Educate Yourself

The Internets are full of sites where you can learn interesting facts, news, and things maybe you didn't want to know.  A growing trend on the Internet has been in the form of online education.  Khan Academy paved the way for may who wanted to expand their education horizon without spending an arm and a leg.  Each month more services and sites become available.  I've collected a partial list of some of the sites I've learned about in the past few months.  Feel free to add your favorite sites in the comments.

• New Charter University - Accreddited online courses (mostly Business for now)
• ThinkTutorial - Free Computer Tutorials and Lessons
• mybringback - Programming & Science videos
• TED - Ideas worth spreading
• KhanAcademy - Science/Math tutorials
• ThinkingAllowed - Thought-provoking videos
• CS50.tv - OpenCourseware - Harvard Computer Science 50
• Open Yale Courses - OpenCourseware - Yale
• Library.nu - eBook database
• MIT - Free Online Course Material - Lectures, Assignments, Projects, Media
• Stanford University - Online course lectures, various subjects
• University of Reddit - Learn & study with your fellow Redditors
• ReadPrint - Online books
• Udacity - Computer Science related courses
• Academic Earth - Online Academic Video Lectures
• Instructables - Makes, How To, and DIY
• HowCast - Instructional Videos
• TopDocumentaryFilms - Watch free documentaries online
• DocumentaryHeaven - Watch free documentaries online
• CodeAcademy – Learn how to code
• HTMLdog – Learn HTML and CSS
• CosmoLearning – Educational website for students and teachers covering all topics

On the Beach

In celebration of the second day in a row with a heat index of over 100, here's a bit of the beach!  See the products featured in this collection on Artfire.

Follow the Ball

In which I make my first video about a ball, doing things that a ball likes to do with it's other ball friends.

Finding Toney

Sometimes I am the Queen of sidetracking..  That's partly why I start much of my writing with a pencil and a pad of paper - too many things to distract me on the Internets.  There's always the temptation to see what's on the front page of Reddit.

But I digress.  (See?  Even without the Internet, I get sidetracked.)  One of the aspects of my sidetracking carries over to researching genealogy.  More than once, I've found myself exploring not just direct ancestors but their siblings, their wives, and eventually their great grandchildren who lived just this past century.  Information that isn't necessarily critical to my family tree - but very interesting nevertheless.

So one day I focused on the family of one if my paternal great grandfathers, Benjamin Jackson, Jr.:

I knew some things about his family.  I was also familiar with many, many mistakes about his family on Ancestry.  Unfortunately, while Ancestry is great at disseminating genealogical information, the website also great at disseminating plenty of completely erroneous genealogical information.  Benjamin Jackson Jr. is listed as his own grandfather on far too many public trees (do people ever even check what they copy & paste onto their trees??).

One of the things I learned about Benjamin was the name of his mother.  I already thought that I knew her name was Lorena Toney Jackson up until I found a scanned copy of his death certificate.  Poor Benjamin had died in his forties from tuberculosis.  His father answered the particulars for his death certificate including the mother's name which was America Coleman not Lorena.  It turns out that Benjamin Sr. married America first and they had two children before she died sometime before 1870.

As I had the opportunity, I explored more on Benjamin Jr.'s siblings and half siblings.  Toney Beauregard Jackson, the baby of the family, was the last sibling I focused on and the one that I found the most information.

Ancestry's search tends to bring back everything but the kitchen sink.  I figured with a name like Toney, I'd be seeing every Tony and Anthony on the east coast returned in searches.  So instead of starting with Ancestry, I Googled Toney instead; not really expecting anything except maybe an obituary.  Toney Beauregard Jackson didn't return any hits to speak of.  But Toney B Jackson had a scholarship fund established in his name at the Citadel, a South Carolina military college.

Not one week before, I had the opportunity to see a college portrait of my father's brother - in his Citadel uniform.  This was getting exciting.

So ok, time for that Ancestry search.  Several pages into it was a Yearbook picture with more than a passing resemblance to my father and wearing a now familiar uniform.  Hello Toney.

Finding a photo on Ancestry, other than a headstone or a photocopy of a census page, is actually an uncommon experience for me.  It's funny how I'd always mentioned the Glover resemblance (something with the eyes and eyebrows) that people could see in my family.  Glover, because I always associated it with my father and therefore "Glovers".  Looking at Toney though made me realize the obvious fallacy of that.  It was the Jackson resemblance all along.

Featured Product: Earth Day In Distress

Earth Day in Distress started with a photograph taken in the mountains of Western Maryland.  Using various techniques and brushes in Photoshop, I gave the photo a more washed-out and rough feel.  This digital print is an outer reflection of inner turmoil; the contradiction of nature's beauty being overshadowed by the pollution threatening our environment.

I've never understood how business and industrialization could be so important as to put our very existence on the chopping block.  Yet year by year, it feels like we as a species are putting ourselves closer to a point of no return.  You can purchase Earth Day in Distress in my Artfire store.

Art's famous on the Internet

I thought his face looked familiar when I saw a post on BoingBoing about this video.  Watching the video, I realized who it was; that cool/funny dude who teaches Yoga over at my gym!  The first class at the gym that my mother-in-law and I went to was his class - yoga for regular guys and gals.  Art is funny as hell, cracking jokes, making comments, "SEVENTEEN!!!" he'd have the class holler.  "Seventeen years since I killed someone!"  This Gulf War veteran has his own way of coping with those memories.  Congrats Art for becoming Internet famous and making the front page of BoingBoing.

Life-Changing books you should read & why they are life-changing

Interesting thread on Reddit so far.

The Bible.
Not for any religious reason, but because it underpins so much of Western art, culture, and literature.  If you have not read it, you will miss out an awful lot.


1984.
Not necessarily because I believe it will happen (in that exact way), but more because it rings to attention many problems that are appearing/being revealed in modern society.  Specifically, the many ills, laws and other regulations inserted by states in many parts of the Western world.


The Republic by Plato.

It lays down so many of the reasons we have now for why we do things. You just have to read it if you're in anyway interested in any sort of academic pursuit.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

Brilliant, unsettling and impossible to put down.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. 

Both are war related (WWII and Vietnam, respectively) but they are so beautiful, deep, touching and really give a deeper look into war and it's effects on people, especially the soldiers fighting it.

The prose is enthralling, compelling and if you don't cry in at least one part of either book, or at least have it make you contemplate life and humanity, then I don't know what to tell you.

Siddhartha. 

Each time I read it I learn something new or gain a new vantage point. I grew up catholic and before this book, I had NO exposure to the concept of no-self. I literally never had anyone in my life ever even hint about such a concept. Looking back on how much change has entered my life since then, I consider reading that book to be my "opening the wardrobe to Narnia" moment.

How to Win Friends and Influence People.

The reason why this different than your standard fare of self-help book and why it has withstood the test of time is that unlike other self help books, it isn't a simple "read this and it will change your life instantly."

Rather it is a book delineating a regimen for slow, incremental change that requires time to implement, and constant review (the author encourages constant re-reading of chapters.)

But once it is implemented, your life will change, and your social interactions and career will literally change, just not overnight.

Read the full thread here.