Hegel / Google / Manual
So I’m moving house again. I was going through a pile of lecture notes and found something I’d made to help me revise Hegel:
I thought this was very funny.
Later, I start surfing and I come across the fact that Google have a new browser in the pipeline – Chrome. Of course I check it out immediately. But more excitingly, they’ve commissioned a comic explaining how the whole thing works.
It’s not that great visually, but surely people are starting to see that the comic form is superior? Who would sit and read a thirty-eight page book on asynchronous web browsers who was not a programmer or geek? But when the information is presented as a series of images, with the main chunks broken down and illustrated, almost anything is fun to learn. In preparation for next term I’ve been reading Victorian literature and found that whilst both leave a lot to be desired, my edition of Oliver Twist with the original drawings by George Cruikshank was so much more enjoyable; there was something to look at! And don’t get me wrong – a page of beautiful prose is a magnificent thing, but over and over people are saying that images + text = a strange harmony conducive to greater mental retention.
(I think the chapter concerning Fagin’s death is excellent even without the images – but the eyes in this drawing..!)
I also found the results of my Morrisby Profile. It’s a little like an IQ test, except it measures your learning style and attempts to tell you what kind of employment you’d like in the future. The scores are shown as bars which taper in to a wedge – I was high or higher than average for everything, but my personality and confidence score was literally off the scale. This I did not remember or expect. Hilariously, another chart showed that my abilities were considerably lower than my self-esteem. I started to doubt the accuracy of the test when it read something along the lines of ‘you probably wouldn’t enjoy a career in creative or original writing.’
Otherwise:
- Can you tell a story in textures?
- I quit my job! (My manager was happy to let me go, which is the first encounter I’ve had with the credit crunch)
- The scabs from my bike crash are very satisfying.
- Greenwich is beautiful.
- I’m reading: ‘Inventing The Victorians‘ by Matthew Sweet & ‘The Lost Stradivarius’ by John Mead Falkner
- I’m increasingly suspicious of the news and its tendency to throw at me strange new political figures (Sarah Palin)
