iammyownteacher

[iammyownteacher]

“Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars.”

— Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

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[iammyownteacher]

[iammyownteacher]

Why toothaches tend to be linked to headaches.

[iammyownteacher]

so metropolitan museum of art has a register of books they’ve published that are out of print and that you can download for free! they’re mostly books on art, archeology, architecture, fashion and history and i just think that’s super useful and interesting so i wanted to share! you can find all of the books available here!

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Public School Physiology and Temperance, 1893

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Diagram showing the distribution of the facial nerve to the face, 1889

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Joel Dorman Steele, Hygienic Physiology, ca. 1901

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Winfield S. Hall, Elementary Anatomy Physiology and Hygiene for Higher Grammer Grades, ca. 1911

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Dodo, General guide to the exhibition halls of the American Museum of Natural History, 1911

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Skeletons of horse and man, General guide to the exhibition halls of the American Museum of Natural History, 1911

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Alvin Davison, The Human Body and Health Revised, 1908

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[iammyownteacher]

“There is a certain irony here, because many of the first werewolves to be outed in society from the 16th through the 18th centuries were actually women. Just as our American ancestors had their Salem Witch Trials, Europe had its Werewolf Trials, and a large number of the so-called “werewolves” tortured and burned at the stake were female. […] In the 17th-century werewolf trials of Estonia, women were about 150 percent more likely to be accused of lycanthropy; however, they were about 100 percent less likely to be remembered for it.”

“Here’s also a pronounced lack of female werewolves in popular culture. Their near absence in literature and film is explained away by various fancies: they’re sterile, an aberration, or—most galling of all—they don’t even exist.Their omission from popular culture does one thing very effectively: It prevents us, and men especially, from being confronted by hairy, ugly, uncontrollable women. Shapeshifting women in fantasy stories tend to transform into animals that we consider feminine, such as cats or birds, which are pretty and dainty, and occasionally slick and wicked serpents. But because the werewolf represents traits that are accepted as masculine—strength, large size, violence, and hirsutism—we tend to think of the werewolf as being naturally male. The female werewolf is disturbing because she entirely breaks the rules of femininity.”

— Julia Oldham, Why Are There No Great Female Werewolves?

[iammyownteacher]

Mongolians are cool because they’ve merged their traditional and modern ways of life so rather than having poverty due to losing all their important skills they just live in their yurts with their cows and 827474874mbs internet

[iammyownteacher]

What is “Intent?”

There are two principal aspects to assessing a fencing action - the quantitative (was a hit made) and the qualitative (was the hit good?).

It is a matter of ongoing grief for many fencers when their hits are not recognised on the opponent. Many believe more “objective” measures, such as applying chalk to the blade to leave a mark on the opponent when they are struck, or electric scoring methods, would relieve this problem.

We need to develop beyond the mentality that the physical occurence of a touch is the most useful thing in determining the outcome of a fencing exchange. To this end, more “objective” measures of the touch might prove extremely successful - finally people will stop arguing over what they believe they saw, and the focus can rest where it should be… On the decision making which lead to that point.

A fencing match is not a simulation of a real fight. It is an assessment of the decision making capabilities of a fencer. For example, in the chaos of a real fight, deliberately making a “double-hit” can very well be a risk which pays off for an individual. Objectively, we may well have survived an impalement and gained the advantage of cleaving the opponent’s head in half. But it is not a very intelligent decision to make, so we never reward that decision in a fencing match.

And that is what intent really is - decision making. It’s not often that we explain this - it is usually learned by example, with a junior referee observing a poor strike, hearing the senior referee call the action lacking in intent, and wrongly learn that the strike was not “hard” enough.

We ought to look to reward intentional actions. If a fencer #1 scores a thrust in opposition on her opponent, and the opponent #2’s blade slumps down on the fencer’s hands, this action lacks intentionality. It isn’t the point that the strike wasn’t “hard” enough - it’s that the action of #2 was not intentional. The thrust in opposition may not have been made perfectly - which is something a ruleset or training paradigm may or may not choose to recognise, but this was certainly not due to the actions of fencer #2, whos decision making was barely evident.

A strike landing stoutly can be indicative of intent, but it is certainly not the same thing as intent. To determine the intent of an attack, we would be better off asking the question: What was the fencer trying to do, and did they achieve this? If a fencer blindly undulates their weapon out in front of them, there is a decent chance it might touch part of their opponent. However, we should not reward it as an achievement on the part of that fencer.

We ought to do what we can to correct this. Not just referees, but every fencer needs to understand the meaning of the word intent. Nobody should be incentivised to hit harder to make their point. From a sporting perspective, we would also gain by focusing more on decision making than the simple observation of touch-or-no-touch.

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From The Mystery of Marlborough House, 1866.

It’s been said that “skeletons symbolize everyone’s condition in the world, where we are all left abandoned and starving, longing desperately for union with and nourishment from heaven and earth”: see my skeletons gallery.

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