This journal is mostly public because most of it contains poetry, quotations, pictures, jokes, videos, and news (medical and otherwise). If you like what you see, you are welcome to drop by, anytime. I update frequently.

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med_cat: (dog and book)
med_cat: (dog and book)

Six links for your Wednesday

med_cat: (dog and book)
Anthropological trivia from Sapiens

Did he want a cat scan? Mountain lion makes surprise visit to Arizona hospital, from USA Today

What are red sprites, blue jets, and other Transient Luminous events?, from Paul M. Smith Photography

(check out their FB page btw--amazing photos)


and three from Medium:

How to Become the Best in the World at Something

With skill stacking, you don’t need to be at the top to be extraordinary

(an interesting perspective)

We live to compete. What I learned by winning the Duolingo diamond league

Common side effects of not drinking

By rejecting alcohol, you reject something very human, an extra limb that we have collectively grown to deal with reality and with each other. Getting around without it is not painless.

(I was a bit puzzled by this one actually, but I suppose, as with many things, it depends on one's experience and social circle...)








Comments

conuly: (Default)
Jul. 17th, 2024 08:42 am (UTC)
By rejecting alcohol, you reject something very human, an extra limb that we have collectively grown to deal with reality and with each other. Getting around without it is not painless.

Nearly half of the adult population of the world reports either not drinking at all or barely drinking anything. It takes a very specific lifestyle to think that drinking really is universal.
med_cat: (Default)
Jul. 17th, 2024 09:56 am (UTC)
Yeah, you gotta read the article...myself, I don't indulge (never did), and I was never one for going out much, so...it was rather strange to me.

I think it was universal in the author's social circle.
conuly: (Default)
Jul. 17th, 2024 09:59 am (UTC)
And it was worse than I thought it'd be, too. Like, I was prepared to acknowledge that some of the non-drinkers still use other intoxicants in a social fashion - but no, it was all about drinking, drinking, drinking, very specifically drinking with her apparently terrible drinking buddies.

Edit: Whoops, sorry, I meant to thread that properly.

Edited 2024-07-17 09:59 am (UTC)
med_cat: (Default)
Jul. 17th, 2024 10:00 am (UTC)
Oh dear ;)

Edit: No problem re: threading

Edited 2024-07-17 10:00 am (UTC)
asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Default)
Jul. 17th, 2024 04:05 pm (UTC)
Nodding at the Duolingo article. I started using Duolingo in 2016, when it was a lot of fun, and lived through the transformation. I realized shortly into my experience in the Diamond League that that wasn't for me, did indeed deliberately drop down, and now I only do about two or three lessons a day, just to keep skill up on languages that I don't have an opportunity to practice. Not *at all* interested in that mad competition. *shudder*
med_cat: (SH education never ends)
Jul. 18th, 2024 10:33 am (UTC)
Totally makes sense. The end of that article reminds me of the famous quote, "the little mice were eating a cactus, getting pricked, they were crying but they continued to eat the cactus."

...and I'm like...once you've realized you're eating the cactus (or, in her case, that "winning" was meaningless and that she wasn't learning, in that mode)...why not stop?

(I'm only in the Bronze League, myself...and I think the gamification aspect can make it fun, if one doesn't take it too far, as the article so well explained)

What language(s) have you been studying?
asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Default)
Jul. 18th, 2024 03:36 pm (UTC)
I used it to start learning Spanish back in 2016 (but then bolstered those efforts in other ways). Then I used it pretty successfully with Portuguese, too: I've never tried speaking Portuguese, but I can understand it when it's spoken, and I can read it. I was less successful with Indonesian--the grammar there is very different, and I think I'd benefit from an actual class with a teacher. (I did take an online class through the Indonesian embassy, and that did help me get some concepts down, but I definitely feel like I need more along those lines.) Then recently, but without much commitment, I've used the app for Italian and Haitian Creole. Italian is another romance language, so that's pretty easy, and Haitian Creole is a creole of French, which I learned in high school, so that's pretty easy too.

My main foreign language--the one I know best--is Japanese ... though it's been many years since I've deployed it in other than the most casual way. I learned that through classroom instruction and then living in Japan. Tetun (the lingua franca of Timor-Leste) I learned through online classes ... that one's like Portuguese: I can understand it, but I don't know that I could actually speak it very well. And now Ticuna :-)

You post in Russian (it's Russian, yes? Not Ukrainian or something else written in Cyrillic?) Is that a second language for you or a mother tongue? What other languages have you learned?
med_cat: (SH education never ends)
Jul. 25th, 2024 11:08 pm (UTC)
Quite an impressive array of languages :)

Yes, Russian and yes it is my native language. I can understand Ukrainian reasonably well (now...), and I did post a poem or two in Ukrainian, some time ago. Can find it and give you the link if you want?

I'd taken German in school, and Latin in nursing school, so I know a little bit of those, and a little bit of French, and I can understand a little Yiddish

...and now I've finally started learning Hebrew, thanks to the advice of our mutual friend [personal profile] amaebi
asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Default)
Jul. 25th, 2024 11:18 pm (UTC)
That's an excellent array of languages too! And you have English in there as well ;-)

Yes, I would love the link to the poems.
med_cat: (woman reading)
Jul. 26th, 2024 12:11 am (UTC)
Thank you; you are too kind--there are only two languages that I truly _know_ ...and yes...I'm bilingual...

Certainly; I've lots of poems posted--if you look under "poem of the day" tag, you'll see.

The particular ones I was referring to:

https://med-cat.dreamwidth.org/3484574.html

https://med-cat.dreamwidth.org/3484836.html