Go Ask Alice

It’s been a very freaky three weeks. The Izzie must be a glutton for punishment. In the midst of a serious Fringe Binge also juggling the video lectures, readings and home work assignment for not one but four online courses with another starting next week!
The Edx course starting next week “Effective thinking through mathematics” was supposed to have started in early January so that seriously stuffed up the serpent plans. But having read their book “The 5 elements of effective thinking” and found it interesting and inspiring, the serpent is determined to pursue this puzzling path at whatever price. Which in fact is FREE

A similar class has just started again over at Coursera. Done it several times already but signed up again for the sake of curiosity and nostalgia. It is also fascinating to watch the evolution of online education - MOOCs in particular. Here’s thinking that within a few years as the pressure for return on investment from the vulture capitalists increases, these few years will be fondly regarded as the Golden Age where priceless learning could be obtained for no cost but time

Another of these courses has a bunch of fabulous books on the reading list. This week’s subject is "Alice in Wonderland" and "Alice through the Looking Glass"
Having already got one of these as an ebook on the tablet and both of them in Martin Gardner’s very erudite “The Annotated Alice”, reading them should not have been a problem

But the Annotated Alice is as fat as any Bible and just as big and heavy. Not the sort of thing you would pop in a back pack for a bit of reading at the bus stop. And this ancient serpent still struggles with the new ebook things. Worked out how to do bookmarks but anything other than reading one page after another seems quite tricky to master

So resorted to the local library and snaffled a pocket sized paperback dead tree copy with illustrations by Marvin Peake which are really spooky and gorgeous
Having searched in vain for Humpty Dumpty and the Red Queen who keeps running to stand still in the ebook, was relieved to discover them all alive and well in the Looking Glass

So spent a good few hours today reading that story and was delighted to find the Jabberwocky, the walrus and all sorts of strange creatures within. Had not realized that “believing six impossible things before breakfast’ was from that book along with a whole bunch of other ideas and phrases that have become part of everyday speech

But the really freaky thing is that on several visits to the Fringe Pleasure Garden the loudspeakers were playing the gorgeous and ever so creepy song “White Rabbit”. Grace Slick has sold her soul since then but it's still a brilliant blood curdling spine tingling song

Had no idea just how much this book influenced the sixties drug culture. Of course just about everyone is going to take that angle for the assignments or the ever so predictable and boring Freudian sex angle. A certain Cat found another sick and twisted take on these tales but Izzie ain’t going there either.

It was exactly 5 years ago that Izzie first had froggie lodgers in the house. One of them was mad about those books and used to say that Lewis Carroll was a fuddy duddy old conservative and hated all the new fangled maths. He wrote the Alice stories to take the piss out of such crazy illogical ideas and would likely be turning in his grave if he had known that his book would turn out to be their Bible. And Poe’s Law hadn’t even been invented yet
In a stroke of good luck there’s a few posts in the latest iteration of the Introduction to Mathematical Thinking about this very topic

So with the help of Martin Gardner and Keith Devlin, it should be possible to present a reasonable amount of evidence to convince a jury of five members. But the tricky bit is being rationed to a mere 320 words to state the case

In the sci fi and fantasy course the assignments are peer assessed and grammar Nazis are given the green light. One of them was exceedingly upset by a lack of dots at the end of many sentences (usually the last one in a paragraph)
Had the same comment in another course. It’s funny. Had never even noticed this little idiosyncrasy until it was pointed out. Still not quite sure why it would push anyone’s buttons. Unlike absent or misplaced commas it is unlikely to change the possible meaning of a sentence

But the Grimm’s fairy tales was just a warm up. The Izzie is going to get seriously esoteric in the next installments which include the Alice tales and Dracula
An essay length of maximum 320 words is pure evil genius. No room for waffling bullshit. Every single word has got to work to earn its place in the tale
And the Cat has set the bar exceedingly high.

Go Ask Alice

It’s been a very freaky three weeks. The Izzie must be a glutton for punishment. In the midst of a serious Fringe Binge also juggling the video lectures, readings and home work assignment for not one but four online courses with another starting next week!
The Edx course starting next week “Effective thinking through mathematics” was supposed to have started in early January so that seriously stuffed up the serpent plans. But having read their book “The 5 elements of effective thinking” and found it interesting and inspiring, the serpent is determined to pursue this puzzling path at whatever price. Which in fact is FREE

A similar class has just started again over at Coursera. Done it several times already but signed up again for the sake of curiosity and nostalgia. It is also fascinating to watch the evolution of online education - MOOCs in particular. Here’s thinking that within a few years as the pressure for return on investment from the vulture capitalists increases, these few years will be fondly regarded as the Golden Age where priceless learning could be obtained for no cost but time

Another of these courses has a bunch of fabulous books on the reading list. This week’s subject is "Alice in Wonderland" and "Alice through the Looking Glass"
Having already got one of these as an ebook on the tablet and both of them in Martin Gardner’s very erudite “The Annotated Alice”, reading them should not have been a problem

But the Annotated Alice is as fat as any Bible and just as big and heavy. Not the sort of thing you would pop in a back pack for a bit of reading at the bus stop. And this ancient serpent still struggles with the new ebook things. Worked out how to do bookmarks but anything other than reading one page after another seems quite tricky to master

So resorted to the local library and snaffled a pocket sized paperback dead tree copy with illustrations by Marvin Peake which are really spooky and gorgeous
Having searched in vain for Humpty Dumpty and the Red Queen who keeps running to stand still in the ebook, was relieved to discover them all alive and well in the Looking Glass

So spent a good few hours today reading that story and was delighted to find the Jabberwocky, the walrus and all sorts of strange creatures within. Had not realized that “believing six impossible things before breakfast’ was from that book along with a whole bunch of other ideas and phrases that have become part of everyday speech

But the really freaky thing is that on several visits to the Fringe Pleasure Garden the loudspeakers were playing the gorgeous and ever so creepy song “White Rabbit”. Grace Slick has sold her soul since then but it's still a brilliant blood curdling spine tingling song

Had no idea just how much this book influenced the sixties drug culture. Of course just about everyone is going to take that angle for the assignments or the ever so predictable and boring Freudian sex angle. A certain Cat found another sick and twisted take on these tales but Izzie ain’t going there either.

It was exactly 5 years ago that Izzie first had froggie lodgers in the house. One of them was mad about those books and used to say that Lewis Carroll was a fuddy duddy old conservative and hated all the new fangled maths. He wrote the Alice stories to take the piss out of such crazy illogical ideas and would likely be turning in his grave if he had known that his book would turn out to be their Bible. And Poe’s Law hadn’t even been invented yet
In a stroke of good luck there’s a few posts in the latest iteration of the Introduction to Mathematical Thinking about this very topic

So with the help of Martin Gardner and Keith Devlin, it should be possible to present a reasonable amount of evidence to convince a jury of five members. But the tricky bit is being rationed to a mere 320 words to state the case

In the sci fi and fantasy course the assignments are peer assessed and grammar Nazis are given the green light. One of them was exceedingly upset by a lack of dots at the end of many sentences (usually the last one in a paragraph)
Had the same comment in another course. It’s funny. Had never even noticed this little idiosyncrasy until it was pointed out. Still not quite sure why it would push anyone’s buttons. Unlike absent or misplaced commas it is unlikely to change the possible meaning of a sentence

But the Grimm’s fairy tales was just a warm up. The Izzie is going to get seriously esoteric in the next installments which include the Alice tales and Dracula
An essay length of maximum 320 words is pure evil genius. No room for waffling bullshit. Every single word has got to work to earn its place in the tale
And the Cat has set the bar exceedingly high.