PiSquared Blog
Blog about geeky stuff, computers, physics and life.
Tag learning
Morse
Tags: English, learningCreated on Thu, 25 Feb 2021
Yesterday, out of nowhere, I decided to try to learn Morse code.
In general, I hate learning languages - I can express something already in one language and learning how to do that in another seems useless with very little added benefit.
But Morse is a different type of language - it's a different communication medium, an almost universal human-binary protocol that can be communicated through timings in different mediums including wires, light or sound.
It can be argued that is is actually a tertiary protocol because it actually uses 3 types of signals - Dots are short signals, dashes are longer ones (3 times as long by standard) but then you also put silence between the letters (which is by standard the length of a dash or 3 beats). However if we think in binary representations - i.e. high and low set of signal - then a dot is a 1, a dash is a 111 and silence depends on where it should be. A silence between individual dots and dashes is a single 0. So for example le
AFTER ENTER - Episode 2 - Pressing!
Tags: English, technology, projects, learningCreated on Fri, 20 Nov 2015
The story so far:
Hi again. Last time we spoke about what happens before a search engine like Google has to accomplish before doing a search through billions of documents that make the Internet. Today we are starting our journey by doing a real search.
Our particular search will be the age old question that every child asks and every adult is ashamed to not know the answer:
Why is the sky blue?
How many ways can you think of doing that search? If you are on a phone or have a smartwatch you can say “OK Google, (hear a small bleep) why is the sky blue?”. Or you can tap on your home screen box and type with the keyboard that appears on the screen. If you are at home and have a laptop on your… well, lap… you could type on your keyboard.
So which one was it for you? This interaction is called interfacing. The word interface is used frequently and interchangeab
...moreWhy I got vaccinated? (part 1)
Tags: English, opinions, essays, personal, learning, lifeCreated on Fri, 04 Jun 2021
Edit: see part 2: what is True and part 3 - what would convince me NOT to vaccinate for progress on opinions in this article.
TL;DR: Because I care about myself, my parents and friends and I believe vaccination is the best way to protect myself and them, in order to resume any kind of "normality". I believe the risk of vaccination outweights the risk of not vaccinating, I trust the process of vaccination approval and testing by the various national and supra-national organizations, I trust the scientists and (even though I don't have to) I understood the relative simplicity of the idea of the vaccine and immune response generated by it. I find it unlikely that there is a larger conspiratorial picture for control, even if the vaccine has not naturally occured but it turns out it has been produced artifically on purpose for some geo-game or by accident by l
...moreLearning through participation as the rule rather than the exception
Tags: English, opinions, essays, university, learningCreated on Wed, 18 Feb 2015
School has never been only about learning stuff.
For few years I believed it’s the things happening in the breaks that matter. Relationships, doing stupid things and talking about crazy ideas. But that’s not completely true. I believed that because just my last memories from school are that things in the break matter. But it didn’t use to be the case. I loved learning things when I was younger.
Oh my, I would read like crazy - Encyclopedias, science books, I would draw the planets of the cosmos and remember the map of Europe. For 16 years of education, school and later University were trying really, really hard to kill this in me. My love and passions, my curiosities. I (almost completely) stopped going to school in the last couple of years. I was having my own projects and I didn’t care about the things in the breaks so nothing could keep me there. There were a few subjects like Physics that were interesting to me but by the last couple of years I started slowly falling out of
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