Skating and books
Oct. 23rd, 2019 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Had a skating lesson on Sunday. It went well! I asked to work on spins, and I learned that while mine aren't great, there's not as bad as I'd thought they were. The scraping noise is supposed to be there, according to my coach. Taking video of myself reveals that I keep tilting my head, which is probably not for the best. We worked on jumps, too.
My coach also had me do back crossovers, and he was quiet for a long few moments (unusual), then started saying things like, "Actually, these look pretty good. Yeah, I'm seeing a real understanding from you here." He didn't have a single correction for me about them! That's pretty rare. I will take it as encouragement.
R and I had practice on Tuesday and it was okay. We tried his new wireless ear buds for listening to our dance music, since we can't access the sound system at that rink, but they didn't work acceptably (thanks, Apple). Ever since I got my skates sharpened, we've been struggling a bit with matching our speed, since I seem to be skating faster for... some reason. Is skating on dull blades that much slower? I should ask the sharpener when I see her next.
Have Read: Read The Birchbark House... not actually this week, must've been last week. Anyway, the description of 'Little House but Ojibwe girl' is spot-on. Because of that, I was hoping I would really like it, but I felt oddly meh about it afterward. Perhaps my expectations were too high for a children's book, but I did take issue with things like multiple plot threads being dropped or sudden character development coming out of nowhere at the very end of the story in a way that didn't make sense.
I spent some of my reading time being confused about what age it was meant for, because the language seemed very simple to me, so I was thinking around six to eight. But then there are a couple of intense death scenes on-page, including one where a woman kills her pet, which doesn't seem like it would go in a book for six-year-olds? Granted, this one is a me thing as I don't read a lot of children's books, so I'm not familiar with what's considered appropriate for different ages.
For something that is such an obvious response to Little House, there were a couple of scenes where it was too Little House for me, like the scene where the MC and her sister deal with crows in their corn. There's a very similar episode in one of the Little House books where the Ingalls family deals with blackbirds in their corn. Maybe it was a coincidence; certainly I don't know if she's read all of the Little House books, but it was similar enough that I was surprised to see it there.
A lot of the dialogue in the book is written in Ojibwe. I am willing to give this book a lot more of a pass on it than I usually would, since it's there for cultural and educational value, but I still found it jarring since the characters aren't code-switching. Most of it can be understood through context, but there were a few times when I had to stop and leaf into the glossary at the back to understand what had just been said.
I think it's great and necessary that there's a Native counterview to the very popular Little House series, and I certainly enjoyed some parts of the book (I especially liked the stories that were told to the children). I just wish I'd found it more engaging. Might check out the second one and see if I like it better.
Yesterday, I read The Turk, a book about the historical Mechanical Turk automaton, its inventor (who also did other interesting work and wished that people didn't focus so much on the Turk), its influence on other inventors, and its connections to computation and chess-playing algorithms. I felt like the last chapter could have been trimmed a little, and it's rather behind the times in terms of AI game-playing nowadays, but it was an easy and entertaining read, and I would recommend it. Very interesting to see how showmanship played into how believable the automaton was, how none of the operators gave away the secret, and how many aspects of culture it influenced - automatic looms, Babbage and his engines, Poe and his Dupin. The book also does a good job of drawing out the mystery of how the trick worked until near the end, for those of us who haven't heard the details before.
There were a lot of other automata mentioned in the book that I was disappointed to find do not appear to have any surviving pictures. At least on the internet. There is a short video on Youtube of a recreation of the Mechanical Turk (the original, alas, was lost to fire) but it has several inaccuracies. There's also a BBC video that isn't very informative and is still slightly wrong. Couldn't find anything else, although the maker apparently takes the Turk to chess events sometimes.
Will Read: I think I still have a couple of unread books laying around my apartment. And I really should get back to Genji before I forget everything.
My coach also had me do back crossovers, and he was quiet for a long few moments (unusual), then started saying things like, "Actually, these look pretty good. Yeah, I'm seeing a real understanding from you here." He didn't have a single correction for me about them! That's pretty rare. I will take it as encouragement.
R and I had practice on Tuesday and it was okay. We tried his new wireless ear buds for listening to our dance music, since we can't access the sound system at that rink, but they didn't work acceptably (thanks, Apple). Ever since I got my skates sharpened, we've been struggling a bit with matching our speed, since I seem to be skating faster for... some reason. Is skating on dull blades that much slower? I should ask the sharpener when I see her next.
Have Read: Read The Birchbark House... not actually this week, must've been last week. Anyway, the description of 'Little House but Ojibwe girl' is spot-on. Because of that, I was hoping I would really like it, but I felt oddly meh about it afterward. Perhaps my expectations were too high for a children's book, but I did take issue with things like multiple plot threads being dropped or sudden character development coming out of nowhere at the very end of the story in a way that didn't make sense.
I spent some of my reading time being confused about what age it was meant for, because the language seemed very simple to me, so I was thinking around six to eight. But then there are a couple of intense death scenes on-page, including one where a woman kills her pet, which doesn't seem like it would go in a book for six-year-olds? Granted, this one is a me thing as I don't read a lot of children's books, so I'm not familiar with what's considered appropriate for different ages.
For something that is such an obvious response to Little House, there were a couple of scenes where it was too Little House for me, like the scene where the MC and her sister deal with crows in their corn. There's a very similar episode in one of the Little House books where the Ingalls family deals with blackbirds in their corn. Maybe it was a coincidence; certainly I don't know if she's read all of the Little House books, but it was similar enough that I was surprised to see it there.
A lot of the dialogue in the book is written in Ojibwe. I am willing to give this book a lot more of a pass on it than I usually would, since it's there for cultural and educational value, but I still found it jarring since the characters aren't code-switching. Most of it can be understood through context, but there were a few times when I had to stop and leaf into the glossary at the back to understand what had just been said.
I think it's great and necessary that there's a Native counterview to the very popular Little House series, and I certainly enjoyed some parts of the book (I especially liked the stories that were told to the children). I just wish I'd found it more engaging. Might check out the second one and see if I like it better.
Yesterday, I read The Turk, a book about the historical Mechanical Turk automaton, its inventor (who also did other interesting work and wished that people didn't focus so much on the Turk), its influence on other inventors, and its connections to computation and chess-playing algorithms. I felt like the last chapter could have been trimmed a little, and it's rather behind the times in terms of AI game-playing nowadays, but it was an easy and entertaining read, and I would recommend it. Very interesting to see how showmanship played into how believable the automaton was, how none of the operators gave away the secret, and how many aspects of culture it influenced - automatic looms, Babbage and his engines, Poe and his Dupin. The book also does a good job of drawing out the mystery of how the trick worked until near the end, for those of us who haven't heard the details before.
There were a lot of other automata mentioned in the book that I was disappointed to find do not appear to have any surviving pictures. At least on the internet. There is a short video on Youtube of a recreation of the Mechanical Turk (the original, alas, was lost to fire) but it has several inaccuracies. There's also a BBC video that isn't very informative and is still slightly wrong. Couldn't find anything else, although the maker apparently takes the Turk to chess events sometimes.
Will Read: I think I still have a couple of unread books laying around my apartment. And I really should get back to Genji before I forget everything.