More Than LOL Catz and Nutshots

Even before a year ago I used to get a little annoyed when I would hear people say things like "Youtube is nothing but lol catz and nutshots." Back then I only used Youtube for finding music videos (usually of old 80s songs that happened to be stuck in my head) and watching Ted Talks, but even then it annoyed me that anyone could imply it was a site with nothing of real value.

Then about a year ago I found myself wanting to comment on some video, so for the first time ever I actually logged in to Youtube. Shortly thereafter my Ted Talk viewing combined with some views of old Bill Nye videos made Youtube start suggesting other educational videos to me.

2013 was the year I actually learned something new every day, and loved every minute of it. Today I am going to share win you some of the most enjoyable educational channels I have found on Youtube, so you too will want to slap anyone who thinks Youtube is nothing but a waste of time.



1. Crash Course

Crash Course is a channel run by two brothers, Hank and John Green. Between the two of them they have expertise on a wide variety of subjects. While I have frequently used Hanks videos to explain complex science concepts to Robbie, John's Green series on World History and US History have kept me fascinated through multiple viewings.

Picking a favorite video out of the scores of great videos they have done has been hard, but I think I will give a tiny edge to these two for changing my views on the War of 1812 and WWI.

2. V Sauce

V Sauce is like Bill Nye for grown ups (though Robbie loves him too). He takes questions that we all used to wonder about as kids, then in a fantastic, thorough, yet round about way brings us the answer. This is another channel that picking favorites is really hard, but here is a couple of great ones.

3. Numberphile

This is channel run by a group of Maths professors from Cambridge. Even though I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about math, I find I am constantly learning things from them, and yet most of their videos are completely understandable by Robbie. My favorite video of theirs is when they explained how the allies cracked the Enigma code in WWII.

4. Ted Talks

I couldn't make this list and not include the channel I started with. Ted conferences bring in experts in a variety of areas to discuss their work. There are talks covering almost any subject you can imagine, but my favorites are the ones by Hans Rosling (only some of which are here).

5. Ted ED

Ted Talks for kids. Below is one of Robbie's favorites.

Some Things to Like About 2013

2013 has been a year that it would be very easy for me to declare was an awful year on so many levels; we spent the entire year on the verge of bankruptcy, I was separated from my wife for a time, my wife tried to commit suicide, my son suffered a scary head injury, and I have been unemployed on four different occasions (just to name a few things).

I really want to take a moment to find some good things about what feels like 365 days of an elephant sitting on me, but before I do I am going to lay down some ground rules. First of all, I am not going to cite "at least I'm not" as a good thing (like "at least I don't live in a country that's having a civil war"); it is a great privilege to live in the country, and the time period that I do and have the opportunities I have had in my life, but the human brain is not wired to weigh such hypothetical scenarios as heavily as actual events in one's life, so for this exercise I will not invoke them.

Obviously anyone in the Savar Upazila building collapse
had a much worse year than me.

Second of all, I am not going to cite any things that might have happened, but did not, as good things (like "my wife's suicide attempt failed"); I feel that doing this is calling back to the bad events surrounding the near miss, and so such good things are tarnished. So with those two rules in mind, here is my list.


1. Margaret was diagnosed with BPD. Usually a person being diagnosed with any condition is not considered a good thing, but the condition itself is not new, its just that it was previously not diagnosed. With a proper diagnosis we can figure out how to live a life together that is a more happy one. In the past (before she was diagnosed) I frequently held hope that various BPD symptoms of Margaret's would just go away given time, and while it is now obvious that such hope was absurd, there is now real reason to believe that in time such symptoms may be lessened and controlled.


2. I have more of a sense of purpose with regards to my career. While this year has seen a great deal of upheaval in my job situation, leaving my cozy, but chaotic job at Fuller Austin has given me a chance to sample different possible jobs I might do as a Mech Tech. While at the start of the year I really didn't know what I should do with this education, today I feel that my best bet would be to continue to pursue drafting jobs, with the thought that given a better situation than the one I had at Entrec doing lift studies might work for me too.


3. I have learned a lot. 2013 was the year that watching edutainment videos and reading informative articles became my biggest "time wasters". Simply put, I am a smarter person than I was a year ago.


4. I have lost some weight. Not a lot, either in raw numbers or as a portion of what I need to lose, but the last I checked I am merely over-weight instead of obese as I had been for a couple of years. No doubt my part-time job at the theatre is helpful in this regard.


5. I have some good friends. I have always been a bit of a loner; actually I have always been a lot of a loner. And furthermore I have pretty low self-esteem, so I tend to assume that everybody else is as ambivalent about me as I am about them. But the last few months it feels like friends, old and new, have conspired to show me that maybe I do matter, and maybe I have actually positively influenced some people and maybe some people really do care.


That's all for now.

Happy New Year everyone!

You Should Start a Blog

"You should start a blog." That was the suggestion from two of my old friends. I knew what they meant - that it would be good for me - but I couldn't help but laugh at the thought.

We live in a world where many people, perhaps most people, have a few dead blogs in their past. But even in such a world, I have far more than my share. Just off the top of my head (I'm sure I'll forget a few)

• I had a blog about my son that I kept up for about three years (by far the longest running blog I've ever had).
• I've had at least half a dozen blogs for table top RPGs I've run over the years and another half a dozen for games that I planned which never got off the ground.
• I've had a pair of blogs for creative projects I was working on with other people that never really took off.
• I had a blog where I talked about poker.
• I had a blog where I talked about Dungeons and Dragons.
• I had a blog where I talked about Aspergers.
• I had a blog where I was compiling job links for Edmonton 
• I had a blog where I talked about all the neurosis in my house.
• I had a blog with Margaret where we would choose a topic each week and each write our view on it.

Now, in fairness to myself, very few of these were the stereotypical failed blog where the author wrote two posts and then never got back to it again. I already mentioned that one of these blogs received content for three years (though it got slower and slower over time) while another had content almost daily for six months (and when I gave up on it would get between 200 and 900 hits per day).

No, my blogs haven't looked like the stereotypical ones because I don't have the problem so many people run into; I actually love to write. My problem is that I have real trouble staying focused.  Generally my blogs start fast and furious and continue that way until there is some distraction in my life that pulls me away from the blog for a little while. Then, after the break, I find my love for that blog's topic has diminished and I can't bring myself to write any more about it.

So one might wonder why I have not started a personal blog where I could just write anything that is on my heart. I guess that really comes down to the difference between a blog and a diary; that with one you expect that other people might read it, and the other not. With the expectation that another might read what I am writing, I have always worried that I might be violating others' expectations.

But having said I have long feared luring others into one type of blog, before switching it up on them, I may be putting myself on that track right now; I am starting this blog with no idea what it is going to be about, only that I am going to do some writing.

I have named it Robbie's Dad because after switching email addresses pretty much annually from the late 90s till the mid-00s I have stuck with robbiesdad for more than eight years now; maybe that name can do the same for me and blogs.

Robbie and his dad.