491–500 of 579 posts
Learning Sanskrit. I have spent the last few years learning it and it's been tremendously rewarding. Sanskrit is a beautiful language. Learning it is a great mental challenge and gives great satisfaction (to me). Before learning Sanskrit I had never really pursued a hobby this seriously. Since I have been doing this I no longer feel like a machine who just goes to work, eats and sleeps. Before this, I used to feel gr…
कुत्र पठसि संस्कृतम्?
Think about WHO AM I. I think this is the most important question one can have for his entire life. I am 28, but I have spent about 15 years to think about who am I? Where am I come from? Where will I go? And gradually, I get clearer and clearer about it. And knowing who am I is the greatest source of happiness, strength and calmness. If you also do this, I think you may understand. You will have small enlightment da…
Check out business school application essays. They demand deep reflection.
SQL. Ultimately a software company is a business, run by business people who have to solve business problems. Often to do that they come up with questions which need to be answered by ad-hoc (written on the fly for one purpose) SQL queries. Having that ability, to answer arbitrary questions FAST will elevate your status in the minds of managers and business people.
At the starting point of my poetic journey, I was ignorant of the genre, very opposed to it (for I couldn’t make the sense out of it) and arrogantly sure that poetry was mostly a scam.
Fortunately for me, a teacher of mine at college had this whole class around Portuguese poets. We had to read them for each other and explain the meaning, while he provided solid interpretations to the texts we were working on.
Thinking I had something in me clearly broken for I could not make the sense of any of the readings we were assigned, I got myself to go the library, picked up one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms to read, and gave myself the task of reading at least a poem a day, trying to make whatever sense I could make out of it — whatever long it took for me to read the whole book. Also, if poetry was supposed to be this highly aesthetic experience, I would have to read the poem (or poems) out loud. And that I did.
When I had finished Pessoa’s book, I felt something was changing in me. Most of the poems still sounded nonsensical, but the ones that worked, the ones I felt I got a sense out of it, really made me feel that I was heading somewhere. So I drudged along.
After the finishing the first book (after a month or two), I picked up another. This time one Alberto Caeiro, one of Pessoa’s most beloved heteronyms. I can’t exactly pinpoint where the magic happened, but, suddenly, I was no longer the same self that started that journey. Now I was not reading out of obligation, but reading as a necessity. Poetry had gone under my skin, and I was starting to get this huge crave to read more and more poetic works.
To make a long story a bit shorter, nowadays I’m an avid reader of poetry, having read most of the great poets of Portuguese literature. I find particularly at home in the poetic genre and I’m even trying for a masters degree in philosophy working on... a poet!
This to me was the thing that I felt most accomplished by putting myself to master it. Looking back to how I felt before; knowing what I now know about poetry, my thoughts are the exact opposite of what they were in regards to poetry. Now I cannot even imagine how I managed to live my whole life at that point without giving poetry a try.
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I was just going to post this, but you where faster;) So yes: I am also very thankful that I had the opportunity to learn a social couple dance (with 'social' meaning non-competitive and without fixed dance-partners) The first lessons were hard and sometimes frustrating when you don't make progress as fast as you want to. But for me it paid out and changed my life. Today I go dancing twice or more a week. No matter h…
Argentine tango : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRQ1T5zKTJ4
My case: reading poetry. At the starting point of my poetic journey, I was ignorant of the genre, very opposed to it (for I couldn’t make the sense out of it) and arrogantly sure that poetry was mostly a scam. Fortunately for me, a teacher of mine at college had this whole class around Portuguese poets. We had to read them for each other and explain the meaning, while he provided solid interpretations to the texts we…
Learning to type - Enhanced productivity https://hkelkar.com/2014/03/02/learn-to-type-before-you-lear...
Writing a blog has been extremely rewarding. It takes effort to Blog Over the years I published a book based on the blog.
Understanding Compounding.
Learning Python for fun. Learning Python was really the stepping stone to learning other interesting things.
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Imagine you would have had to go your path with just books, without the great math teacher you mention. It would have been possible, but much harder. Now imagine you have 5 or 10 great teachers, with expertise in different areas of CS. Wouldn't that also have made it possible for you to learn much faster, or learn more in the same time? And now imagine, you meet a few like-minded CS students, and 'try to implement so…
This may well be locale-dependent, but the great things you describe - I can indeed only imagine. I did my best to search for like-minded CS students, did my best to seek great teachers. I tried for nearly 2 years - and failed miserably. The handful of students - out of 150 on the year - I could talk and maybe team up with were disappearing one after another, hired by this or that company. The professors were all old…
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> If you really don't want to mess around I think swimming is the way to go. I have been plauged by muscular/ligament issues too. I tried swimming and ended up hurting my rotator cuff, now I can't do repetitive overhead activities :\.
I mean.. if it's really that bad you can always walk back and forth in the pool. I really do that sometimes.
I am too young for this shit :( .
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> Far less chances of getting injuries with bodyweight exercises I found no evidence for this, arguments seems to boil down to an "appeal to nature". Many variations of bodyweight exercices are far from healthy for tendons (single arm push ups or single arm pull ups for example), even basic push ups are harder on the shoulders than dumbbell bench press. If you keep the rep range above 15-20 the risk of injury is pret…
>> Far less chances of getting injuries with bodyweight exercises > I found no evidence for this, From Wikipedia: """ Bodyweight exercises have a far lower risk of injury compared to using free weights and machines due to the absence of an external load that is placing strain on the muscles that they may or may not be able to deal with. However, the lower risk of injury is only provided that the athlete/trainee is pr…