Monday, May 14
5:00 am
It is +10 °C, with a high forecast of +25 °C.
From the Environment Canada website:
Today Sunny. Wind northwest 20 km/h gusting to 40 becoming light this morning. High 25. UV index 6 or high.
Tonight Clear. Wind becoming south 20 km/h this evening. Low 12.
5:30 am Musings
It has been just over a week since I last mused in the morning. I have a hot cup beside me at the moment and a blank screen in front of me.
The big surprise has been birding. I have a new telephoto lens and have only used it once.
Another surprise has been my fitness program. I have not missed a day of either weight training or coulee walks in 26 days. yet have only lost 6 pounds. Although I must admit that I am feeling more energized and I am beginning to notice a slight improvement about my waist. Not a lot, but a beginning.
I am pleased with the return of mathematics to my routine. I am feeling like I am getting back into this. Group theory is the focal point, and so far it is making sense.
Reading is another plus. I am doing more of this. The book by Simon Schama is an unexpected delight. I bought it on a hunch and the hunch was a good one. After reading the first item on the ugly American I began to ask myself, what exactly is an essay. I googled "writing an essay" and read a web site that gave a series of steps for writing an essay. I then applied these steps to reading an essay and ended up creating a mind map of the article. What surprised me was the lack of structure in this article. The article flowed and was easy to read, but there was no attempt to provide a tightly reasoned piece. I have a few other books of essays. I am going to play with this a bit and see what develops.
Geocaching has been another surprise. I am doing very little of it at the moment. I am still trying to go out and search for a cache on days which have no "finds" for them, but I am not rigorous about this and miss the occasional day. However I am saving a bundle of money on gasoline.
3:00 PM Technology
I have been playing, unsuccessfully, with a combination of software packages. I first used a package called Inspiration to create a mind map of an essay by Simon Schama. Good. I then tried to use a package called Snagit to capture the diagram. Nope. The diagram was fairly large and scrolled down off the window. Snagit has the capability to capture such images, but it turned out it did not work with Inspiration. I then tried saving the diagram from Inspiration into an web page. Snagit is able to capture a scroll image off the web, but it turned out that the image was too small to read properly.
[7:00 PM] Got it! I imported the Snagit image into iPhoto and then saved the image to the desktop at an enlarged size. The final step is a simple drag-and-drop to this page. Here is the result of the partially finished diagram.
One approach to describing how people learn is to categorize people as primarily verbalizers or visualizers (Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald, 2002). A graphic organizer is a display that shows the relationships among ideas and concepts. There are 3 main types of graphic organizers: concept maps, mind maps and webs. A concept map links ideas together with labeled connecting lines showing the nature of the relationship. A mind map shows an overview of the topic (the above diagram is an example of a mind map). A web shows a more complex set of inter-relationships. Many people use these terms interchangeably. This paragraph is an example of a description that favors a verbalizer. People are not one or the other but rather show preferences for one or the other.
4:30 PM Birding
We noticed a flock of about 25 American White Pelicans circling over the coulee. This gave me an opportunity to try my new telephoto lens out. Although I was not using a monopod for stability I was able to get a few pictures that showed that the birds were definitely pelicans even though they were over a kilometre away.
I submitted a report to eBird and added one record to my database. This was only the 14th species that I have identified in Alberta this year - not very impressive.
9:30 PM Literature
Much to my surprise, I am thoroughly enjoying Schama's "Scribble, Scribble, Scribble". Although the chapters are essays on a wide variety of topics, they are written in a style that makes reading them a pleasure. I have just finished two chapters that provide insights into the lives of Macaulay and Isaiah Berlin. I have one of Berlin's books, "The Crooked Timber of Humanity" which is superb. Shama's essay reinforces my image of the man. Macaulay is another matter. While I recognize the name as one I have seen mentioned numerous times, I cannot admit to having read anything by him.
I have just downloaded Macaulay's essays from Project Gutenberg (free).