User:LokiClock: Difference between revisions

I like learning and thinking about languages. I am willing to attempt communication in any language I'm learning, but you know what skill level to expect.

Old Norse

I have most of the grammar of Old Norse memorized, but application of much of it remains unpracticed. I have chosen to learn a general c. 11th-12th century Icelandic dialect. In other words, Norse with all the Ęs, U̇s and Ǫ́s. Vocabulary needs work, but then it always does.

I know many of the more common scribal abbreviations. As for runes, I'm mostly familiar with the Medieval ones, but can read Younger Futhark just fine. Not much knowledge either way of variant letterforms, and I've not yet learned the calendar.

I study the reconstructed canIPA phonology and tonology presented by Luciano Canepari, with the addition of Ø̨. I have not yet analyzed spectrograms of my Norse speech to determine how much they agree with the hypothetical phones given.

Also, I may or may not enjoy adding information about Old Norse to Wikipedia.

		The Original Barnstar
		I award LokiClock this barnstar for his enthusiastic contributions to articles on the Old Norse language. Haukur (talk) 20:24, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

In progress

Icelandic - I speak with folk and try to pass on the icewiki. I began learning the language between 12/9 and 12/13/09.
German - College is useful.
Latin - I have consumed Cambridge Latin Course Unit 1. It takes much time and research to compose each thought.
Japanese - Can read Hiragana and Katakana, a few handfuls of Kanji, some pronunciation, and very little of the actual grammar yet.
Other North Germanic - I have hazy knowledge of the phonologies and grammars. For each language, I can read on a rudimentary to basic level. I get the plot and some subtleties of movies if I never look at the subtitles, and regularly notice meanings lost in translation.
Hungarian - A year or two back, I learned a bit of the phonology and a couple words after considering a second language. I didn't last long, but the practice in learning the phonology has had lasting benefits. The language still interests me, but the tutorials don't. If anyone knows of some introductory material that isn't culturally disinfected, let me know.

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 * Other North Germanic - I have hazy knowledge of the phonologies and grammars. For each language, I can read on a rudimentary to basic level. I get the plot and some subtleties of movies if I never look at the subtitles, and regularly notice meanings lost in translation.
 * Hungarian - A year or two back, I learned a bit of the phonology and a couple words after considering a second language. I didn't last long, but the practice in learning the phonology has had lasting benefits. The language still interests me, but the tutorials don't. If anyone knows of some introductory material that isn't [[Fungicide|culturally disinfected]], let me know.
-==Math==
-It's problematic to learn math on Wikipedia. Working with the structure of an encyclopedia article, I try to identify the ways in which certain articles are lacking or proficient. My main concern is a lack of subject neighborhood for most articles - bigger pictures must be assembled by exploring linked articles until subjects are mentioned with sufficient correlation to suggest a [[semantic field]] to the reader, e.g. {isomorphism, bijective function}, {map, function, operator}, {image, domain, codomain, →}, {[[tensor]], [[vector]], [[dual vector]], [[covariance and contravariance of vectors]], [[tensor field]], [[vector field]], [[one-form]], [[Differential form#Intrinsic definitions|differential 1-form]] (by way of [[Gradient#Differential or (exterior) derivative|gradient]]), [[linear functional]], [[Linear map#Change of basis|linear map]]}. Secondly, to see why conclusions follow from the nature of another subject, each subject must be well-enough known already to know where the property of the object needed for the connection is located within an article.
-These problems are two results of the information architecture of an article. Math knowledge is a web of largely atomic subjects, interconnecting at all scales (general object to class of object, inside and across fields), and the relevance of facts aside any other fact is subjective. Articles are not a [[Semantic web|tree of information]], but I believe that by [[Flatfile|flatfiling]] cross-sections of relationships, the argument structure can approximate a web structure by exposing each benefit of a tree interface that's deemed relevant. Wikipedia's category architecture implies its point of view for relevance of benefits and thus which facts end up appearing together. So Wikipedia's capable of behaving nicely, but the slices are chosen without a tree model allowing alternative slicing schemes to be noticed.
-''Opinions on [[Unimodular lattice]]<sup>[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Unimodular_lattice&oldid=450311268 (rev @ wr)]</sup>:'' This article is good for learning in special ways. 1a) It defines & highlights all technical terms required to mention variations that are available for all objects of the subject's type (lattice), and to broach the connections to other subjects. Its applications section connects it to subjects outside of the article, showing the neighborhood of the subject in the mathematical world. 1b) The definitions support this subject's end of a connection, and if the subject being connected does likewise, a reader gets the type of statement being made without specialty external to Wikipedia. For example, if ''odd'' and ''even'' were not first shown to be specific types of Unimodular lattice, the reader would not understand that "this almost determines the manifold" is resolved (qualified) by saying the manifold is determined for one type, and for other types there is a choice. 2) By speaking of the rarity of objects with certain properties, it qualifies the significance of the terms to people working in the subject who attempt to find examples of objects with certain properties.
-''A beautiful bit from [[Seesaw mechanism]]<sup>[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Seesaw_mechanism&oldid=448746464 (rev @ wr)]</sup>:''
-"The mathematics behind the seesaw mechanism is the following fact: the 2×2 [[Matrix (mathematics)|matrix]]
-:<math>A = \begin{pmatrix}0&M\\M&B\end{pmatrix} \text{,}</math>
-where <math>B</math> is much larger than <math>M</math>, has the following [[eigenvalue]]s:
-:<math>\lambda_\pm = \frac{B\pm \sqrt{B^2+4M^2}}{2} \text{.}</math>
-The larger eigenvalue is approximately equal to <math>B</math> while the smaller eigenvalue is approximately equal to
-:<math>\lambda_- \approx -\frac{M^2}B.</math>
-Therefore, ''M'' is the [[geometric mean]] of ''B'' and ''λ''<sub>−</sub>, up to the sign. In other words, the [[determinant]] equals {{nowrap|''λ''<sub>+</sub>''λ''<sub>−</sub> {{=}} −''M''<sup>2</sup>}}. If one of the eigenvalues "goes up", the other "goes down", and vice versa. This is the reason why the name [[seesaw]] was given to the mechanism."