This handbook teaches you how to learn any language on your own, in the language’s home turf, by teaching a native speaker to be your teacher.
The trick is to instruct your local agent to teach you something he/she is hardly aware of — the structure of their language. You will supply the plan and so are teaching yourself through them. Comprende? It’s done slowly, naturally, and playfully - the way you learned English. Your assistant doesn’t even have to speak your language.
You begin using a few easy words, trying to make as many mistakes as you possibly can, entertaining the folks in the marketplace or anywhere else they’ll put up with your blabberings. Then you systematically add additional words in steady daily use, guiding your guide in what you want to learn next. This well-tested method was devised by missionaries trying to learn languages lacking scripts, courses, or guidebooks, and works great for dialects, or indeed any language you want to learn.
The text of this workbook shows you how to construct your own exercises that fit the language you are after and later how to discover its grammar by yourself. The goal is multiculturalism, inseparable from multilingualism. Like realizing that you don’t need a degree in anything to build your own house, learning that you can become fluent in another language without a course or classroom is deliciously radical.
If you like this approach check out other online texts by missionary linguists which take the same approach of enabling an intermediate to become your language teacher.
This DIY process works best on location, rather than before you arrive.
– KK
Language Acquisition Made Practical
E. Thomas Brewster and Elizabeth Brewster
1976 (1998 printing); 384 pp.
Available from Amazon
or from Lingua House
Author’s website:
Lingua House
135 North Oakland
Pasadena, CA 91182
818/584-5276
There’s more of the same approach (different book) here at SIL, also a language site for missionaries.
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Elance is a global marketplace for freelancers. You post a job you want done, and freelancers around the world will bid on it in a matter of hours. Once the price and deadline are agreed upon, the work will be delivered to you very rapidly. Because of its global nature, your costs may be very low.
Elance has a pool of 135,000 pros expert in programming, design, writing, and legal matters. People use them to design a logo, create marketing materials, tweak a database, code a website, create an iPhone app. I’ve used Elance three times now and have had fantastic results. For instance recently I had to move 3,000 images from Cool Tools’ old Moveable Type database to a new one in a very hairy non-trivial manner. Estimates from US shops for writing the necessary script went as high ,000 and would take months from specs to testing. We went on Elance, got a bid for 0 to do it manually (without scripts) and it was done perfectly in a week. You could start a company with them. In fact Kevin Rose hired an Elancer to code the first version of the now-popular website Digg.
Elance’s escrow service holds the payment and protects both the work provider and you the employer. The site provides status updates on work done, and plenty of communication between the parties. Workers must pass a competency test to qualify to be listed. Some freelancers can also pass expertise tests in a mild form of certification, say for working on java or ajax, etc. Elance freelancers did about million of work last year and less than 1% of the jobs had any kind of dispute, and most of those were self-resolved by the fact that the entire transaction correspondence is logged.
While I went to Elance for cheap labor, others go to it to get jobs done in a hurry, or to find expertise that they can’t find locally. (Fifty percent of Elancers live in North America.) If you have work, and you know what you want, this is a great service.
The real trick in using Elance, or its competitors RentACoder, GetAFreelancer and oDesk (which I have not used) and Guru (which I have used with satisfaction) is in being able to specify the deliverable you want without spending more time that it would take to do the project itself. This kind of outsourcing is best for bite-sized chunks of work. The more precise you can detail your job the better that Elance or the others will work for you. It’s not good for consulting, hand-holding, or mind-changing assignments. But it can be cheap enough that you can try lots of things. It costs you nothing to post a job on Elance. (The winning provider will pay a 5-10% fee to Elance.) You can pay with PayPal.
And it is not just for coders. I hired a guy to run ethernet cable in our home, and others have found a videographer for their wedding, or a translator for their manual, etc. Like any remote relationship, you get what you put into it. Elance, Guru and GetaFreelancer use escrows, which protect you (and the worker). Elance has open bidding, GetAFreelancer has the option of closed bidding. To date, Elance is the marketplace that seems to have the most action so that is why I use them.
It’s a great tool when you need to hire expertise.
– KK
Elance
Related Entries: Hiring Smart!
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This cell phone booster will increase your signal strength by one or two bars. If your home or office has dismal cell phone coverage, as mine does, this booster can make a difference. Often a spot outside your building, or on top of your building will have better coverage. This device picks up the signal from a small stick-like antenna and relays it via a cable to a book-size station where you want the signal. Using this in my studio I can now get two bars where before I had none. The zBoost is the least expensive signal repeater I could find.
A few important caveats. This is not a miracle machine; if you have no bars outside, there is no signal to amplify, so you will still have none inside. Also, the antenna and relay station need to be separated by a wall or ceiling or several rooms so that you do not simply create a feedback loop where the antenna is recirculating the stations emissions, creating a useless squelch. Lastly, the radius of boosted signal is small. It can serve a large room, or maybe a few small rooms. In my experience it will not fill a home, or office with a boosted signal. It is best to think of this as providing a boost to a room. To cover a large area you’ll need more than one, but I don’t have any experience in what happens with overlapping coverage.
I have the dual spectrum variety of EZBooster, which covers most carriers, in part as a service to visitors. I also found that finding the optimal location for the antenna is not obvisous or trivial. Placement makes a huge difference; it’s worth trying all kinds of positions. Sometimes attics and corners of rooms will work, and sometimes near windows are NOT better. There’s a 50-foot interconnecting white coaxil cable which should be long enough, but can be ugly.
For years I’ve tried to get my local cell phone companies to boost the signal in our neighborhood, but with no success. This modest gadget at least gives me coverage in my home office.
– KK
Wi-Ex ZBoost YX 510
0
Avialable from Amazon
Manufactured by Repeater Store
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Do high-priced optics really make much difference in a pair of binoculars? Yes. Great optics create a very bright image within a large viewing area, so that if feels as if you are looking through a magic window rather than squinting through a tiny peephole. Your eyes scan the scope easily, as if there were no glass in front of them — except everything is closer. You can watch longer, in dimmer light, without fatigue, which is what you want for birding, sporting, or boating. If great optics are squeezed into a lightweight waterproof small object you can hold this magic window longer without the shakes. In short, superior optics make distance viewing clearer, easier, weather tolerant and all around better. According to the Cornell Ornithology Lab and Birder’s World, the best buy for high-quality optics birding binoculars are the Nikon Monarchs. The go for about 6 on the street.
These are startlingly bright, wide-eyed, and lightweight (21.5 oz), which has made the Monarchs a best seller. Because they are waterproof and shockproof — with an amazing 25-year warranty — they are also very popular with hunters. They can also focus as close as 8 feet — ideal for dragonfly and butterfly viewing (thus the name Monarch).
If you have not examined binoculars recently they are undergoing a performance curve similar to cameras, getting better and cheaper each year. These 0 binocs would have cost ,000 only 5 years ago. When friends view these Nikon Monarchs, they go “Wow! It’s like a movie screen!” I’ve found the ease of viewing — sort of like watching a flat screen rather than peering through a tube — encourages me to use them more. I also like the fact they are waterproof so I can use them in the rain and mist without worry. I wear prescription sunglasses and these work perfectly fine with them. They also feel well-balanced in my medium hands. I find I can hold them fairly steady for long periods of time with one hand. None of this was true with my inexpensive binoculars in the past.
The very best binoculars today go for ,000. But for only 6 (what I paid ), or one tenth the price, you can get a pair of these Nikon Monarch binoculars and get 95% of the same performance. Sure, in a one-to-one comparison, a pair of ,000 binoculars may be a little better, but they are not 10 times better.
Other new models share many of the same features of these 8×42 Monarchs, including sealed optics, waterproofing, coated glass, and bright viewing, but these others cost a minimum of 0-600. There are certainly cheaper binocs (you can get decent ones for ) but they suffer from dim views, narrow fields, short lives. The Nikon Monarchs make a fantastic tool: You get most of a thousand-dollar view for a bargain price.
– KK
6-0 (price seems to vary on demand)
Available from Amazon
Manufactured by Nikon
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Micofinancing is among the better ways for the haves to help the have-nots. Small loans are made to poor but ambitious workers, who expand their livelihoods with the small loan and then pay it back. Which is then lent out again. The previously recommended agencies Opportunity International, and Trickle Up are great tools for individuals in developed countries to kick-start other folk’s self-development. These agencies do the hard work of identifying and training the recipients, and tracking loans and performance.
But why not use the peer-to-peer model to allow individuals with money to loan to specific individuals in need of a small loan? That’s what Kiva does and it works wonderfully.
Kiva enables you to make small or above loans to an individual or small group of individuals in a developing country. They use these small loans (aggregated to about 0-0) to finance a food stall, repair shop, hair salon, sewing machine, new cash crop, etc. When they pay it back to you in about 11 months, you can then re-lend it to another person of your choice.
The advantages of Kiva over the other worthy agencies are three fold. One, you can direct your loans to the kind of projects or livelihood you deem the most important or the most sympathetic. Maybe you are into food so you gravitate to funding small cafes or local fruit growers. Or maybe you think women’s sewing centers are a key. Secondly you have more direct contact with the borrowers. They have names, faces, stories. Not a few Kiva lenders have met up with folks they have lent to. Thirdly, while most microfiance agencies are thrifty, Kiva is particularly thin in administration thanks to the well-designed software platform that runs this service.
The payback rate for Kiva is about 97%. That’s a better “investment” than stocks this past year! The variety of folks you can lend to is exhilarating. The karma is good. These loans make a difference. Kiva lends million dollars every 10 days. It is easy to do. A few folks are already on their third cycle of re-loaning the same money they first put up three years ago.
I think the peer-to-peer lending service of Kiva is such a wonderful tool that I have started a Cool Tools Lending Team. The intention is to gather like-minded folks to make microloans to folks needing tools to start or build a livelihood. I’ve seeded the team with the first 0 of loans to three borrowers planing to use the loans for tools and I’ll add up to ,000 of Cool Tool’s ad revenue as the team identifies borrowers hoping to secure tools. Ideally, other Cool Tool readers will join me in lending small amounts to enable others to self-develop and remake their lives. If you are interested, please join me at the Kiva Cool Tools Team.
– KK
UPDATE: Good news and bad news. Good news is that word-of-mouth praise drew many folks to Kiva this holiday season and all available lendees have been funded. There were several thousand a week ago, so this is a great thing. Bad news is that if you are headed there for the first time, you won’t find anyone to loan to. I trust this is temporary but I have no idea when they’ll be an “inventory” of loan candidates. When there are lendees available, you can join the Cool Tools team by signing up for the team, then making a loan to an individual in the ordinary way and choosing Cool Tools from the Team option when you “checkout.”
Kiva
Kiva Cool Tools Team
Sample entrepreneur:
My name is Khursheed Bibi. I am a fifty-year-old woman. I have lived in the city of Pakpattan, Pakistan, for 15 years. My husband, Mr. Rafiq, is a mason. I have three kids: one son and two daughters. My son runs a furniture making business. My elder daughter is in 9th standard and my younger in 8th standard. I run a decorative embroidery business. I embroider dresses and sell them in clothing markets. I charge per dress. I invest my income in my daughters’ education (paying school and tuition fees). I’ve successfully repaid two previous loans from Asasah (a microfinance institute of Pakistan). Now I am applying again for a loan to buy lumber to expand my son’s furniture making business. I am the leader of a group of entrepreneurs sharing this loan.
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This is a conceptual Nokia gun phone made by somebody in Photoshop. It’s fake. Mad fake. Faker than the ID I use to buy booze (I’m 16). Because no phone company has the gigantor cojones it would take to manufacture an actual handgun-phone. And I think we can all agree, that’s a fundamental problem with today’s society. That’s why I outsourced the manufacture of a gun-phone to a friend of mine. And I’ve got to tell you, this shit looks legit. *BRRRING* Oh, if you’ll excuse me — I need to take this. *BANG* Oh. Uh-oh. Listen, I’ve gotta run to the vet real quick.
Gun Phone Concept [uberphones]
High atop the snow-covered peak of Everfrost Mountain the elves brew a wicked batch of grog — a grog so powerful it can etch diamonds and make a Goron’s pee burn. I’m telling you, that stuff will even put hair on an infant’s chest. It’s true, look at my newborn. Just kidding, that’s a Furby. Anyway, this is a LEGO brewpub built by a guy named Andrew. And what brewpub is complete without a pole-dancing LEGO minifig? None. And this particular dancer is powered by a 9v motor, so she spins about the pole like a champ — in both directions (video after the jump)! Which is a lot more than I can say for the last stripper I saw — she tried to slide down the pole upside down and fell on her neck! Needless to say, I took my dollar back while she was dazed.
Hit the jump for a short video of Plastica doing her thing on the pole.
Etsy seller YOUgNeek is selling custom-made Star Wars clocks for a pop. I’ve got the feeling it’s a trap, but I can’t prove it. Just to be safe, I paid for mine with marked Monopoly money.
This beautiful clear and chrome Sterling and Noble clock boasts 12 vintage classic Action Fleet Micro Machine battleships and vessels. They are finished in a pewter color. Each Star Wars Starships and Fighters clock is YOU gNeek and one-of-a-kind. If you have some favorite ships or vehicles in mind, let me know so I can include them if I have them in stock. Time to do battle! Requires one AA battery (not included - I use to include them but it made shipping more expensive a couple times).
Also the middle Star Wars label in the middle of the clock is optional and can also look different (it is cut out of books or boxes etc and layered with a resin-type coating).
Wow, for a couple Micro Machines and a piece of cereal box glued to a silver wall cock. Talk about a racket. And speaking of rackets: racquetball. I own at that shit. Ha, I did type wall cock up there, didn’t I? It’s my prerogative! You think nobody gets drunk this early on a Saturday morning but you’re wrong! Freud, I slipped! Now gimme kissies you little coke whore you!
Star Wars clock, proof that The Force is not with you [dvice]
This is a video of a deep-sea (770-meters to be exact) siphonophore doing its thing. What the fuck is a siphonophore?
…an eerily fantastic creature that appears to be a single, large organism, but which is actually a colony of numerous individual jellyfish-like animals that behave and function together as a single entity. The individual units, called zooids, all share the same genetic material and each perform a specialized role within the colony. The best-known siphonophore is the poisonous Portuguese Man o’ War.
Mmmm, I can almost taste the wasabi and soy sauce from here.
Siphonophore: Deep-sea superorganism [pinktentacle]
Thanks to Jack, a personal friend who knows I’m a sucker for new sushi.
What the hell is a Fridge Door Can Caddy? It’s a piece of molded plastic that holds four cans vertically in the refrigerator door so you can save space. And, as an added bonus, it comes with a handle so you can grab your brew and run should the cops come to raid your meth lab (I’m on to you!). gets you a set of two. Also, to anyone who can explain why there’s a 3:1 soda to beer ratio in the picture. Who the hell only takes one beer somewhere? Well, except the shower.
Beer Can Door Caddy Might Just Save the Environment From Beer Fridges [uberreview]
Some guy went and made a wallet out of an old SNES game cartridge (that shit better not have been A Link To The Past). The cartridge comes packed with emergency LEDs, videogame sound effects, and enough room to carry cash, cards, keys and a USB memory stick. Granted, it’s not the coolest wallet I’ve ever seen, but I’m biased since I made one out of an entire Wii console. Plus, if i rock it in a front pocket, it makes my junk look bigger. And rectangular-er. Which, according to my latest poll, 6 out of 5 women on the bus find freaky deaky.
Hit the link for a picture of the insides and a link to the Instructable.
Some people drink decaf coffee. These people, given normal coffee, will go apeshit, bouncing off the walls and breaking things. Given espresso, they will spontaneously human combust and create a black (coffee) hole that will smell like fresh roasted beans and suck many an oblivious barista into its odoriferous depths. That’s why it’s important they never drink regular coffee or a Red Bull. To keep the rest of the world safe from these people, somebody developed D+Caf strips.
D+caf test strips are simply little strips of paper coated with antibodies that tell if you a beverage is properly decaffeinated, turning up blue lines if it’s got more than 20mg of caffeine per 6oz serving. Even modern decaffeination procedures can’t remove every single trace of caffeine, but between 20 and 30 percent of coffee and tea drinks “contain unacceptably high levels of caffeine” according to the strip’s maker, Silver Lakes Research.
A box of 20 strips costs and I really wish they were Roof+e strips instead because the Superficial Writer keeps eyeing me salaciously and encouraging me to chug my Appletini.
D+Caf Detects If You’re Drinking Real Coffee Instead of Decaf [gizmodo]
The Postcard Aeroplane is a balsa wood postcard from suckUK that you can send to a friend or former lover. Then, when they receive it, they can punch out the plane parts and fly your message to the moooooooon. One time my grandpa mailed a coconut. To the fucking moon I say! Can you tell I’ve been huffing? I have. I made resolutions! I broke them!
Balsa wood postcard transforms into flying model glider [dvice]
This is a video of a deep-sea (770-meters to be exact) siphonophore doing its thing. What the fuck is a siphonophore?
…an eerily fantastic creature that appears to be a single, large organism, but which is actually a colony of numerous individual jellyfish-like animals that behave and function together as a single entity. The individual units, called zooids, all share the same genetic material and each perform a specialized role within the colony. The best-known siphonophore is the poisonous Portuguese Man o’ War.
Mmmm, I can almost taste the wasabi and soy sauce from here.
Siphonophore: Deep-sea superorganism [pinktentacle]
Thanks to Jack, a personal friend who knows I’m a sucker for new sushi.
This is WALL-E made out of wood. It was very well constructed.
Disney commissioned UK-based sculptors and a group called Morpheus Prototypes to build this wooden sculpture of Wall-E as a gift for Pixar/Disney Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter.
Impressive, but I could have made the same thing out of a bunch of popsicle sticks and some wood glue. Unfortunately, mommy says I’m not allowed to use the glue anymore because I fed some to my turtle and now he’s different. Slower. And he was already slow to begin with! ZING!
Hit the jump for a closeup of a tread.
Some guy went and made a wallet out of an old SNES game cartridge (that shit better not have been A Link To The Past). The cartridge comes packed with emergency LEDs, videogame sound effects, and enough room to carry cash, cards, keys and a USB memory stick. Granted, it’s not the coolest wallet I’ve ever seen, but I’m biased since I made one out of an entire Wii console. Plus, if i rock it in a front pocket, it makes my junk look bigger. And rectangular-er. Which, according to my latest poll, 6 out of 5 women on the bus find freaky deaky.
Hit the link for a picture of the insides and a link to the Instructable.
I actually made it to 2009! Last night when I was writing the Happy New Year post I still had my doubts about the last few hours of 2008 doing me in, but here I am. Suck it, Death! Go sickle some other sorry bastard you skeletal taint!
Anyway, this is a Domo-kun themed XBox 360 made by DeviantARTist Ricepuppet for his sister-in-law. As you can see, it’s brown and looks like a turd that wants to eat you. Kind of like that dream you have when you eat fish right before bed. No, not vagina.
domo-kun mod makes a toothy 360 [technabob]
This is a custom Davy Jones Munny figure. You might recall Davy from such blockbusters as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chesticles, and Ass Pirates of the Caribbean: The Geekologie Writer’s Cave of Treasure. This particular pirate was made by Mallory Carson of Fullerton, CA.
Mallory is a 21 year old animation major and currently in her senior year at CSU Fullerton. While she’s a full-time student, she manages to score some extra cash by selling her artwork.
And to think I sold my soul (and genitals) to pay my way through college. Art — who would have known? Seriously though Mallory, good lookin’. I mean it — I’m handsome as hell. We should date casually.
Hit the jump for two more, including one of Davy-in-progress. Also, his peg-leg looks like a summer sausage and is making me hungry.
This is a time-lapse video made by Eirik Solheim of the year 2008. As you can see, it was an eventful year. The trees started off naked, put on their sexy spring and summer dresses, then stripped down again in the fall. And I imagine there was a botanical orgy of immeasurable proportions in there somewhere as well. You know — trees humping trees, a couple bushes trying to get in on the action, maybe a lone deer banging a stump. But maybe that shit doesn’t really happen the way I imagine — how the hell should I know, I’m not a fucking Hobbit!
Amazing time-lapse video shows 2008 in 40 seconds [dvice]
The Cooper Cooler Rapid Beverage Chiller chills a beer down to 43 °F in sixty seconds. So, at the moderate drinking rate of one beer per 45 seconds, you only have 15 seconds of down time until the next beer is ready. Not too shabby. You just fill the P.O.S. with ice and water, and presto: it rotates your can, all the while hosing the aluminum bastard down with cold water. Of course, if you’re looking for something a little more powerful — something that can cool a beer instantly — I’ve got two words for you: witch titties.
One Minute Drink Chiller Works Better Than A Fire Extinguisher [ohgizmo]
