Learning to Read and Input Chinese characters
Two of the biggest challenges with learning Chinese characters is looking them up and inputting them. With a language like English, looking up is easy because words are listed in dictionaries alphabetically. Likewise, entering words in a search engine or translation device is also easy because we know the basic elements, letters, required to input those words.
With Chinese characters, whether simplified or traditional, both looking up and inputting them are difficult because both require pre-knowledge of the character, whether it is its radical, pronounciation or stroke count.
Character maps are designed to overcome both of these problems.
Character maps use the Easy Shape Lookup System (aka Chinsym for Chinese symbols) to make Chinese Characters easy to lookup. The indexes for this lookup system are consistently based on a specific element of a character and the grouping of these elements into 12 easy-to-recognize shapes, each with up to 16 related sub-groups.
The S1 index for Simplified Chinese characters uses the first element of each character for indexing. The S3 index uses the final element for indexing.
Making character lookup easy solves only one part of the problem.
The cangjie input system is a free input system available on both mac and windows operating systems. It's a shape based input system which means that you don't need to know a characters pronounciation to input it. Plus, once you've learned the basics of this system, it's relatively easy to enter any character.
Character maps make looking up characters easy. Combined with cangjie input codes for both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, they also make learning the Cangjie input system less frustrating.
Character maps are also come with English definitions and Mandarin pronunciation using pinyin.
Check out the s1 series of character maps
Smart anatomy
Anatomy tends to be taught in the same way over and over again. If you look for a picture of the femur using google search, you'll tend to see the exact same views of the femur. As a result it's hard to visualize, for example, the outer or "lateral" view of the greater trochanter simply because very few anatomists draw this view.
Smart anatomy focuses on anatomy relevant to movement and proprioception. You can't have movement without proprioception. And you can't have proprioception without the engines which drive movement. And so smart anatomy focuses on muscles, connective tissue, joints and bones.
To make it easier to visualize these structures, smart anatomy aims to provide more than just the standard views.
And rather than looking at anatomy as a doctor or massage therapist would, i.e. as someone else's body, the idea of smart anatomy is to learn to feel and experience and control our own anatomy, directly.
Direct experience of our own anatomy, tied in with the view of anatomy provided by anatomy texts provides us with a deeper understanding of anatomy and more importantly a deeper understanding of our own body.
For an even deeper understanding, it's also very helpful to work at drawing anatomy.
Why is this "smart anatomy"? The use of the word smart is based on the idea that smart phones and tablets are smart because the same part of the device accepts inputs and provides outputs. That part is the "touch screen". With our own body, the main elements that provide both outputs (movement) as well as inputs (sensation) are our muscles.
Making yoga poses Sensational
One of the key ideas with sensational yoga poses is to use yoga poses, and other exercises, to help you feel your body. More than just a general instruction, sensational yoga poses includes some of my earlier attempts to provide useful and differentiated exercises for helping you to feel and control your body piece-by-piece. It has got a fairly detailed anatomy section which I will be transitioning to smart anatomy.
Perhaps the two parts of that site I feel are most helpful are the section on balance and the section on flexibility. Note that both revolve around the ideas of feeling your body and controlling it.
Take Out the Slack
A very simple idea that can be applied to any relationship is to take out the slack.
A relationship, at it's very simplest, is two connected ideas. When the slack is removed from between those ideas, they can communicate with zero lag and zero misunderstanding and that means that they can work together as one.
For programmers, taking out the slack means writing code error free so that the program compiles and does what it is supposed to do. Generally, programmers have zero choice but to remove the slack, otherwise their programs won't work.
With humans, communication is a lot less effective. But it can be made effective and we then have slack-free communication.
With the body, our body, removing the slack can mean efficient transmission of force, minimal effort coordination (i.e. you don't have to think about coordinating parts, tension transmitted force does it for you), effortless effort (you are working but it feels like good work, enjoyable work),
