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I was super excited to go skiing for the first time as an 11 year old. My older brother and I had signed up for a ski trip run by our town, and we were on a bus with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Going skiing was something I had dreamed of doing ever since watching Olympic alpine skiing as a very small child. Every winter I would sled fanatically any time it snowed, but I longed to go skiing. This was my chance!

I ended up learning how to ski quickly and loving it. My first day, my brother and I stayed on the beginner hill, but by the end we were flying down that little hill. Since then I have gone on to ski black-diamond slopes.

Why did I learn skiing quickly, while other people struggle greatly? Since then I have failed multiple times trying to “teach” friends how to ski. But then I have another friend, Keith, who learned how to ski even faster than me and was on black diamond slopes on his very first day!

How people learn is a whole field of study that fascinates me. Today, let me share a few of my thoughts about how learning works based on my own experience and from what I have picked up from reading about learning.

I think that there are many, many mini skills that are needed to accomplish any physical skill like skiing, swimming, or even walking. Having a toddler in the house makes that very clear. My son will try all sorts of variations on manipulating objects and repeat again and again. I believe that these games help him to build up a suite of mini skills that can eventually be drawn upon to learn skills like shooting a basket or doing stand up paddle boarding.

Perhaps getting stuck when attempting to learn a new skill is just a sign that one needs to learn some more of those mini skills. I had that experience with snowboarding which I tried for the first time with my friend Keith who was trying skiing. I had hoped that my experience with skiing would help me to pick up snowboarding. No luck! I kept on falling, and just felt very unstable on the board. I couldn’t turn or stop, so I had to fall. Sometimes the falls were awkward half-falls, and other times I would do a face plant into the icy snow. In the end, I gave up and switched my snowboard rental for a ski rental. Then Keith and I had a blast for the rest of the day racing down the advanced hills.

I didn’t try snowboarding again for over a decade, but when I did try snowboarding I picked it up right away and I loved it! I’m not sure how this happened, but I attribute it to learning how to do the RipStik (see the image below). A RipStick is like a skateboard but has only a single wheel at each end attached with swivel casters. To move you have to swivel you legs back and forth which somehow generates motion. It was definitely a challenge to learn but I learned it during a summer living with a group of my friends while going to Rutgers.

RipStik_Classic_BL_Product
The Razor RipStik

Somehow when I returned to snowboarding I felt like I was able to transfer some of the skills I had picked up from the RipStik. I felt much more comfortable balancing on the board. I could swing my legs and hips to enter in to turns and I could control how the edge slid through the snow.

When I tried snowboarding as a teenager, I wasn’t good at it, but when I tried it again over a decade later I was a ‘natural’. This experience and others like it, make me question the idea that some people are inherently good or bad at certain skills or sports. Yes, some people will learn skills much faster than others. But do not write off the slow learners! Once they master the necessary mini-skills they can catch up pretty quickly and perhaps they can experience the joy of flying down a mountain on a snowboard!

Do you have the experience of failing to learn something the first time and then picking it up years later? I’d be curious to hear about it. I’m also interested in learning more about what the scientific research says about how people learn.

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The first weekend of December, I took part in the 2019 Omega Center conference titled Love at the Heart of the Cosmos. The Omega Center is an organization dedicated to building a new understanding of religion and science. The conference explored the idea that God’s love permeates the physical world and that the physical world matters to God. I attend online, but despite the distance, was still able to feel the excitement of the speakers and the attendees. I felt a sense of finding my “home”, other people like me who care deeply about religion, but are searching to find an understanding of religion they can wholeheartedly believe in.

To give a sense of the conference, here are a few examples:

  • Matthew Fox talked about the importance of holding on to a sense of wonder. He argued that God is not static, so we should be open to updating our beliefs and doctrines. I found it particularly encouraging how he has worked on new forms of liturgy.
  • Kathleen Duffy , a Catholic sister and physicist, described the struggle of Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as he navigated writing about evolution and how it impacts his Catholic faith while facing censure from the Church. It is helpful to learn from Teilhard’s struggle, because we still face obstacles today. There is real resistance towards fully embracing evolution which necessarily causes dramatic changes to our understanding of God.
  • Ilia Delio, Catholic sister and theologian leading the Omega Center, spoke about the need for inner work, including contemplation, to contribute toward the future that God is calling us to. She described how technology is changing our very definition of what it means to be human, and the role of religion in this time of change.

Throughout the talks, the questions, and other events, there was a sense that we are on the edge of a big change in religion and society. In some way the current world religions will need to change to make sense of our changing world. There is a hope that a new religion or religions could emerge and help humanity face existential challenges.

I am just one person, and can not do much on my own, but I am part of something bigger. Maybe I can and we can, in some small way, contribute toward this epic story.

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Parallel parking is hard. Many of us avoid parallel parking if we can help it, and yet there are a select few that seem to be able to parallel park with ease. How do they do it? Over the past three years, I’ve been forced to parallel park a lot since our apartment doesn’t have enough parking in the lot. All the practice has helped me get a lot more comfortable about parallel parking, but it has also got me thinking. Parallel parking is an iterative process; somehow by going backwards and forwards and turning the steering wheel back and forth you can shift your car into a spot. I realized there must be an algorithm, a simple set of rules, that will always move the car smoothly into the spot. So I figured out a way to do it, and want to share it with you today. Maybe knowing the rules will help our parallel parking!

Shift car into spot by shifting back and forth according to an algorithm.

The basic problem with parallel parking is to shift your car into the spot, as shown in the sketch above. It would be easy if the front and back wheels could rotate 90 degrees, but with a normal car you have to deal with only the front wheels able to turn. Here is an algorithm I found for parallel parking:

  1. Start with car lined up with front of spot (not optimal but easier to understand the algorithm).
  2. Turn wheel right and reverse about half the length of the spot.
  3. Turn wheel left and reverse to the end of the spot. The car should be straightened out.
  4. Turn wheel right and go forward about half the length of the spot.
  5. Turn wheel left and go forward to end.
  6. Repeat until car is close enough to curb.
The car tires draw out concentric circles as the car turns.

As I was figuring out how to sketch the process of a car parallel parking, I actually learned something about car steering. It turns out that the front wheels do not point exactly in the same direction during a turn. Instead they follow the Ackermann condition so that every wheel draws out a circle with the same center point, as shown in the sketch above. With this insight, I was able to trace out the motion of the car as it parallel parks. The images below break down the process:

  • Car about to park in spot
    Line up car with open spot.

So if you trust my drawings, following these steps solves the parallel parking problem. Give it a shot! It is a little unnatural at first following a series of steps, but is nice once you get the hang of it. I like knowing that I can always shift the car where I want it just by going forwards and backwards.

To really learn something, I think it’s important to mess around and try things. I played around with making the turns uneven and found that this can cause the car to be crooked or straighten it out after I make a mistake. The slides below explore how this works.

  • The tracks of the back tires make nice symmetric curves if you follow this parallel parking algorithm.

Thanks for reading my thoughts into how parallel parking works. I hope it was helpful and interesting. Part of my inspiration was a nice article I read about visualizing algorithms. Please let me know if you have and questions or comments!

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I didn’t know how RSS worked for a long time. It’s too bad because RSS is a great way to follow websites that you like. It stands for Real Simple Syndication (see wiki article for more info) and is a way for websites to create feeds of their content that users can subscribe to. This is one of those cases where a little barrier can be enough to block adoption. I wanted to share with you how RSS works in case you also are wondering how those little broadcast symbols work.

Following a website or blog on social media is pretty straightforward; you just click on the button for Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc. You can achieve the same thing with RSS, but you need to know a couple things first. If you just click on the button you might be asked to open a text file with a bunch of code in it.

rssText

That’s what I did, which is wrong. That code is actually a computer readable version of the latest posts from the website. Instead, you copy the link (right click and press “Copy link location”), and then you subscribe to that link in your RSS reader. But wait, I also had no idea what an RSS reader was. It turns out an RSS reader is just an app that automatically reads a website’s RSS feed and pulls the latest posts and updates from the websites that you follow. I’m using Inoreader right now which allows me to follow several blogs all in one place. Here’s a screenshot from my phone:

Screenshot_20190811-162619_Inoreader

If you want to start following websites outside of social media (and without spamming your email inbox) then sign up for a RSS reader. There are a bunch of options with readers, Feedly is a popular one. Many are free and you always can switch later if you realize that another has features that you like.

I’ll end by noting that you may already be using RSS without knowing it. iTunes or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) are essentially readers for podcasts that are broadcasted using RSS! So if you want to create a podcast you just need to create an RSS feed and connect it to iTunes (see this tutorial for example).

I’m planning on looking into how I can use RSS more on this site. I hope you enjoy RSS too. May it help you break free of the social media silos and find the content you like.