--- Watching your language ---

A few notes on the choice of words........

Chameleons and the big word

I've never been punched because of something I've said. Amazingly, I've never been punched. A few times I should have been.

I'm a chameleon - you know, those lizards that change colors to blend in with their surroundings. I pick up accents, gestures, expressions.... I can't, say, affect a New Zealand accent if I try but sometimes one just comes out. I got that accent from a welder I worked with offshore.

I was driving around Montgomery, Alabama with a friend and we pulled into a fast food restaurant to pick up something to eat. The check-out person asked if I was from Australia and I said, "Yeah. I'm from Sydney." She oozed as I snagged my bag of food.

I don't typically lie by nature, but it was just too tempting, and it made her happy.

I was in a check-out lane at WalMart when I was suddenly rattling on in an Hispanic accent, and I turned around to see a big Hispanic guy and his pequena espousa glaring at me. I apologized profusely.

Sometimes, I can't pull out the word I want to use. I combat that problem by having a big vocabulary so, if I can't retrieve one word, I'll just use a synonym. Unfortunately, the synonym might be a $20 word where a half dollar word would be more appropriate. It makes me seem to be trying to impress people with my erudition.

It's tough being a lizard.

But, all in all, I've gotten along pretty well with my language problems. Here are a few things that I've picked up.

Big sentences

The Teaching Company has a course called "Building Great Sentences: Exploring The Writer's Craft" presented by Professor Brook Landon. One of his points was that Strunk and White was wrong in their "The Elements of Style" when they counseled to always use short sentences.

I agree.

Long complex sentences can be awful - a misery to try to decipher, but they can also be beautiful and fun to read if they are well crafted.

It's a matter of style. I hope my style in this blog is enjoyable to read.

The way I try to ensure that my long, complicated sentences are well crafted is: I read them aloud (or I listen to my computer read them to me - I put each blog through a screen reader before I post it.) If a sentence doesn't flow well, if it doesn't sound natural, if it's hard for me to get it out, then I start looking for a problem.

The age of belle letres is gone and I lament it's passing. I read letters of Civil War soldiers writing home or pioneers writing to their families back east and, although the writer is obviously illiterate, to the best of their ability, I can tell that they are trying to make their letter enjoyable, readable, beautiful. Even scientific works were crafted to be read - not like the dry scientific writing of today.

I want these blogs to inform, but I also want them to entertain. I hope you enjoy my stories of adventures in learning.

What is vulgar?

"Vulgar" is dirty, right? At the very least, it's uncouth.

Actually, it's Germanic.

The word "vulgar" actually means "common". For instance, the Bible was written in vulgar languages. The New Testament was written in a form of Greek called "koine" which literally meant "common". And, of course, the Vulgate Bible was called that because it was written in the vulgar Latin.

Today, vulgar usually means Germanic. I'll try not to be too offensive but I will talk about "ass". Of course an ass is a donkey and when you are calling a person an ass, you are likening them to a donkey.

But the use of "ass" (a word of Germanic origin) to refer to the "posterior" or "gluteus maximus" (both words from Romantic languages) is considered obscene, or, at least, boorish. Why? They mean the same things.

Well, there is an answer. It's the same answer as to why we raise pigs, but we eat pork. We raise cattle, kine, bulls, and cows, but we eat beef. Deer run in the forest, but when we eat them, they are venison.

On Christmas Day 1066, William the Conqueror was crowned king of England. "Conqueror" is a bit strong for what actually happened. William might have been French, but he was also related to the childless king of England, Edward the Confessor, so when the king died, William became a valid contender for the crown. Many in England, in fact, supported William.

When William became the king of England, one thing he brought with him was the French language, and it became fashionable to speak the king's tongue.

So, just think about the vulgarities that I'm not going to talk about in this article. How many of the inappropriate words are of Germanic origin while their appropriate alternatives are from the French, or Latin, or Spanish, or Greek?

Responsibility for being understood

I've mentioned James Kilpatrick as one of my favorite linguists. He held that the primary purpose of language was to be understood, and if your hearers understood you, then your language was correct. (I might also heartily recommend June Casagrande's book, "Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies: a guide to language for fun and spite".)

I would like to go a little further and suggest that people are responsible for being understood. Both the speaker/writer and the hearer/listener share 100% of the responsibility to be understood, for what other purpose is there for language except to be understood. Even double talkers carefully craft their language to be understood to be saying hilarious gobbledygook.

In speaking, the way you make sure that you are understood is by looking for nonverbal cues that you are making the right impressions on your hearers, and by flat out asking them if they understand you as saying what you meant to be saying.

When writing, well, you have to rely on the responses you get and those are not often forthcoming. But you use the same language speaking as you do writing, so you have some prior knowledge as to how others understand what you say. You should also be sensitive to the fact that persons from other cultures often use the same words differently, so, if your communications are to be consumed abroad, you should not be too surprised if you are sometimes misunderstood.

In that case, you should be the last person to be offended and the first person to be willing to correct misconceptions.

Choosing your words

Certainly, if you want to get a point across (or a concept, or an emotion, or a lesson) you should choose your words carefully and put them together in a may that will cause the consumer to be more likely to receive what you have to say rather than to wonder away, disinterested.

Humans have two advantages over all the other animals: excellent opposable thumbs and an exquisite technical language. It is entirely fitting that we should take the utmost care in crafting with both.

Develop a habit of listening to what you say and reading what you write. Don't be afraid to critique yourself and ask for others' feedback.

--- A course in mathematics ---

Do you want a self education in mathematics? I have three curricula for you according to how deep you want to go and how long you want to take.

If you just want a brief overview I'll plug my own work.

The Stat files (on the Therian Timeline site) are about statistics, but I begin by breezing through arithmetic, algebra, geometry, pre-calculus, calculus and differential equations - and then I throw in a little complex mathematics, vectors, linear algebra, logic, and simple statistics. The purpose of this section is to bring budding amateur researchers and statistician up to speed in the preliminaries, but the section, The Basics, would serve as an overview of mathematics, too. Here's the address:

http://www.theriantimeline.com/stat_files/the_basics

If you want a little more depth and, maybe, some hands-on experience, check out the Excursions section where I explain counting on your fingers (fingermath), standards of measurement (including the measuring tools you carry around with you everywhere - your body),  lattice multiplication, and building a slide rule from scratch using index cards.

http://www.theriantimeline.com/excursions

If you want a lot more depth, you might want to follow my mathematics LabBook. It's a mathematics tutorial with lots of personal involvement.  At the current writing, I've only covered the very basics of mathematics - the logic behind math, counting, and whole numbers, but my intention here is to look inside mathematics and really see how it works. Do you really know how numbers work?

If I live long enough, I'll make it to differential equations.

The LabBooks are LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet documents but, fortunately, LibreOffice is a free download.

http://www.theriantimeline.com/Mathematics.ods

..........................................
Level two is conversational math. You can pick up an understanding of mathematics to the point that you could sit through a lecture on, say, tensor analysis and understand what the presenter is talking about. You probably wouldn't be able to use tensors to solve an engineering problem though. You could achieve that level in about a year with the Teaching Company mathematics courses.

The Teaching company sells college level courses in a wide range of subjects. The video sets are pretty pricey. The key is that every set they sell goes on sale at least once during the year at a substantial discount. Also, the Denver Public Library has many of the products. Check your own local library if you want to go that way, but there is considerable advantage of owning your own. For one thing, there's no time limit.

The Teaching Company website is here:

https://www.thegreatcourses.com

For a complete course of mathematics, I would recommend:

Arithmetic
Secrets of Mental Math - Arthur Benjamin
Algebra
Algebra I - James A. Sellers
Algebra II - James A. Sellers
Geometry
Geometry: An Interactive Journey to Mastery - James S. Tanton
Precalculus (including trigonometry)
Mathematics Describing the Real World: Precalculus and Trigonometry - Bruce Edwards
Calculus
Change and Motion: Calculus Made Clear - Michael Starbird
Differential equations
Mastering Differential Equations: the visual method - Robert L. Devaney

There are several other sets for fields like discrete mathematics, probability, statistics, combinatorics, etc. but that might take you into a second year of study.
........................................................
Now, if you want to take a few years and really have a mastery of mathematics, I would recommend beginning with the CK12 textbooks and then switch to the MIT OpenCourseWare courses for the college level mathematics.

CK12 is an organization that offers excellent free textbooks and other learning materials for grades kindergarten to high school (thus "CK12"). The website is here:

https://www.ck12.org

And the MIT website is here:

https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

If you can get your hands on a copy of the old educational mathematics textbook Basic Mathematical Concepts, by F. Lynwood Wren it's one of the best mathematical texts for explaining elementary concepts I have seen. Some other great resources are:

The Universal Encyclopedia of Mathematics by James R. Newman
Secrets of Mental Math by Arthur Benjamin
The Handbook of Essential Mathematics: Formulas, Processes, and Tables Plus Applications in Personal Finance edited by Donald D. Gregory and Vincent R. Miller

This last reference is an Air Force Research Laboratory text that has been released for public distribution and can be found on the Internet here:
https://florida.theorangegrove.org/og/file/3a8c652c-11d0-e967-95fb-b5bbae2586d6/1/math_handbook.pdf

Also be sure to check out the Interactive Mathematics website (http://www.cut-the-knot.org).

--- Language Resources ---

If people go by their experiences in school, "Language" is probably thought of as vocabulary, grammar, and. maybe, literature. Foreign languages would be included in all that. But there is a lot more to it than that. Those communications classes - those are language, too. How about etymology? That's one of my favorites. I almost enjoy being criticized for saying "Call a spade a spade," so I can explain where the phrase comes from and why it has absolutely nothing to do with race. Or, when I say that "It's all balled up," and some one looks at me like I said something dirty.

That's one of my favorites. When people relied on horses to get around, they would often ride, or take their carriages out on a snowy day and the snow would get packed under the horses hooves into tight snowballs, causing them to fall down.

Likewise, "to suck" derives from the beat generation when, if you were a good trumpeter, you "really blew" but, of course, the opposite was to "really suck."

There's more to why a particular person said /that/ than choice of words. Sigmund Freud actually did first describe the Freudian slip - saying something you really mean without intending to go quite that far. There is certainly a psychology of language.

And language is composed of signs. Words are signs, but people don't always associate all those other signs as language - but it is. Semiotics is the study of signs. There is  much more to language than people usually think and much of the most fascinating parts are often ignored.

Why does the English "father", the German "fader",  and the Italian and Spanish "padre" sound so much alike; and why doesn't the Russian "otets" and Aramean "hayry" follow suit?

Why do Americans gesture with the first finger and thumb of one hand in a circle to indicate that things are alright, and why will that get you into trouble in other parts of the world? Our nonverbal language is also language.

I mentioned two of my favorite authors of linguistics in the blog, "Language and me". You might also want to check out Desmond Morris' Peoplewatching. And if you want to check out the languages of other folks - horses, dogs, cats - he's also written Dogwatching, Catwatching, Horsewatching, and Animalwatching.

"Foreign language" is a relative term. German may be foreign to an English speaking person but not to a German speaker. English is a foreign language to many people in the world. Ironically, though, English is a langua franca, so it is understood by many people whose first language isn't English. I learned German in college because, at that time, a lot of research in psychology (my field) was published in German. There are a lot of reasons to pick up another language, but one is just that it's fun to do so.

If you want to devote a significant part of your time to the serious study of language, you will certainly need a reference library and you couldn't do much better than the online MIT reference library (https://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=176227&p=1160775).

And if you want to pick up a new language, check out MIT's OpenCourseWare offerings in foreign languages. For supplemental study, fun, and games, look at the Digital Dialects page (http://www.digitaldialects.com) and the BBC's languages page (http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages).

If you want to delve into sign languages, there are many resources for American Sign Language on the web. I recommend the excellent AMSLAN dictionary at Signing Savvy (https://www.signingsavvy.com).

I'll be looking into a lot of language while I try to learn Spanish this year. Maybe you'll get bit by the language bug.

Is there a foreign language you have always been wanting to pick up? Just keep in mind, the longer you wait, the harder it is to learn it. Don't let the opportunity slip by.

Walk around town and pay attention to what people  say. Do some of the phrases they use seem odd to you? When you really think about it, do many of the phrases you use seem odd to you? Why do people say those things?!? Most dictionaries have the etymologies of the words - explanations of where the words come from. You can usually find the origins of phrases on the Internet.

--- Spanish ---

A funny thing happened during my first session of Spanish. I suddenly became emotional. I'm not that kind of guy! Things don't usually move me that way. I hope it's a good omen. Watching the video felt...joyous.

One session for me is about three days. I start with the Class Activities list on the MIT website, watch the video episode, and then complete the textbook assignments. The next day I do the activities in the workbook. The third day I play around with the supplementary materials. I have all the resources in a single file - here's what it looks like in Windows explorer.

                                                                        [Spanish explorer]

And I keep all my notes in a LibreOffice spreadsheet one page to each session.

At this speed, I may be able to finish the first MIT course in a year. Hopefully I'll be able to talk with my Hispanic neighbors (with only a little good natured laughing.)

--- Math in my world ---

I've avoided mathematics heavy curricula. One consequence of mathematics as a language is that my dyslexia interferes with mathematics also. I'm slow and make a lot of errors, but one of the advantages of math is that there are always checks. If you know how to check your work, there's never a reason to let an error in calculations get by you.

But I enjoy mathematics. I especially enjoy explaining mathematical concepts to others. I like opening up the mathematical machine and showing others how it works.

I took courses in college through integral calculus and I continue taking them via the Teaching Company, MIT OpenCourseWare, and other resources. One of my areas of specialization in graduate work was research methods (the other was vocational evaluation.)

I haven't done a lot of research, mostly helping others with their projects, but I have done a good bit of advisory work and think of myself as a pretty good statistician. I like teasing information out of real world data.

One of my long term projects is the software I offer in my website, the Therian Timeline. I'll be talking about that as time goes on. It's available in the Excursions section and there's a link in the Related Pages links to the right on this page.

Research is an issue in the therian community and I made these tools available as free downloads so amateur researchers could have easily accessible tools. I continue to build on them. For instance, DANSYS is a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet (Calc itself is a free download) that can already perform most of the commonly used statistical procedures, but the extended version, DANSYSX, can do far more. I'm currently working on a regression procedure that will build a best regression equation from a set of data, rejecting weak variables. That one will take a while for me to complete.

Some folks love numbers; some hate them. What about you?

--- Language and me ---

Me and language? Language and I?

(Head slap) It's not even a sentence! Forget it!

What do you expect. I'm an animal. (Movie reference)

I'm dyslexic, I think in images, I stammer, I occasionally can't pull out the words I want to use, and, yes, I talk to my self.

Verbal language is not my first language.

But, then, my contrariness has served me well more than once. I have always been fascinated with and have enjoyed those things that I am not supposed to be able to do. That's why my favorite x-sport is rock climbing (or, it was until I clocked up so many hand injuries that my grip has gotten weak. A rock climber climbs with their hands, not their feet.) and rappelling.

I was not good at language so I was in two gospel groups and two advanced church choirs for many years, have two minors in world literature, joined the speech troop in college, and have spoken publicly....a lot. If you can find the Auburn Circle from the 1970s, I have stuff published there. The Circle is the Auburn University literary magazine.

I can tell you stories...and I probably will.

I'm not much for board games (they bore me), but if you can drag me into a game of Scrabble or Pictionary I will be ecstatic. I love crossword puzzles, Cryptoquotes, puns....people say that puns are low brow. They're wrong. Puns are perpetrated by people who love language and, consequently, love playing around with it.

Double talkers slay me - luckily there aren't that many around any more. The last two I can think of are Archie Campbell (if you haven't heard his "Rindercella", you must find a copy and listen to it.) and Norm Crosby. I'm sure there are others around, I just dropped TV when they went to high definition.

My favorite linguists are James Kilpatrick and Bill Bryson. Kilpatrick was actually a journalist. Wikipedia calls him a "grammarian" - I beg to differ. A grammarian would never say, "If you understand what I'm saying, then I'm using correct English." A linguist, on the other hand, would. He had a popular newspaper column on the English language for many years.

Bill Bryson wrote a book about an attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail (A Walk in the Woods). He's a professional author. He also wrote The Mother Tongue, Made Here in America, and Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words.

I can speak a little German (a very little and very slowly) and can read considerably more. I still have a little American Sign Language left. I'll probably brush up on them some day. Just now, I've started a last ditch attempt to learn Spanish. The MIT OpenCourseWare course I'm using is fun - I'll see if it's effective.

As you get older, it's harder to pick up new languages. I have a friend who is my age that makes it a hobby. I think he's got 20 or more that he can speak conversationally, but he does it constantly and has been learning languages for many years. I still have hope.

How about you? Are you a "language person?' What's your story?

--- Lookout Mountain data ---

They say that atmospheric pressure and temperature drops with increased altitude. The relationships are complex (See the Wikipedia article for Barometric Formula for the pressure equation) but we don't have to be exact here. Pressure drops about 11.3 pascals for the first 1000  feet above sea level. A pascal is a measure of pressure that is equal to one Newton of force over one square meter of area, or about 0.000145 pounds per square inch. A millibar is 100 pascals.

On my recent hike up Lookout Mountain, I carried a weather meter with me that measures barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, and quite a lot more. As for atmospheric pressure, it will measure to a tenth of a millibar, or 10 pascals. It measures temperature to a tenth degree Fahrenheit. I stopped occasionally to record the time and altitude from my phone, and the atmospheric pressure and temperature from my weather meter.

The weather meter is a SensorTech by Dakota Watch Company. I bought it several years ago from the National Geographic products catalog. Here's what it looks like.

                                                              [My weather meter]

There are several ways that altitude can be measured. The only way I know that it can be measured with precision is by a couple of surveyors with expensive equipment physically hiking up the mountain. Smart phones can do a decent job. The most accurate phones use an onboard barometer that can compensate for temperature. My phone doesn't have a barometer but it will give me a reading by the less precise method of GPS. One global positioning satellite can give a pretty precise fix on a location by latitude and longitude (horizontal position on the globe), but to get an altitude for a point, there needs to be at least two satellites. The altitude is triangulated between the satellites (there's trigonometry involved). With all the calculating, some accuracy is lost, but I've compared my readings with altitude contours from topographic maps and they tend to be pretty accurate.

My altitude measure for the starting point of my hike was 5764' and it was just below the 5800' contour on Google's topographic map. Windy Gap was at 6941' and the Google topographic map showed it to be just above the 6900' contour.

Here's the data I recorded.

                                                             [Lookout Mountain data]

And here's a graph of pressure and temperature vs. altitude.

                                                            [Data chart]

See the problem?

Actually, I noticed part of the problem while planning the hike. I wanted a day with stable weather because as weather systems move through, as you probably know from weather reports, barometric pressure changes. I didn't want the barometric pressure changing for anything but altitude. My meter was barely sensitive enough to register the difference between the bottom of Chimney Gulch Trail and the summit of Lookout Mountain as it is.

Imagine my chagrin when I noticed that, according to Dark Skies, the weather service I commonly use, there is a dip in the barometric pressure every day around noon! Why would that happen?

The weather station I was watching is on Colfax and I'm sure that street heats up as the sun rises. Hot air (think about a hot air balloon) is lighter than cold air. Golden is a smaller town but I expected some of the same effect. What happened? Here's a chart of the altitude, temperature, and pressure over time.

                                                                 [Time]

According to my calculations, my hike had an elevation gain of 1430 feet (for a travel record see the Terminus: Golden blog). That gives an average altitude gain of 8.6 feet per minute, or 513.8 feet per hour. I think my hike up Mount Cheaha in Alabama was steeper but it was only an elevation gain of 95 feet. The temperature curve is so flat I made a separate chart for it.

                                                                [Temperature]

It certainly dropped as I went on. But how did these variables change with altitude? Well, there's the jaw dropper.

                                                        [with altitude]

In the lower part of the trail, there was a slight decrease in pressure, about 0.8 millibar over 1000 feet. Then, Bam! Right around 1000 feet the pressure went up (!) from 954.3 millibars to 965.9 millibars. That is over 10 millibars in the wrong direction!

Well, of course, there's a reason. At 6951 feet, there is a natural wind tunnel called Windy Saddle that collects all the winds from one side of the range and blasts them through to the other side. You can probably guess that compressing air makes it denser and creates more pressure, and, also, that denser air is colder. Right here the temperature dropped from 62.7 degrees to a rather brutal 46.9. I had to put my coat back on!

Air is funny but it's very predictable. Things like the ideal gas laws that you might have learned in chemistry governs it's behavior and, therefore, forms a basis for the behavior of weather. Do you have a wind anomaly like Windy Saddle near where you live? If you visit, try to figure out how it works. Weather meters, thermometers, and pocket anemometers (wind meters) are fairly inexpensive and, perhaps you could record some measurements and make some charts. Feel free to show your results in the comment section of this blog.

--- Math Resources ---

You don't have to have equipment to do mathematics as Arthur Benjamin explains in his book Secrets of Mental Math and the Teaching Company course Secrets of Mental Math (both of which I recommend highly.) but if you want to explore mathematics, you really should have a few pieces of equipment. If you already have a computer and/or a smart phone, many of these tools are free downloads.

I would recommend having a good spreadsheet and there is even a free download for that - LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org)  has a fine spreadsheet called Calc, but most office productivity suites have their own and, if you already have one, most of them work similarly enough that we can all talk about their spreadsheet and understand each other.

I also use Google Sheets on my smart phone. The nice thing about Sheets is that I can share the same documents between my phone and my computer and they don't take up space on either because they're saved in Google's cloud storage.

The nice thing about a spreadsheet is that it can do anything a scientific calculator can do, except it can do it a few million times at the same time (each cell on a spreadsheet is virtually a full function programmable scientific calculator with graphing capabilities and a whole lot more.

But a spreadsheet doesn't substitute for a graphing calculator. Although most spreadsheets have graphing capabilities, they are primarily designed for business and statistical charting. A good graphing calculator is designed to do mathematics. For instance, most spreadsheets won't give you a serviceable polar graph (I've programmed that ability into DANSYSX but there's still a lot that a graphing calculator will do that DANSYSX can't. I'm working on it....) Not to worry. There are two popular (free!) graphing calculators available for computers that will do everything - get them both because they both have they're strengths.

GraphCalc is a great little graphing calculator utility that will give you rectilinear or polar graphs in 2D or 3D, and it works just like a handheld graphing calculator (http://www.graphcalc.com).

GeoGebra is a mathematical visualization utility (https://www.geogebra.org/?lang=en) that has many extensions available, many of them specifically for teaching mathematical concepts. It has grown over time and now will change between a graphing calculator and a mathematical visualization utility.

There are a couple of "analog computers" that I will recommend simply because using them provides exceptional familiarity with numbers and arithmetic procedures.

It's hard to use an abacus without strengthening your mathematics skills and understanding deeply how numbers work. David Bagley has put out several versions of abaci and they're all on this site (http://www.sillycycle.com/abacus.html). Choose one that meets your needs.

To really get a grip on mathematical principles, learn how to use a slide rule. A slide rule will give you an intimate knowledge of arithmetic operations up to and including logarithms. The problem is that slide rules went out of style when scientific calculators came out and so they are very expensive now. On the other hand, there are online and downloadable slide rules available on the Internet. Here's one ( http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n909es/virtual-n909-es.html). Derek's Virtual Slide Rule Gallery has several models for you to choose from (http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim). And a portable version of the same is here (http://solo.dc3.com/VirtRule.html)

And I must plug my own works. They are free and I don't even ask for donations.

DANSYS is a spreadsheet built over LibreOffice Calc. It has many mathematical utilities built in and DANSYSX, the extension, has many more. I also offer ToolBook, a LibreOffice spreadsheet that has tools programmed into it such as randomizers, timers, and counters, and over time, I'm programming more into it. Both are available here (http://www.theriantimeline.com/excursions/labbooks). There's other stuff here, too, and I will be bringing that up as time goes on.

There are a lot of other mathematical utilities online for specialized use. For instance, if you want to explore differential equations, there are vector field maps and other visualization tools available.

I'll be showing you some of my toys as I explore mathematics in the field next year.

People ask me why anyone needs mathematics above what they teach in elementary school. My answer is usually that it enriches one's life. Mathematics is fun. If you like puzzles, then you would probably like mathematical problems. Further, there are things that you can probably figure out at home without resorting to college level mathematics, such as scaling recipes, but most advanced mathematical techniques were developed as shortcuts and labor saving devices and understanding them gives you the same advantages. Finally, mathematical knowledge gives you a one-upsmanship advantage in social interaction. Just think of how impressive you will be when someone asks you how fast you drove coming over and you return, "Do you mean average velocity or instantaneous velocity?"

--- Spanish ---

Well, I have my Spanish textbook and workbook and am ready to embark on this year-long (and maybe more) adventure. I'm starting with MIT's Spanish I course, which is available on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare site (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/global-studies-and-languages/21g-701-spanish-i-fall-2003). The online course tells you which materials they use (you have to buy your own but they're not expensive) and provides a syllabus, calendar of activities, assignments, related resources, and in-class activities (which has handouts as PDFs).

I have set up a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet as a notebook and I have other resources that I will be using including the exercises and games on  the Digital Dialects website (http://www.digitaldialects.com). There is also a (fairly) nearby branch of the Denver Public Library (the Schlessman Family Branch) that has a regular Spanish conversation group. I may attend that once I become a little conversant.

The MIT course uses a Spanish TV series (which can be accessed through the Annenberg Foundation website http://learner.org/series/destinos) as a core learning experience and a companion textbook and workbook. There are 26 episodes and 52 class sections. The course is designed as a semester course but I will be taking more time with it for additional exercises (and because I'm old).

I think I've mentioned that I've tried to pick up Spanish twice before and failed. As you get older, it's harder to pick up new languages. German and American Sign Language were easy and Spanish looks like it should be easy also, and I would like to be able to converse with my Hispanic neighbors.

There are many ways to pick up a new language - commercial and free Internet resources and community programs. It's fun and you can spend as much time and money as you want. Especially check out the MIT OpenCourseWare language courses.

--- End of the year, start of the next ---

I've focused on religion and social sciences during 2018. The physically disastrous end of the previous year left me drained and I haven't regained my endurance completely, but I haven't let it slow me down too much. I haven't made any particularly long hikes but I did, for instance, make it out to Strontia Reservoir, around 13 miles round trip. And I made my second near 1000 foot ascent without much pain. Then I capped off the year with the 1400+ foot ascent of Lookout Mountain in Golden.

There were some big gains during the year. Most outstanding was my gain of a son by adoption and the addition to our extended family of an exceptional little canine. I learned something about family law.

I'm not done with the social sciences. I plan to continue explorations of the local community through next year. That will mesh nicely with one of my planned topics - language. I will be making a (last?) attempt to learn Spanish using MIT's Spanish courses as a core curriculum. It's not the first language that I've added on. I learned German and American Sign Language in college and, although I've lost the ability to converse in either, I can still read German with some difficulty. Perhaps I will polish those languages once I get to where I can talk with my Spanish speaking neighbors.

I will also be playing around with mathematics. That doesn't seem like much of a field subject but, in fact, there is a lot of math in my future. Mathematics is a primary language of sciences and 2020 I will embark on a hands-on exploration of hard sciences beginning with astronomy and physics.

I've already made use of mathematics, for instance, in my study of smiling on the trail. In the coming months, I will be developing trail mathematics and measurement techniques in earnest. For instance, I plan to use surveying skills to determine how tall that huge monolith at Red Rocks is using only primitive tools and trigonometry.

                                                                       [Red Rocks]

I have some larger scale hikes planned. This year the station-to-station hikes have been on the order of less than 10 kilometers. Next year, I plan to check out the ends of the lines (there are 11 destinations). I have already explored the area around Mineral station - Chatfield Lake, Waterton Canyon, and the Mineral to Littleton section of the Platte River Trail - and Golden Station, with my hike up Lookout Mountain. That leaves nine more.

I also plan to hike the Highline Canal Trail in four sections, one for each season. These will be 20 mile lengths but I will start at the beginning (Waterton Canyon) and, since the canal runs on gravity, it will all be down hill.

So, join me for a year of adventure and learning in 2019.