"Autodidact" as a username was taken for my use in describing this tumblelog, but I think lifelong learning says it just as well.
I have been curious about everything and anything ever since I was a kid, and that interest in learning what there was to know has never waned as an adult.
Tumblr gives me the perfect platform for recording my insights from reading and research and creating a repository of the knowledge I gain on a variety of topics. Best of all, this can then be shared and later accessed by others on their own self-educational quests.
Archive
I just bought myself a video iPod yesterday. I was very excited at the thought of all of the tutorials and DIY-type video I could download until I discovered that iTunes didn’t have a large variety of free video podcasts. It seems that most of what iTunesU offers is audio. And you cannot download from YouTube. Sure, there are tools out there, but as soon as they evolve, YouTube changes their code to counter them.
So what’s a girl who doesn’t like to watch only music videos and crap on her iPod to do?
Well, I stumbled across VideoJug this morning, quite by accident, because I Googled “how to make pasta,” and it came up in my search results. I was happy to discover they supply a link beside each video for downloading to the iPod, as well as the Sony PSP and mobile 3GP (not sure what that is just yet).
I just heard the word riparian for the first time ever today used twice in an NPR story on the California levees and wondered what the heck it meant. Now I know.
I love coming across new words, scribbling them down during my commute and then looking them up later. Words are like jewels to me, each one as precious as the one before, and no two ever exactly the same, like snowflakes. Plus, words are the one thing no one can never take away from us, not through poverty or old age or anything. Even if we couldn’t speak or see, they’d stay richly, deeply rooted in our minds, echoing throughout between synapses, in the fertile soil that can never amass too many of them in its vastness.
Sometimes, just for kicks, when I’m riding the train home from work, I take a blank paper journal page and write one word at the top. Then, I will write until I run out of ideas — writing one word or phrase after another, a dance of syllables. The initial word helps to spark my creativity. In this way, I go on a kind of psychedelic word “trip,” and, before I know it, I’m at my stop, which is a 40-minute ride to the end of the rail line and I’m feeling energized and full of new wonder.
