Aston J


Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Richard Dawkins letter to his 10 year old daughter

Posted on: September 2nd, 2011 by AstonJ No Comments

This letter was written by Richard Dawkins, and given to his daughter when she turned 10. Richard Dawkins is a respected scientist and author.

To my dearest daughter,

Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the Sun and very far away? And how do we know that the Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the Sun?

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Best way to learn/read/study

Posted on: May 3rd, 2011 by AstonJ 3 Comments

Saw this mentioned on Stack Exchange earlier (via @ryanbigg) and as it was a post I was going to be doing anyway (to accompany a forthcoming feature, ‘Best way to learn Ruby & Rails) I thought I’d go ahead and do it now.

Ok lets get started… but first it should go without saying that the ‘best’ way to learn is whatever works for you – these are just a number of tips that I find help me. Maybe they’ll help you too.

1. Learn something you’re interested in!

This one’s easy. If your heart’s not in it, forget it. We learn best when we have an interest in the topic. Of course our reasons for learning something may vary – you might want to learn something so you don’t have to pay someone else to do it, or, because you genuinely like/love whatever it is you are learning. The more you like it, the more likely you are to master it.

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