A Knitting Academic

One day as a child, my friend stormed out of the room while I was talking to other friends. "She's frustrated because we are all talking and she's excluded," a family member explained. My friend was and is deaf. Though I knew a little sign language, I only used it when talking directly to her and didn't realize until that point what it meant for her when others talked. I realized what she must feel to sit in a room seeing everyone else talk and laugh. She was invisible, and it would take her considerable effort to join. I made more of an effort to sign when speaking after that point. It doesn't exclude anyone to sign and speak concurrently. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to speak multiple languages at once and to have two languages and cultures coexist. Today,  I am inspired by the article " Unpacking the Emotional Labor of Immigrant Women " by Olga Mecking (a writer living in the Netherlands).  My impression of Europe, and Scandinav...

Lingq offered it's annual sale and I signed up. I was excited to make lessons for myself using the OCR capabilities of Google Drive. So, I took some photos to "scan" the first few pages of my book, and Google gives me the following... Google Drive I suspected the error is due to me including too many pages, too many pages with pictures, or having too imperfect photos. So, I pile the PDF into OneNote, where I need to copy text from each page individually. It can't get accurate text from the image pages, but the text pages are actually fine... OneNote Argh. Still, the OneNote conversion means I have to copy and past every page in addition to fixing the linebreaks. So I download paid commercial software (trial version), FoxIt PhantomPDF and Abbyy. Here's what Abbyy ($199) did with the PDF from GoogleScan: Abbyy OCR editor interface Abbyy FineReader verification tool The Abbyy program is really really nice and has lots of ...

Learning a foreign language (especially an uncommon language) can be pretty expensive, frustrating, or boring. The price increases as the language becomes less common because there are fewer people paying for the content, meaning the creator needs to charge more to get by. I'm learning Finnish, so there's not nearly as much content as there is for English, Spanish or Mandarin. Learners want a mix of vocabulary lists, graded readers, video, audio, writing prompts and in-person conversations. Finding someone to converse with is harder with Finnish because there are about five and a half million speakers in the entire world. Spanish has about 480 million. I found three conversational partners on websites like Italki for about $14-40 an hour. It was ok, but hard to schedule the time due to the time-zone difference and it required a lot of preparation to plan what we would talk about. Luckily, I also have access to native speakers locally because they are my fami...

Instead of relieving stress by shopping, I relieve stress by perusing public library e-book collections. All of the items from the public library are free, and they can be instantly downloaded and read if there's at least one copy available. Also, the books take up zero extra space in my home - which is a plus. If I don't like the book, I can just return it guilt free. In fact, returning it just means that another eager reader has the opportunity to enjoy it! Today, my search topic was "ghost stories". I've always loved stories about spirits haunting people trying to gain closure to something that happened in their lives. I stopped reading ghost stories after high school, but they have a special place in my heart. I recently reignited my love for ghost stories when I bought a book of stories called "Haunted Georgia: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Peach State" and rediscovered "Haunted Looking Glass", a book I bought but didn't read i...

Your car probably weighs more than 20 times what you weigh, averaging about 4,000 lbs. If you consider high school physics, the amount of energy needed to move an object is at minimum the weight times the distance. That means the car could be using 20 times more energy than is really needed to move you from your house to work or wherever you want to go. Enter the scooter: A cute little moped for moving one or two people, or even more if you are reckless (I once saw a family in Vietnam transporting a kid-size barbie car on top of their scooter - it was unusual even for Vietnam). Mopeds weigh 200-500 pounds, and they need a lot less parking space.  Parents dropping off the kids at school on scooters Despite using less fuel, many scooters create more pollution than cars. As shown in this Nature article  , scooters emit from 10-100 times the mass of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as primary and secondary organic aerosals (POA and SOA), as light and heavy duty veh...

I hate grafting pieces of knitting. If a pattern is written to be knit as separate pieces, such as a front and back, I will convert it to be in the round with as few seams as possible. The act of threading a tapestry needle and running yarn through my stitches is tedious and always feels synthetic. It takes part of the magic away. Knitting without seams seems to me to be much harder and more creative. You have to find ways to grow the fabric organically to create the construction that you want. That is the magic of knitting to me, to create a novel and pleasing construction using only a piece of yarn and two knitting needles. A seam marks where my hand knitted garment became a sewn piece reminiscent of mass manufacture.  (Yes, I know many fabrics are knit!) Thus, imagine my surprise when I read someone's comment that seamless knitting is less desirable when it comes to clean construction. In the comment section of Franklin Habits review of Amy Herzog's books " At La...