry campus, or one for which this message later on urged, that concerned staffers mentor students not to drink, robs these students of the chance to learn from the most effective teacher possible – pain and agony – and the ability to drink until your obnoxious roommate becomes a permanent visual blur.

Drink Up Kids!

LJ – Information Horizon

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From 4/27/2006

I began a tangential discussion with a friend a few days ago, regarding something I’ve been thinking of for quite some time. That if you were to visualize the combined intelligence of the human race as a sphere, an imaginary object that contains all the thinking, all the printed words, and all the media that humanity has expressed since we began thinking and recording those thoughts into media that such a sphere would be truly immense.

Then I imagined what one person might look like in the context of that thought-sphere. A dot, a very small very bright dot. Now for each person, you can look around, you can explore and you can learn – this I associate with movement and increase on the surface of this imaginary sphere – the more you know the bigger your dot.

What then, is the chance of any human being able to approach the horizon of that sphere? Or more likely, is it even possible?

In the case that it is not possible for any one human being to reach the horizon of the information sphere then the next logical argument would be that humanity exists on this sphere, that there are people covering every surface of the sphere, just that nobody will be able to visit all the “islands” in this sphere of knowledge. What then for our fate? If we haven’t the hope of integrating all that we know, how could we possibly think that we can consider new things – unless the sphere looks more like a puffer-fish than a beach-ball, with localized growth building up mountains of insight, surrounded by plateaus of general knowledge. What really gets me is the fear that we do have many if not all the answers we seek already, it’s just, there is nobody around bright enough and fast enough to integrate all the separate islands of knowing into a cohesive and definitive answer.

What might happen if someone miraculously did acquire the breadth of knowledge that would be regarded as a span across the horizon?

Healthy Chicken Parm

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Today was an exercise in trying to convert a time-honored recipe into a healthy alternative. The dish was Chicken Parm. We all figured that the pasta and sauce was pretty much a fixed requirement so we worked on what could be done with the chicken itself.

Instead of frying the cutlets in breaking and egg, we all pretty much agreed that we should bake the chicken with spices and then when it’s done, give it a little cheese covering. While at the market I found 2% Italian blend shredded cheese which helped cut back on the fat and the calories.

On the whole I thought it came out very well. I would on reflection have cooked the chicken longer or hotter than I did. It was done, but not done where I wanted it. It was good to eat, but just a smidgen rubbery for my tastes.

As a side I rolled up some Pillsbury Croissant Rolls and dressed them in a butter and garlic salt wash before baking. They came out crispy and with just a hint of garlic. The only real leftovers we had were about 3 cups of pasta, but those are easy to put up as leftovers for someone’s lunch tomorrow.

Today we also visited Cody Kresta winery in Mattawan, MI. Every time we go we come away with wine. They have a real passion for wine making and it comes through their bottles. I love their 2010 Chardonnay, it’s got a wonderful note on the palate that I just love. They are only 20 minutes away and so it’s not any real chore to go visit them. The lady who manages the tasting studio there is incredibly pleasant and she sells her wine very well.

Dreaming about Watches

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Have you ever dreamed that you had a watch and looked at the time in your dreams? I just woke up from a dream like that. It had a number of other qualities 😉 but at the end it also featured me looking at my watch. In my dream I could have sworn that the time was 10:30 in the morning, but actually it is 8:46 AM.

This dream has got me thinking about the physics of that existence. I carry around my self-monitor even when I dream so when the dreams are offering me a chance to explore something I wouldn’t normally feel alright exploring I usually don’t elect to go forward with whatever it is. Its the flow of time that interests me. If everything in a dream is constructed out of my mind, then a watch, indeed the flow of time itself is completely malleable and up to me. There has to be some basic irreducible moments in dreams because you can’t spend an eternity dwelling in a dream-state, you do move forward despite the notion that time is a complete construction in that state.

I think the jury is still out as to the phenomenology of dreaming. I’ve seen competing theories ranging in meaning from dreams as prophetic tools, diagnostic tools, all the way down to a bored cortex that is clamped down with a motor inhibition yet continuously gets input from other parts of the brain that are accidentally firing due to their functions as part of the restorative part of sleeping. I think dreaming is more than a bored cortex making up bits and pieces to keep itself occupied while the limbic system and the hippocampus are busy refining the days memories, chatting up the immune system, and pushing brain chemistry back to a point where we are unlikely lot run into pink elephants.

I do certainly believe that the brain is actively occupied in a lot of maintenance procedures during sleep. Resetting neurotransmitters, dealing with chemical deficits here and there, and conversing with the immune system, but for me, dreaming feels more than just a random series of inputs making my cortex come up with a set-dressed stage to entertain me. I think that when we are in a dreaming state, that we are much closer to the reality that exists purely in our minds. Existence there is not really bound by reality in the real world. I’m sure a more spiritual person would approach this argument that when you dream you are in direct communication with your soul. In a way that is compatible with what I imagine, as the physics of the brain have to point almost by default to the existence of a soul, I just don’t go that far. When people dream, the only real thing that your mind has to go on for stimuli has got to be the noisy click-clack chatter of cells that are firing “accidentally”. I put “accidentally” in quotes because it’s actually very much a quantum mechanical thing, these cells are so small, their connections so fine that a portion of what they are firing for might be the foamy background noise of virtual particles being created and annihilated in the very small spaces between synaptic clefts between neurons.

I can’t escape the theories from David Bohm, that perhaps these tiny spaces between synaptic clefts or even along neuron cells themselves are an interface between classical reality and the implicate order. That the soul is a part of a holographic superstructure that lies independent of classical reality and needs a brain of sufficient complexity to access these special conditions. That it is our larger, more convoluted brains that lead us to consciousness, sentience, and that dreaming is a natural epiphenomenon of that sentience.

If all of of this supposition even has a whiff of being true, that means that the soul is immortal, and that our experience in the world, our persistence in it despite how often our bodies are effectively replaced and how much of our bodies aren’t really ours, but mostly bacteria is all because we are expressions of the implicate order inside flesh. Here we arrive again, like a big circle and back to a really awesome statement: All Is One.

It would be certainly something if our ability to dream Implied a soul, that our bodies were constructed to tune the implicate order and that our consciousnesses, our sentience is not only a fundamental structure of the universe itself but that we are actually all connected in a fashion in the implicate order. The ramifications for ethics and morality are mind boggling. If we are all in a certain way intimately connected to each other wether we are alive or dead, then we are never truly alone and when we do violence to each other, we are doing violence to ourselves.

There is no way to prove any of this. It’s pretty to think about and perhaps someday science will demonstrate wether the brain actually does what I suspect that it does or rather the opposite, that it’s all just a flash in the pan. I really find the entire notion of my soul being a part of the implicate order to be very comforting and puts a rather fine set of clothes on Buddhism.

Christmas Redux

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Christmas never ends. That’s the trick with having family in far-off places. We travel and end up having multiple iterations of the holiday. It would be one thing if we shipped Christmas and concentrated on our families but so far we’ve been meeting up and there have been little explosions of Christmas over and over again.

This Christmas had a definite theme. I am becoming thoroughly French. Scott, in the guise of Santa gave me Rosetta Stone Francais, the full shot which should give me basic fluency with a level commensurate with emigration if I so choose, not that I would. I really enjoy the french way of life, the language, the cuisine, and that second part, that’s another part of Christmas. I have a Crepe Stand, a pan, several tools and a crash course with a french chef in Chicago to make french crepes. I am definitely cruising towards a fate made of crepes. There are worse things. Waking up in the morning and making a fresh crepe and filling it with Nutella – yeah, what punishment that is going to be. How ever will I cope. 🙂

Other members of my family gave me money to buy gifts I wanted on my own. With the money so far I bought two pair of Levi’s 501 jeans in my newer smaller size. My waist is about 36.5, these two jeans are 38’s and they are shrink-to-fit, so they fit wonderfully well and the style of the 501’s really appeal to me because they are button-fly, something very different from the tyranny of the copper-colored zippers. There is a part of me that doesn’t like the idea of sharp zipper teeth in that region of my anatomy. I know there isn’t any risk of anything happening, but it’s a matter of principle.

So I have lots of cash on hand and a huge number of iTunes tracks on my wish list there. That’s something that I really don’t understand. Apple enables their customers to make a wish list, but they don’t enable you to export it or build a list, or even export it socially so that other people can see your list and perhaps surprise you by buying the music and then leverage iCloud on Christmas morning to an iPod which is magically chock-full of music that you wished for. We’ll have to see if some of that will be in the plan for my Christmas cash.

Western let us know before the holidays that they would be making a one-time-payment to us employees as a kind of bonus. It was in lieu of not getting a COLA, having our health insurance premiums increased, and a factor of other reasons that are only really attractive to the accountants. I got my $400, but thanks to the IRS, I only got to have $256 of that. It is more than I would have otherwise, so I don’t complain too loudly, but still, it is a little source of irk. I’d rather have it the other way around.

So Christmas has come, and come again. When we get back Santa will eventually swing around AGAIN. I liken it to the idea that Santa has an odd case of retrograde amnesia. He visits over and over again, spreading Christmas cheer well into mid-January. It’s a theme we’ve all fallen into, we dwell in the Christmastime afterglow and then we announce with mock surprise that we found something that Santa left under the tree that the elves forgot to place properly. In a way, Santa gets the last word, even if he has to visit on Saint Swithins Day to win.

Rosetta Stone Francais Level 1 Unit 1 First Thoughts

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I just finished Level 1 Unit 1 in my new Rosetta Stone Francais course. The approach is something I’ve never experienced before. The interface is so simple that I found myself overthinking it several times. It’s helpful in that it tells you “Nothing here is click and drag” instead everything is clickable, talkable, or writable.

What did the first unit cover? It didn’t approach the language as I thought it would. There was no demonstration of rules, no tables for Je, Tu, Vous, Nous, Ils, and so on and so forth. There weren’t any verb conjugation drills and I found myself not translating after a little bit of time. Of course, a little knowledge is a very bad thing, and in this case I have the tattered remains of my grade school and high school french floating around in my head while I’m going through the basics again, and oddly enough, for the very first time.

It was extremely pleasant and I found myself picking up a kind of natural approach immediately. I think what bothers me the most about Rosetta Stone isn’t the actual product, it’s very polished and professional, but what gets me is that I would probably be better off starting French with this program than if I had skipped a foreign language completely in grade school and high school altogether! I can’t imagine what a Rosetta Stone course would cost a grade/high school and I’m sure it would “break the bank” as it were.

One thing that’s really quite awesome about the Rosetta Stone courses is that I can do all my work on my laptop and practice on my iPhone almost as well. The entire course structure is synchronized in the cloud at Rosetta Stone itself so as you follow along in the program on a computer the mobile app knows where you are and makes the programs available to you over wifi or 3G to keep on practicing.

During this unit the things you learn are boy and girl, singular and many, gender, and certain verbs such as swimming, drinking, eating, running, reading and writing.

One thing I can tell immediately is that this is going to be incredibly fun to use and at the end I should have basic fluency in French. That will be a wonderful feeling.

Something else that I’ve been thinking about is the need for translation. All throughout school it was a translation matrix, memorizing language rules and then establishing mental lines drawing from English to French. Imposing a germanic language onto a romance language can only work so far before you run into conflicts. That’s what’s always upset me about the standard way other languages are taught in the United States, it’s always English-wearing-another-language. I have a faith, as I don’t know outright and for sure, but I suspect that the shape of thinking in English is different than the shape of thinking in French. We think in words, we think in our language. We can imagine without language, but when we want to share what we think we have to drag what exists in our minds as honest thoughts through the bog of our language so we can communicate our thoughts. I have it on good authority that while people think in different languages there is no reason to think that the quality of those thoughts of the efficiency of communication is any different from language to language, it’s not a matter of good and bad, it’s just different.

I think that’s the thing that draws me to the Rosetta Stone courses the most. That excitement I feel when my thoughts can dip their little toes in another language-bog altogether. Instead of thinking in English and communicating in English, I could possibly (with enough hard work) start to think in French. That’s what drives me, that curiosity of what it feels like to think in another language. Not so much to do more things that have a direct application with it, although that would also be nice, but to sit back and feel the difference between expressing a thought in English and then expressing it in French.

Only time can tell if Rosetta Stone is successful in coaxing my 36 year old brain to re-accept a new language. This is where kids born today are the luckiest kids ever. A young 4 to 6 year old brain, in the channel of language acquisition can soak up all of these new thoughts and even more before they settle into a primary language and an “other” language. If only Rosetta Stone was available in 1983, I could have mastery over French, English, and German for example. Maybe I still have the ability, despite it laying dormant for so very long.