A Knitting Academic

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...

It's surprisingly hard to find 100% organic cotton panties that are less than $20 a pair. I managed to get the last remaining nude pair of Skin bikini panty in my size on Zappos at 55% off.  But I choose not to wash and wear the same underwear every day of the week. Since I grew up getting the multi-pack of Fruit of the Loom, the cost of additional organic cotton underwear is quite the sticker shock. None of the retailers that I found had a clear Fair Trade commitment to make the cost more worthwhile.  So, I was very excited to find Pact clothing sells organic cotton products at lower prices. Unfortunately, these panties are only 95% organic cotton and 5% elastane. Elastane is an obvious problem for women's genitalia. It doesn't breath very well, and so could disrupt the very fragile natural balance of vaginal flora. Sure, it makes the boy shorts stay in place throughout the day, but it's not quite clear how well 5% elastane panties breath. Based on how hot and uncomf...

Reading lots of memoirs by incredible people like Stacey Abrams, Cecile Richards and Shawn Askinosie has worn me out a bit. They have grit and created successful movements and organizations and wrote books to help others. Their works are inspiring, and I may never achieve anything similar. So, I picked up my first fiction novel by the popular Fredrik Backman. He's well-loved for his book, A Man Called Over, which was also made into a well-loved film. His works have a reputation for being elegant, focusing on the spectrum of humanity, and still remain perhaps a bit heartwarming. "Us Against You" was published in 2018, and gives me a chance to vote for it in the upcoming Goodreads books of the year standings. I really want to be able to vote and choose between nominees this year, so I started reading the book on Scribd without knowing what it was about and ignoring that it's a sequel to a book that I haven't read. Since I didn't know before starting, the st...

Since reading " Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion " by Elizabeth Cline , I've had a new-found need to make my wardrobe more sustainable. I applied Marie Kondo 's method to identify which items I wanted to keep and which I needed to thank for their service and give away or recycle or turn into rags. I made the vow to buy clothes to replace when necessary, and not to fulfill a shopping desire or urge. I also made the vow to source all new clothing more responsibly. That means features like: Organic cotton GOTS Certified Fair Trade Recycled materials   Some of this effort has gone pretty well. I bought a clearance organic cotton dress from Pact to wear as a night dress along with 95% organic cotton panties. Many of these items are fair trade and GOTS certified. I also got a regular cotton dress from Passion Lillie that is fair trade and dyed in a supposedly more environmentally friendly process. Unfortunately, I've had a number of p...

When my partner asked for a traditional gansey sweater, I immediately wanted to try one of the more sustainable yarn options on the market. Peace Fleece came to mind because the Fall 2018 issue of Interweave Knits had an article on their relationship with the Navajo Nation. According to the article, the Navajo reservation ranchers had a lot of Churro and other sheep whose wool sold for very low prices at a local trading post. A member organized a wool buy day and soon Peace Fleece started buying the wool at almost 10x what was previously being paid by the trading post. Peace Fleece started in 1985 buying wool from the Soviet Union in an effort to create economic ties and promote peace and understanding. They have a lot of information on their website about the farmers and ranchers who provide the fleece . What's especially nice about Peace Fleece is that they have navy wool. It's surprisingly hard to find that color. Patience Blue Peace Fleece and Beth Brown-Reinsel...

On December 4th, 2018, I shared my footprint results from a few calculators. I wanted to see how the estimates changed now that I live in a house and have a more demanding job. I'm sure the calculators and their assumptions have changed too. Essentially, my footprint hasn't changed a lot. I've reduced in some areas (shopping) and increased in others (transport and housing). Although I buy more organic, I eat a lot more dairy. Check it out and let me know: what's your footprint?   Redefining Progress My 2018 results are here . If everyone were to live like me, we would need 4.7 earths. That's 0.3 more than in 2008. Surprisingly little change despite having a whole house and flying internationally more often. My global acres footprint increased by 10 acres. My pastureland proportion increased significantly. I suspect a lot of the results changed due to increases in quality and availability of data over the past ten years. The Global Footprint Network and Ear...

Knitting and math are obvious best buds. Sara-Marie Belcastro's article, Adventures in Mathematical Knitting published in American Scientist (Vol. 101, N. 2, March-April 2013, also online ) has a lot of great examples. But it seems like knitting, because it has often been performed by women, has not always been seen as a technical or mathematical endeavor. Men, having generally had a monopoly on creating the studies of intelligence and aptitude, have generally also had a monopoly on deciding what is and isn't technical. Here's a quote from a lecture by Richard Feynman, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City. "I would like to report other evidence that mathematics is only patterns. When I was at Cornell, I was rather fascinated by the student body, which seems to me was a dilute mixture of some sensible people in a big mass of dumb people studying home economics, etc. including lots of girls....